Sunday bird blogging

A hooded crow in a Tehran park.

I saw a few of these in Istanbul, but they were everywhere in Tehran -- there was even a pair nesting in a tree outside my hotel room window.

We flew to Kerman, in southeastern Iran, last night. Our flight was delayed, so fortunately the airport was an educational experience on its own. Men and women have to go through security separately, and we women were patted down by a female agent, while the only man in our group just had to show his boarding pass. There was a “encase your luggage in layers of plastic wrap” service like the one in South Africa, a few shops with limited offerings, and a woman behind a small table, who was offering blood sugar tests, while also selling sessions in vibrating “massage” chairs. She got quite upset with us as she thought our luggage cart was blocking access to her (empty) chairs.

The strangest, and most unnerving, sight was several woman who were completely veiled. We're used to women in chadors at this point, but these women had their faces completely covered, without so much as a slit or a piece of mesh to look through. (I think they were probably Arab, judging by the way their husbands were dressed.) I couldn't help staring at them, but there was no way to tell if they looked back. They glided over the floor, faceless, limbless, like the dementors in the Harry Potter movies.

I have to figure out a new way to handle blogging on the road. I still have several draft entries for Tehran I need to finish, and there's little chance I can go through the hundreds of pictures I'm taking and say anything meaningful about them when our days are so full.