Being Social

Tonight the friend of dad's who had offered to have me over for breakfast, lunch and dinner came by for a visit with his wife and 20 year old son. Dad's apartment is ill-equipped for such visits. The normal spread for visitors is a huge platter of fruit, also chocolate, candy, tea, cake, and cookies. Dad managed to rummage through his bachelor kitchen and come up some walnuts (easy since he has an endless supply from the trees in his garden), dried cherries and grapes (our leftover road food from Esfahan) and a box of chocolates that someone had gifted me. That's the other part of the visit; no-one ever shows up empty handed. So far, I've received 4 boxes of chocolates as gifts. These folks showed up with a huge plant that I suspect may have come from the flower store next to our building. I was feeling a little tired of the whole farsi show (head scarf, pleasantries, etc) and luckily these folks were very down-to-earth and chill. The wife took off her headscarf almost immediately and the son was lounging all over the couch, shouting to Dad from the other room. He is 4 months into his required 21 months of military service, and said he didn't like it because they give you a hard time.

They asked if I had any pictures, so I ended up showing them pictures of Woodfolk House, Oakstock Pink Floyd dancers, and Richmond's Festival of Five Fires. The latter is a yearly art/fire spinning festival, complete with halloween themed burlesque. It felt quite rebellious to show those pictures, and even Dad commented “You can't look at those, this is an Islamic Republic!” I played them some of the new Persian Pop that I got from Farshad and Benefsheh, and by the end we were all lounging on the floor (except dad). They basically demanded that they take me to the Tajrish Bazaar tomorrow and even that we come to dinner, though we're not able as other relatives will be over here visiting us.