An Upcoming Adventure

I'm one to enjoy a good adventure; in fact, some of my upcoming blogs will be centered around the adventures I ran into during my freshmen year of college in UC Santa Cruz. Surprisingly enough, I was completely sober during the grandest of these adventures. And I will be sober once again during my upcoming adventure on the eleventh: a trip to the heart of the Shi'a world - Iran.

The last time I went there I was nine years old, and a nine year old boy cares about one thing: instant gratification. Also, a nine year old boy does not know much about the politics of the time, the name Khomeini is a catalyst for emotion, (More on that later.) patriotism is a culturally ingrained feeling, not a rational, profound choice, walking under a Qur'an before exiting a house is an easy game of limbo, and oh how sweet it is to be eight years younger than my sister and two times as valuable. Endemic to Iran was my superiority and a harem of relatives, acquaintances, and faces, literally, who loved me for being.

Actually, my first day in Tehran is enough to define culture shock and the effects of culture shock on the human being. Setting: Tehran, Iran. Third-world automobile with an obscure brand and the color of jaundice. Plot: I use my catalytic word.

My cousin's driving, my aunt in the passenger seat, me, my mother, and my sister are shoved in the back, I'm snugly squished against the window, and we hit a traffic jam. I start looking at the towering edifices and my little mind is analogizing the city to a Los Angeles or a San Francisco. My eye catches one building, thirty to forty stories, with a breath-takingly large mural painted on it.

The mural: Instead of fifty stars, fifty skulls. Instead of stripes, trails of missiles. The American flag with a America-hating twist. Below the flag were corpses, and below the corpses, in Farsi, was written: Death to America.

Now, how is a nine year old boy supposed to handle such a thing. America was the country I loved, America was all I knew. So I rolled down the window, I stuck my head out, I saw a police officer and with as much gusto and inch thick patriotism as I could aggregate yelled, "Death to Khomeini!" Of course the officer's head shot right, my aunt turned an opalescent hue of fear, my cousin in the next ten seconds gave me an Iranian Curse Word crash course, and he drove into a nearby alley, through it, onto another street, and another, and another, soon I was overcome with absolute confusion, and before I could say, "I said, "I'm
a little thirsty!'" my mother's palm met the side of my face. First memory ends.

I'll post another memory from my journey to Iran as a nine-year old until the eleventh, when my posts will stop, and I embark towards that foreign land.