Damien and I finally met. We have been cyberchatting for a while now. He seemed like a very cool person online, but I had no idea he was THIS cool! He came over to our apartment and we had a one hour chat which was way too short. He is a very smart and broad-minded boy who (like me) is trying to pick the best out of every culture and improve his character and (not so like me) make a difference. Another cool thing about Damien is his interest in technology. He has this super-laptop and he was telling me about the new technology implemented in it. To begin with, his laptop has a blue-ray-disc drive and an HD monitor! If you don't know what they are, ask Damien! He's the answer!
Peace Bro!

General Knowledge Question:
In which self-governing country do the locals feel insecure on the streets?

It's here at last! ADSL connection! It's not really as fast as I thought it'd be, but it's way faster than the dial-up connection I used to have and gives me lots of new options on the net. This is a picture I took of Sara on a wharf in Kish. I like it a lot, cause I think there is a special feel about it.

We're back! I felt terrible when the plane descended into the usual smog and there appeared thousands of appartments and streets. I was wondering: "What, are we nuts? Living here?" I thought God was laughing at us Tehranis for living such sucky lives!
I have two other pictures added to my previous entries.

Oh my... We're having tho much fun here in Kish! We just biked to a hotel for Sara to do her e-learning thing! It's pretty cool in evenings and biking around from mall to mall and from one cafe to another is like the best thing I've ever experienced. J'adore Kish!

We're leaving for Kish island and I'm pretty excited about it, partly because it's my first time visit. It's gonna be me, Sara and Sara's dad. We're leaving tomorrow afternoon and we'll be back by Saturday noon. It was a late decision and we thought we might not be able to get tickets. But for some weird reason, some travel agent went the extra mile for us! Sara called the place and introduced herself as Movahedin and the operator was like: "Holy Shit! You are our regular customers! Consider it done Ma'am!" What the fuck! We? Regular Customers? Last time I remember a Movahedin get on a plane to kish was... 1932?

Last night, Hamed Y, Safaneh, Sara and I got together at a cafe on Gandi street. It was a great chance to catch up and just chill out after a tiring week. We then had a cool slow-mo drive in Hamed Y's Peugeot 206. He's a very careful driver. We decided to spend the rest of the evening at our appartment. We watched a British romantic comedy called "love actually" and had dinner together. It was a great get together.
This morning, Sara and I went to Chitgar Park. We took the Karaj subway and got off at Chitgar station. It was very convenient to get there actually. The cool thing about the park is that it has a cycling track. You can easily rent a bike and have a cool ride on a long winding track. I hadn't ridden a bike for ages. It felt so cool. This is a picture I took of Sara by her cell phone camera. The green place behind her is where they rent bikes.

I'm so excited about Sara Cotton's new Album "Never Got a Chance". I've been listening to "Al You Suck" over and over again on my car stereo. It's amazing!

Ham Z and I had quite a day! We had some fast food at a place in the west of Tehran and we spent the rest of the day waiting in line to take gas! We just realized that waiting in line to take gas was a great entertainment in Tehran! We got to have a good chat and listen to all sorts of songs by just "waiting in line"! Besides, the sense of "achievement" you get after having filled the tank is so worth the wait! Viva Iran!

The class party last night rocked. Everybody brought some kind of food and drink. There was macaroni salad, mexican corn, potato chips and a lot more. I put James Blunt on for background music. We were eating, speaking, playing games, telling jokes and taking pictures for almost four hours! Close to the end of the class, two of my colleagues sent their students in too! And that's when things got really wild! At the end of the class, my students gave me a quality book of Khayam's quatrains. It contains the Persian text and the Fitzgerald translation plus fascinating Persian miniature paintings. My students have signed the first page of the book. It's the most valuable gift I've ever been given.

Sara's got a cold and has been staying at her parents' for the last couple of days. I haven't seen much of her really. We had lunch together though yesterday at a pizza place close to SBU. It was very enjoyable, especially because of the snow. We also listened to a famous song for the first time. It's called "Hey there Delilah" and it's by Plain White T. It's a good song for a snowy day!
The picture on today's entry is that of Alicia Keys. I've been listening to her "no one" a hundred times. It literally rips my heart out!

It was a wonderful day today at Farhikhtegan. For one thing, I told my students about the end-of-term party. They were "booking" excited about it and helped brainstorm some cool ideas on the board. I also used the ideas Sara and Ali Sheikholeslami had suggested in my previous entry and now, we know exactly what we're gonna do. There's gonna be food and drink, music, conversation and lots of games! Oh, and jokes too! I'm so looking forward to Wednesday when it's all gonna happen. The other cool thing about today was that I sang! In my class! We were talking about favorite singers and when the conversation lead to my favorite singer, Bryan Adams, (love'im!) they asked me if I could sing one of his songs to them. I sang them "heaven" and got a big applaud in the end! And no at all! Well, I've won a Hammy Grammy afterall! That should count for something, shouldn't it?
The picture on today's entry is taken from the music video of Katie Melua's if you were a sailboat. I love that song!

I'm thinknig of organizing an end-of-term party for my Intro class at Farhikhtegan. They're a cool bunch of students who've been amazingly hard-working throughout the term and I think we all deserve to celebrate what we've accomplished. I've never had a class party before and had to rack my brains to come up with ideas. I've got a few ideas here; I'd appreciate it if you guys let me know what you think of them and maybe give me some more.
. Food and drink (students will be walking around the class, eating, drinking and speaking to one another in English)
. A list of topics (work, family, sports, etc.) and possible questions for each topic to help the students make conversation
. Background music (I'm not sure what will work best)
. Jokes (in English obviously! I'll be telling the students to prepare them beforehand and perhaps set up a joke-telling competition like the one in Big Ham's party! I owe this one to Big Ham! )
That's basically all I've come up with. Once again, I'd love to get your opinion/help. Thanks everyone!
By the way, the movie "premonition" starring Sandra Bullock (I hate that girl! ) is on screen at Cinema Farhang. Sara and I got to watch it a couple of nights ago. I would call it a mediocre movie, but the sound/picture quality is amazing. Don't miss it if you're interested!

Sara's between terms and stayed home today, which is a great thing since she hardly ever gets to stay home and relax. I got enough time between classes to go home and have lunch with her and then we watched a movie together. The title was Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. Rob Schneider who is one of my favourite actors "now" is in desperate need of money and the only way he manages to make money is by becoming a gigolo, a male-whore, who is paid to "give pleasure" to unusual women! The movie is so hilarious I still can't get the scenes out of my mind. I definately recommend it to anyone who wants to have a big laugh!

tomorrow my class with the girl what book do i have to take toefl the tv is on is it on bbc prime do i have to turn it off i could watch rowan atkinson tonight but no i can't they had such a small house nothing in it they had a good receiver those turk guys he looked good tonight nice appartment with the green carpets i gotta tell sara about it gotta replace the windows for christmas we need to buy cookies with saf cookies what a headache shit my skin i was good

I just got rid of Norm by placing him in a category to which my blog would not be accessible. Good riddance! Even though he's a very nice guy, it was pretty stressful being in touch with him, cause he is so active on the net and you can't possibly keep up with him. Besides, Sara and my friends have no reason to question my heterosexuality now! :D
Big Ham's thanks-karaoke-giving party was such a big night. I got to get together with my friends and catch up with some of my old classmates. We had a crazy dance and a fascinating singing competition. For some reason, people thought my singing was good; and I won first prize! :D This would be my first Hammy Grammy!

Hey everyone! The Halloween Pictures are available now at alimovahedin.myphotoalbum.com
I will be removing the album in a few days, so be sure to download the pics!
enjoy!

We had an awesome Halloween Party last night. It was loads of fun! Everyone liked the gravesite and our freaky dummy! I have pictures of the dummy, the pumpkin, our costumes and all the rest of it here in my camera that I will soon upload onto a website. Here is a picture of us in front of the gravesite; happy to be dead! LOL!
From left to right:
Front row: me, Leili, Maryam K, Maryam P, S
Back row: Mo, Parisa, Sara, Annie, H
Thanks for coming guys!
and thanks for being so cool!

I've been so busy lately that I can hardly get the time to go online and catch up with my friends. I've been meaning to read Norm's blog entries, but still haven't got a chance. I'm sorry Norm! I'll make it up to you! The problem is, my classes are way too many right now and on top of that, I have the halloween party to worry about. It's crazy and I love it!
Last night, just before I went to bed, I took a look at Hamed's entry about Google Trends and the shocking results he'd got about the city of Qom. I did a search for "Chris de Burgh" just now and got a big surprise. Why? Check out the picture above!

I've been puttting a lot of time into discovering all the functions of Sara's cell phone! For one thing, I bought a 1GB memory card so that we could install more programs and transfer more songs onto the cell phone. The other thing I did last night was buying a Nokia CD which contains everything from themes and ringtones to games and applications. I converted and copied more than 300 songs onto the cell phone and thanks to the small size of Nokia sound files, they ocuupied only half the capacity of the memory card. This morning, I had time to go through the applications on the CD and install a few useful ones. Among them are Oxford Advance and Pocket dictionaries, Oxford dictionary of Idioms and Oxford French and Italian dictionaries. I also installed an English to Persian dictionary. I was fascinated by the number of words they contained and the long definitions they provided. They're so cool! I also installed a map of Tehran on the cell phone. From now on, Sara will in a way be carrying several thick dictionaries and a map! I did something else too which made Sara very (norman pause! norm knows what it is!) very happy! I converted the Friends episodes I had on CDs to Nokia video files, 3gp files, and realized they each took no more than 25 MB! Sara will be able to watch friends on her way back home tonight! LOL!

Yesterday, Hamed and I had such a great time together. We drove around the city and took pictures of whatever caught our attention. His camera is a Sony 7.2 Megapixel with a 12X optical zoom and it... ROCKS! After having taken many photos of interesting and sometimes weird objects (like the back of a Cadillac for Norm to enjoy! LOL!), we drove home and tried our hands at Horror Photography! You can see me as a vampire in a picture Ham posted on his blog. And here is another picture which is my favourite! Don't look at the picture for too long, or something bad might happen to you! LOL!

It was another one of those ten hour teaching days today and I'm pretty worn out right now. I had my last IELTS class with Sasan this afternoon. He had a long list of words to check with me and said he'd be reviewing them on the plane. He will be staying in Turkey for a few days where he will be taking his test. I wish him a lot of luck.
We went over to Mohsen and Akram's the other night. They have recently got an appartment in Poonak. It's a very nice appartment and is well-decorated too. We spoke about their neighbourhood and their appartment and found out that we had opposite ideas on everything. While I like the Poonak area and all the shopping centers in it, including Boostan and Tirajeh, they said they actually "hated" the area and had never really been to any of the shopping centers! I suggested we could exchange places if they really wanted to! LOL! The other thing we talked about was the pilotting course Mohsen is taking in Kerman. He said he had one more year to finish the training and would start his career right after. He also played a DVD for us of his so called "solo" flight, which is, as he said, one of the many tests they have to take before they become official pilots.
Last night, was the Eid-al-Fitr. Sara and I visited our parents' and grandparents' and met all the people who were there too. While I was talking to my grandparents, my phone rang. I couldn't believe it was Norm from America! He said he'd got concerned, cause he hadn't heard nor read from me for many days. I told him everything was ok and that the reason I couldn't get online lately was that I'd been very busy with classes. It was funny how everyone in there was wondering who I was talking in English to! Who could that be?
I'd been wanting to buy Sara a new cellphone for some time now; so I thought the Eid would be a good excuse. After some research, I bought her a Nokia N70. I managed to give her a surprise by getting it off the backseat and unexpectedly handing it to her while driving. She was so excited about it at first! But last night, I found myself much more intersted in the device! I stayed up until late discovering the menus and feeling kind of guilty about doing it before she did! I don't know if cell phones are more of a "boy" thing! Although she likes her new cellphone a lot, she's definately not as interested in it as I am! I told Ham about Sara's new cell phone. He sent her a message saying: "Instruction Manual: As a new cell phone, you should know how to handle me properly. You can take nude pictures of people using the infra-red technology! Just point and shoot! Enjoy the new gadget! Mokhles-e shoma, Agha-ye Sazandeh!" We had a great laugh over Ham's message!
There are two things right now that I'm quite stressed about. One is the halloween party which I still haven't done much about and am hoping to be able to do something about tomorrow when I have fewer classes. The other thing that worries me is why Hamed is "again" not showing interest in seeing me! LOL! Did I tell you he's been feeding on blood lately? People keep telling me he looks different. But he seems OK to me!

I was looking through the pictures in my e-mail when I came across this very special one. It was taken four years ago on the day I was leaving for Morocco. These are my very special friends who came to Mehrabad airport to see me off. I'm so looking for ward to the halloween party when we'll all get together again!
From left to right:
Hossein S, Ehsan M, Mohsen R, Hamed Y

Our lives have sure gone different ways. Hossein is teaching Persian literature at a school right now, Ehsan is starting his own computer business, Mohsen is comlpeteing his pilotting course and will soon be a pilot and Hamed Y is doing his military.

Good luck guys!