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reasons, they squat. I found this a bit time-consuming. In a men's room with
10 urinals, a guy knows at a glance what's available; in a men's room with
10 doors, you have to go knocking. (And now I can empathize with women
who do this all the time.)
Seyed made sure we ate in comfortable (i.e., high-end) restaurants, gen-
erally in hotels. Restaurants used Kleenex rather than napkins; there was a
box of tissues on every dining table. Because Iran is a tea culture, the cof ee at
breakfast was Nescafé-style instant. Locals assured me that tap water was safe
to drink, but I stuck with the bottled kind. Iran is strictly “dry”—absolutely
no booze or beer in public.
From a productivity point of view,
it seemed as if the country were on
Valium. Perhaps Iranians are just
not driven as we are by capitalist
values to “work hard” in order to
enjoy material prosperity. I heard
that well-employed Iranians made
$5,000 to $15,000 a year, and paid
essentially no tax. (Taxes are less
important to a government funded
by oil.) While the Islamic Revolution
is not anti-capitalistic, the business metabolism felt like a communist soci-
ety: h ere seemed to be a lack of incentive to really be ei cient. Measuring
productivity at a glance, things were pretty low-energy.
I couldn't help but think how tourism could boom here if they just opened
up. h ere were a few Western tourists (mostly Germans, French, Brits, and
Dutch). All seemed to be on a tour, with a private guide, or visiting relatives.
Control gets tighter or looser depending on the political climate, but basi-
cally American tourists could visit only with a guided tour. I met no one just
exploring on their own. h e Lonely Planet guidebook, which is excellent,
dominated the scene—it seemed every Westerner in Iran had one. Tourists
are so rare, and major tourist sights are so few and obvious, that I bumped
into the same travelers day after day. Browsing through picture books and
calendars showing the same 15 or 20 images of the top sights in Iran, I was
impressed by how our short trip would manage to include most of them.
My travel sensibilities tingling from all these discoveries, I was excited
to visit the University of Tehran. h
Because Iran is
“dry,” would-be
beer-drinkers
seem to fantasize.
They drink a “malt
beverage” that
tastes like beer and
comes in a beer
can, but is non-
alcoholic.
ere I hoped to i nd another side of Iran:
