Kangaroosha!

I've just noticed that I can't play Rosha's videos on my own website anymore due to government internet filtering! This is just great! Anyway, I'll keep uploading for future. Here are some new pictures and videos of Rosha. She gets so excited when she holds our hand and stands up in her cot. BTW, in the second picture, that's her grandpa (my father) holding her.

Busy Weekend!

It was a nice weekend with many good things happening. I got my cell-phone back from the police. They have removed the memory to get rid of its contents, which is pretty stupid as they could have simply formatted it. But anyways, everything else is fine with it and I'm happy I got it back and won't have to go there or call them anymore.

On Thursday, I booked a tour for Syria. It's a typical religious tour, with a one week stay at a three star Tedmor hotel; I say "three-star", but the truth is Syrians give as many stars as they "wish" to their hotels! We'll leave Saturday October 3rd and have the interview on Monday. I've heard the interview is mostly in French which is not a good news, and I've also heard that the interviewers can be pretty mean. Our biggest concern is not the interview, but where we're gonna leave Rosha when attending the interview. I plan to call the embassy on Monday (when they're open) and see what they recommend. I've called them several times before, they speak Arabic and very poor English, pfff!

Thursday was so busy, I also took our identifications and my military card to a translation office to get them translated once again, this time for the 'federal' file that we will open right after the interview; that is, if we pass the interview! We also took Rosha to a clinic for a vaccination; she has a slight fever now and Sara puts ice on her leg and washes her hands and legs with cold water. Our thermometers don't work properly, so I'll have to buy one on my way home. It's so strange we have three thermometers and neither of them shows anything! It's as if there is no mercury in the tubes!

Thursday afternoon, we went to Hyperstar. It was my fourth time as I've been taking our family members there one by one to show them the place! It was awfully crowded this time and we decided never to go there again except on a weekday morning.

Yesterday was the Quds day; the day protesters had long been waiting for to get out on the streets again. I'm not gonna write much about it here, suffice to say Iran became first headline on CNN, BBC, Aljazeera and France 24!

Here's something else about this weekend: The weather turned so nice! We had a heavy rain on Wednesday and the weather's been cool and autumny eversince. Last night, we thought we'd go out with Rosha for some fresh air. We chose to go to Velenjak and the small parks to the north of Shahid Beheshti University which were quiet and very nice. Tehran looked so beautiful from up there, but did it make us reconsider our immigration? Hell no!

Signal Available!

I wonder where the satellite noises are! Is the government out of budget? Did the noises interfere with other devices? Did they cause the recent airplane crashes? Is the government simply giving up? I don't know what the answer is, but it's good that this one thing has actually got better for the people when everything else in the country is getting worse and worse.

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Iran has become a different country. The June presidential elections got us all political. People decided to vote and not to repeat the mistake that got Ahmadinejad elected four years ago. But the elections turned into a coup announcing Ahmadinejad as the winner and cracking down on protesters. Many were killed and injured and now the government is blaming people as "eghteshashgar" and claiming that they were backed by the west to overthrow the regime through a "velvet revolution". This is a very depressing point in Iranian history.

Unfortunately, I got in trouble too. Three weeks ago, I left our company for Haft Tir Sq; there in front of E'temad Melli newspaper office, the situation wasn't normal and many police cars were parked. I made a huge mistake and took my cell phone out to take a picture. Before I had even taken anything, a cop arrested me and forced me into a police van. Then, I was taken to a police office where they interrogated me and kept threatening that I would be sent to Evin prison and punished. They released me in the evening after my boss and dad came and gave them their identifications as a warrant. But from that day until today, I've been going to the police office almost everyday and every time, they either completely ignore me and tell me to come the day after, or they threaten me in different ways and accuse me of things I haven't done. This last time that I went there, the police officer was mad and violent and said that I will be punished big time. I'm very nervous and scared. I keep thinking about Sara and Rosha and the plans we have, especially that our immigration process is developing and I don't want to ruin it in any way. We've heard so much horrible news these past months that I sometimes think they will definitely kill me.

I'm in a very bad mental state right now.

PS. This video kind of captures the post-election spirit in Iran.

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

Two days ago, I watched Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University live on Al Jazeera television. I am happy I did not miss the live program, because from then on, it has been carefully edited on televisions worlwide. The Iranian press and media reflect the event as a very successful one and go so far as to call the president a "hero". At the other end of the spectrum, are televisions like CNN which particularly focus on Ahamdinejad's response on the homosexuality issue. I was not at all happy with the way Ahmadinejad performed at the event, however, I think one thing people in the west are not considering is the "culture gap". The language we speak in Iran sounds disorganized, provocative and too religious to the western ear. Therefore, some of Ahamdinejad's words, specially what he said about homosexuals, were not taken for what they really meant.

When he was asked about homosexuals in Iran, he said "اولا در ايران ما هم جنس باز مثل كشور شما نداريم" which was translated into "first of all, we do not have homosexuals in iran like in your country". There is a lingual mismatch here. What the Persian sentence means to an Iranian is: "We don't have as many homosexuals in our country as you do in yours" which is what he truly meant and is probably accepted by many. To an English speaker however, the translation states that there are absolutely no homosexuals in Iran and so, he was booed for what he said. You can see that although the translation is literally correct, the message it carries is different. Apart from that, there is a cultural mismatch in between. In Iran, homosexuality is still regarded as a taboo. It is considered inappropriate to speak about it and people, specially in formal gatherings, shy away from the topic. For the same reason, government officials tend to ignore the issue and deny its existance. I think when Ahmadinejad said there weren't any homosexuals in Iran, he was not speaking scientifically and in terms of numbers, he was rather denying the existance of a phenomenon that sounded "extremely embarassing" to him. If our president was more aware of current issues and more literate in western culture and English language, he would not possibly have humiliated himself the way he did.

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