Adventures of Mr.Behi

Ahmadinejad needs a tour of the Student Park

These days while the story of Columbia University is still hot, Iranian blogs show their anger on both remarks of Columbia president and lies of Iran's president. The claim that he made about homosexuals that they don't exist in Iran in the way they exist everywhere else, looked like a joke in the first place just like many of his prior statements but created a set of furious reactions in Iranian blog sphere not just because of the topic of "Homosexuals" but because Ahmadinejad's tradition of denial. You ask him about x issue and he says: what x issue? who told you that? He did so for high inflation rate and high prices in Iran and also about lack of freedom of speech. Many of bloggers like Masih Alinejad reacted to the recent claim by suggesting him to tour "The student Park" in downtown Tehran where many believe is one of the main hangouts of the undercover gay population of Tehran.

The student park or "park-e Daneshjoo" is in downtown Tehran adjacent to the famous city theater hall. I grew up and lived in the downtown and can vividly remember how this park transformed in years. The name of the park came from old times and I remember when I was five and used to go in the play ground in there, tens of university students from the nearby Tehran university used to hang out there with their books, making study groups on the grass. The city theater has been one of the main attractions for art lovers and attracted theater fans to the neighborhood of the park whenever a good play was around.

Later when I was a high school student, they built a library in the back of the park. I was not a member of that library but it became so famous around the town as a place where student boys and girls used to start friendships. Later, the authorities divided working days of the library between boys and girls to prevent that.

When I became a university student, the lovely tradition of studying in that park was history and those scenes could barely be seen. The park was famous then as a hang out of drug dealers and prostitutes especially during the night but since then, you could see young boys with make up holding hands around the area and the student park hosted this very controversial group of people. Recently, the park hosted a very famous women demonstrations that was cracked down by the authorities and made the park famous all around the news.

Whatever the park is famous for, I still remember my running around its pool, using the swing and curiously looking at students on the grass solving mathematical problems...good old days.

See where the Park is on GoogleEarth

Notes from Italy- Part I: Milano

Now it is time to start writing the details of our adventures Italy. I just started a new photo album just for this trip and will add pictures as I write about places we visited. I am down to more than 800 pictures, each around 10 Mb in RAW format and have some editing to do...

45°38'0.01"N, 8°43'41.00"E: Milan Melpensa airport: We used Alitalia to come to Milan from Lisbon to start our trip in Italy. The flight was smooth and the Italians did a lot of clapping when we landed. We had a lot of fun listening to Italians talking the entire trip . It is a real amusing language with such a sharp signature that Italians will never be able to give up no matter what foreign language they speak.

After getting the luggage, we went to the car rental booth of the company that I reserved the car online with earlier. I also booked by phone, a car navigation system that appeared to be one of the best spendings of the entire trip. I was lucky that I had the Libyan driving license with me. I had left the Iranian driving license back home and they did not accept the international driving license. I did not get how they could not accept the international license in English but could accept the Libyan one which was in Arabic and they could not understand a word of it!

With the help of our navigation system, we could easily find our hotel Milan to spend the night. The main building of the hotel was such an old, humble building with pictures of Humphrey Bogart all over its walls. It was recently renovated and we got a room in the new part which was clean and comfortable. They gave us a free wireless network password which was not working but surprisingly, there was another network available in the neighborhood, free of charge and we enjoyed it! Dinner was quick in a small Turkish restaurant, the only one in the walking distance that was open that late.

Next day, before leaving Milan, we took an hour in one of the fashionable streets of Milan with famous brands shining behind windows (picture) with prices in three and four digits! Even many of those who came for shopping, obeyed a certain dress code despite us who were in our casual jeans and T-Shirts and tourist backpacks. :)

From Milan, we went to Sirmione, a medieval city @  45°29'46.57"N, 10°36'14.96"E

Ramadan

We are back in Tripoli and Ramadan is here. I don't fast and it is just so difficult to cope with a day without lunch. The interesting thing about Ramadan here is the 12 hour time shift to all the aspects of life. Working hours are from 9-15 which is just a blink of the eye. Many people go to work at 10 and by 2:30, many start to pack their bags. The real life starts very late at night and people may stay out till morning before another day of fasting. Coming back from Italy, our flight landed around 2:00 a.m and so early in the morning we found the streets jammed with cars and shops open. Last night, we did our grocery shopping around 10:30 p.m! At work, anything important shall be planned before noon time especially if it is a meeting with local customers. People may think more about the fact that they are hungry than thinking about what you say.

Fasting with this fashion is something that I am not able to connect to. It looks so much like a duty or a habit than a spiritual thing. I was told that the merit is to feel the hunger and thrust and share your food with the poor. Instead, people eat so much before sunset and so much after the sunset and so little during the day, thinking about next time that they shall be eating again. It was the same in Iran...although there are people who really enjoy the spiritual part and test their endurance in life with fasting, for many others, Ramadan is just a good excuse for working less.

The academics who they are not

After watching the entire cast of Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia, I can summarize my reaction in one phrase: "Feeling pity for two people who believe they have academic spirit and they are so far from it".

Columbia President Lee Bollinger repetitively called himself an academic with right to know while he used an outrageous language not expected from a professor. It is not the degree but you would expect some personal growth to have happened in a person after reaching such academic level. Seems that he panicky reacted to criticisms of holding such meeting and had to scape somehow! He did so but from the limits of social behavior. If you call someone a petty from the beginning, then you are not ready to listen and "academically speaking", you are biased. It was so disappointing  listening to those words and the shadow of those strong and unwelcoming words prevented enough attention to be given to some of his true statements and questions and gave chance to Ahmadinejad to escape them easily. Again, our first big academic of the day certainly lost the purpose. If I was a Columbia student, I would have delayed my graduation to avoid his signature on my degree!   

Interestingly, Ahmadinejad called himself an academic at the same time. He does so in many of his speeches no matter where. The start of his talk was funny when he made that religious speech on importance of science to enlighten humanity :) As if he was talking to a group of elementary school students in a remote village. This self-called academic was not afraid to make a lot of big-fat lies either and showed how he himself is biased with only a few information channels. This was true for the case of freedom in Iran, freedom of women, freedom of speech at universities and the Middle-East conflict. He did a lot of cursing in there by answering questions with other questions without getting to the point. This was a brief snapshot of his general policy...talking big, not specific, without aim and certainly not in the shape of a president nor an academic intellectual. I would however say that with him under such blistering attacks in there, not much could be expected.

Ahmadnejad in NY

There is a proverb in Persian saying “This coat is too big for you” used for someone who pretends doing what he/she is too immature for. Since Ahmadinajad became president, we started regretting as this proverb started to make sense about him. To me, He is politically so immature that he rarely thinks what he puts himself into and what future outcome his remarks might have or else he does think and his framework of thinking is so away from reality. He is a simple man for whom presidential chair is too big, so big that after two years, he still could not come to comprehend his own position and has never learned to abide to normal diplomatic behaviour that is expected from a president. From such an unfair election, no better president elect would have come out.

Last year after coming back from the UN, he claimed that during his speech, a rim of light surrounded him. Domestically, he claimed so many unrealistic things as well. I would say that his talks about holocaust and the wiping off Israel are as insignificant as his other statement. As a result, I think comparing him to Hitler is a very unrealistic and is truly propaganda to fuel a war. The regrettable fact is “why he has put himself and his country in such position by talking before thinking?” We will add this question to the tons of others we have left unanswered from the Islamic republic.

P.S: We arrived in Tripoli today from Rome with so many great memories from Italy and gigabytes of pictures. In days to come, I put all the details in the blog

In Florence after a long walk

We arrived to Florence yesterday night and were walking all day today exploring it...It was a fantastic day just like other days in Italy that I am just going to start writing about. I updated the posts about Portugal though (below). Tomorrow we will drive to west to see the leaning tower of Pisa and from there will drive through Tuscany towards Rome where we will stay for three days and then head back to Libya.

I have just a few minutes before this internet shop closes and I shall catch up with some blogs and news sites that I normally would have read since this trip but it feel so good not to read news for a while...

Milan...Sirmione...Verona...Venice

We have seen so many things every day and had so little access to internet that my notes and photos are getting loaded in my computer. Just posted a short one about part of our day in Lisbon and I will keep posting about days we passed in Italy in respective calendar days so you may need to scroll down a little bit next time. From Milan we moved to the medieval city of sirmione and then had a few hours in Verona and earlier today we reached an area very close to venice which will be our destination to visit tomorrow. We are in a lousy internet cafe and it is 9:00 pm and we got to run...did a lot of sightseeings and drove a lot and it is long since lunch...till next time...

Hello ITALIA!

Still a lot to write about Portugal and especially Lisbon and our two days adventures in there but for the moment, lets talk about our current location: We are in Milan.

We arrived yesterday, rented a car that I previously booked and it luckily had just enough space to accommodate us and our suitcases. My geeky trip planning paid off and the navigation system that I booked for the car was available. It was so comfortable to find the hotel using this...these are good inventions but can also eliminate part of the fun. You may go somewhere and find the place without knowing how you did it. However, considering our time frame and the tight schedule, this is the way to survive. Milan airport is kind of far from the city and we had to move around some highways exits to get to our hotel which is a small but cozy building in somewhere that looks like a busy working district of Milan.

The most hilarious thing happened to me on the highway toll yesterday and I bet Mrs.Behi had not laughed so hard for so long like that watching me making the complete foll of myelf. We got to the automated toll booth that had this little space to enter your card or money or voucher and I did not know what I supposed to put. The car in the front put a kind of highway toll card and I was wondering if I had to put my credit card or not...my hesitation and anxiety was so funny and I had the embarrassment feeling the cars behind me and was wondering: shall I put a Euro bill or the card, I tested the bill and it was not fitting and then finally I tested the card the machine was about to take the card in but as I was not sure what to do, I was wondering if the machine was considering another sort of card and might damage my credit card....finally we passed...and now it is the morning after. In a matter of an hour or so, we will leave to Sirmione which is a small peninsula in the middle of a beautiful lake, North of Italy...more to come.

Listening to Portugal’s history while leaving it

It is amazing how much you can learn about a country you visit by people who take you to places when you are there. Leaving Lisbon became like an informative session on Portuguese history with a cheerful taxi driver who took us from Cascais to Lisbon airport. The driver was a senior man on his seventies, a very fresh and sound though as he mentioned himself that he still works more hours than his eldest son (on his fifties) who was also a cab driver in a small family owned transportation company.

He started- and repeated several times- with his pride of the ancient empire of Portugal and places discovered by his people in Americas, Asia and Africa. Every now and then he used the opportunity to denounce that British Empire, did only discover Australia and the rest of their empire were discovered by Portuguese and Spanish and later captured by Britons in what he believed as power of gun. He was so proud to declare that Portuguese were first in India before the British and I could not help not to interrupt him that India had already been discovered and inhabited by its own people! 

He also felt very patriotic about the liberation of Lisbon from the Arabs, he was the one who told us that the flag of Portugal is in fact half red in memory of the blood spelled freeing it and green in respect for life and growth and the castles in the middle represent the castles freed from Arabs towards the victory.
We were close to the airport when his stories were shifted to the dark side of the empire with the slavery and how Portugal dictatorship was not letting go the colonies and how that resulted in many Portuguese to dies in far lands. 

Lisbon hills, breathtaking and beautiful-Part Two

Read Part one here....It was there - in  Praça do Comércio- where we decided to learn more about the area by taking the tram tour, which happened to be a great fun. This old fashioned tram still had the old decoration, the bell and a rope hanging inside as “stop” request.

The journey soon took us to a cruse within the narrow streets of alfama district with houses and apartments blocks stacking on top of each other. Many of those buildings were decorated with tiles outside reminding the visitors of the eastern influence on this area which in indeed true and the history of the neighborhood goes back to the time of Arab occupation of Lisbon. The tram continued taking us up and we could see building after building with either flowers or wet clothes hanging from their windows and balconies (Pictures: 1, 2, 3) The shaking tram carriage with its bells ringing every now and then, continued to take us uphill in streets that were just wide enough for it to pass (Picture). Finally, we reached the top of the hill and started the plunge from the other side. Down the hills, streets around the historic squares start to become more rationalized, making a grid geometry with similar apartments blocks one after another (Pictures: 1,2). Yet still, the old age was apparent from the face of many of the buildings. In there, we passed by some interesting attractions of Lisbon like the Santa Justa elevator that had a long queue of tourists and no time.

The Castle of Lisbon: The remains of our short day in Lisbon was spent in Saint Geogre’s Castle also knows as castle of Lisbon. This castle is part of the series of castles forming the center of Portuguese flag and together they show the pride of these people in winning back the land from the Arabs who took over this area for many years. In fact, a big part of this castle was built by the Arab rulers in the most amazing spot that enables a great view of anything moving below. The structure of the castle is simple and strong but beautifully preserved (or restored?) with refreshing rows of trees on the edge and view of old Lisbon below that looked like a big stack of orange domino pieces (See Portugal album for photos).