Ramadan vs. Atkins...

Just a quick one for yez to let you know that I'm still alive and that I haven't been gunned down by the mujadeen... (I don't even know what the mujadeen are, but they sound ominous!).


So yesterday, I was an exemplary little tourist and did lots of cultural stuff. I got up at cockcrow and went to the Grand Bazaar which was interesting (pretty similar to the one in Istanbul... grand bazaar is grand bazaar). After that you won't believe what I did... you won't feckin' believe it... wait for it... wait for it... yes, I went to a museum! Actually it was more a palace than a museum (the Golestan Palace in fact, click here for Wikipedia link), but it had lots of old shit behind glass cases and lots of drawings so it qualifies as a museum... there was even an etymological museum part of it, with freaky life size mannequins wearing traditional Iranian clothes... freaky shit!

Not wanting to overload myself with culture, I took the afternoon off and lay in a park reading my book... I also found this deadly little Iranian tea house and I tried 'dizi' for lunch, which is a famous Iranian dish. It's like a stew of mutton, spuds, tomatoes etc. and they serve it to you in a tall and narrow oven fired clay receptacle with a bowl and a pestle... Luckily enough I had read up in my lonely planet about it, so I wasn't baffled by this array of accoutrement.

First of all, you rip up bread and put it into the bowl and then you decant all the broth out of the stew into the bread and you eat that like a soup. That's essentially your starter. The idea is then to get your pestle and to grind the remaining stuff into a paste which you then eat with bread or a spoon and yogurt. So, pestle in hand, Conor starts trying to grind this stuff up... but I fear that I was a little too timid with it and was only really slopping it around the place (like a little girl). An Iranian dude beside me stood up and came over, ripped the pestle out of my hand and proceeded to beat the living bejayzus out of my lunch. He layed into it like a bat out of hell for about five minutes and then presented me with the resulting (very fine) paste for my entree... Mad altogether, but his bird spoke English so we chatted for a bit and I impressed on her my utmost gratification for her bloke having pureed my lunch for me... and we all laughed... hihihihihi!!! Ahhhh, it was very nice altogether...

And then when I went to pay, I think I gave the money to a beggar instead of a waiter and created a big hullabulloo whereby everyone was shouting at the beggar and trying to get the money back off him while I stood by with a slightly bewildered look on my face... Well done Conor you big eejit!

Tomorrow is a big day... it's the first day of Ramadan (Ramazan), the Muslim month of fasting... that's right, you heard me... Conor decided to go to the most frickin' Islamic place on the face of the planet at the most frickin' Islamic time of the year. And so, from tomorrow, no-one eats, drinks (even water) or smokes during daylight hours.. for a month ... and apparently I'm not allowed to either! Well isn't that just brilliant... just frickin' brilliant!!! I don't know what I'm going to do... apparently all the shops, restaurants and anything that might be source of nosh remains closed. Foreigners are supposed to survive by staying in their hotels and eating there, but that is going on the assumption that your hotel is not a hellhole of a cockroach infested piece of cowdung! Anyway... I'm sure I'll survive it somehow... worst case scenario I lose a pound or two (and we all know that wouldn't exactly be Armageddon!).

I bet ya nobodies even reading this... everyone's off in Electric Picnic having a ball while Conor's stuck in tehran awaiting starvation... Anyway, I don't care anymore, I'm off to search for a loo... l8r compadres...