A Saudi family

This girl in Yanbu was hovering around the edge of our tour group, obviously curious, so I said hello to her and she said hello back.  When she got in the car with her parents she waved, and I gestured with the camera to ask if I could take her picture. 

More fans

There were groups of boys running through the gardens, eating ice cream, and interrupting Goli's explanations of what we were seeing with questions about who we were and where we came from.

Later, when we had time to wander around on our own, it was mostly spent talking to the boys, taking pictures -- and posing for a few.

Street photography

Caught you looking.

An unguarded moment at the bazaar in Kerman.

Shazdeh Gardens, continued

One of the vendors outside the garden, with his daughter.

They're Baluchi, or Balochi -- a semi-nomadic people who live in southeastern Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Final encounter

I think this is an appropriate place to stop. For now, anyway -- I still have stories to tell and I'll try to write them over the next few weeks.

We met this girl while walking across the bridge this afternoon. She spoke excellent English, as many young Iranians do. And when I could, I answered in Farsi, and she didn't understand anything I said. I was just using the same basic expressions I've been using for weeks -- my name is Kathleen, I'm American, I'm from New York, I understand a little Farsi -- but every time I said anything she frowned and looked confused, and her mother would repeat what I'd just said. Maybe she was just expecting to hear English, and wasn't sure that she was hearing me correctly, but it was very funny.

Back to English-speaking for me.

Encounters in the Eram Garden

We continue to attract friendly curiosity wherever we go -- usually a smile and a Salaam is enough to get a conversation going.

The man on the left is Iraqi, visiting his girlfriend in Shiraz. He invited us to visit him in Basra, assuring us that the British army has things under control and it's perfectly safe. Unfortunately, not on this trip.

My Iranian fan club continues to grow

I met these beautiful girls outside the Reza Abbasi museum, where they were about to start their school visit. They noticed my camera, so I asked if I could take their picture, and as you can see, they were very reluctant.

I posed for several selfies, and recited everything I know how to say in Farsi, which produced gales of good-natured laughter. One of them adjusted my headscarf because my ponytail was showing -- you can tell from the uniforms and black scarves that they go to a very conservative school -- but she wasn't being critical, just helpful.

Welcome to Iran!

That's what we hear from Iranians all day. “Hello!” “Hello!” “Welcome to Iran!”

This picture was taken outside the Niavaran Palace, where the Shah lived with his family in the 1970's , until the revolutionaries took over and suggested, rather firmly, that he might prefer to live elsewhere. I got tired of looking at the furniture and Empress Farah Diba's gowns, and went to sit outside and wait for the rest of the group to finish.

There's a beautiful park, and I was alternating between bird watching and people watching when a young woman peeked her head around the corner, giggled, and then disappeared. She peeked again, disappeared again. Finally she approached and asked me shyly in Farsi if I spoke English. I said, Yes, that I was American. Her face lit up and she disappeared again, returning a minute later with the man in the picture.

He told me that he has been trying to learn English on his own, from American movies he's able to download, and he was excited to have a chance to speak English with an actual American. They brought the entire family over to meet me -- brother, sister, mother, aunt, wife, son -- and we all nodded and smiled and posed for pictures with each other. No one else spoke any English, but I got to use my half-dozen phrases in Farsi, which everyone enjoyed very much. The mother in particular, a tiny woman in head-to-toe black, acted as though meeting me was a great honor.

“We love Americans!” they told me, and it was obviously true.

I'm not being fresh, I just want you to buy a carpet

This is Genghis, who latched on to me by the Blue Mosque, using that line. He said that I broke his heart forever, because I refused to go back to his shop and check out his merchandise, even though he didn't expect me to buy anything and did he mention he could ship my carpet to New York so I wouldn't have to carry it?

I'm confident Genghis has fully recovered from his disappointment by now. I had been planning to do another tour today but decided I'd rather go to the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia on my own. Having to fend off the Genghises of the world is a small price to pay for setting your own schedule.

In which I do not tour the Bosphorus

Instead I hung out in a cafe with these guys.

Because I'm staying in Asia, the tour company I'd booked with wouldn't do the usual hotel pickup. Instead, they told me to meet the group at the Yasmak Sultan Hotel at 1:15.

I got there about fifteen minutes early and stood in front of the hotel, and waited. And waited. And waited. Lots of vans and buses drove by, and a few of them stopped but none of them were from my tour company. But Istanbul traffic is horrendous, and I figured they were running late. The hotel isn't that large and there was a limited amount of sidewalk in front, so I knew I couldn't miss them.

At 1:45, I asked the concierge inside if he knew anything about this tour company. He had never heard of them, but looked up the number and called them for me. They kept him on hold for at least 15 minutes then finally said they'd call back. When they did, they put me on the phone with the man I'd spoken with that morning to confirm the tour. He said the driver couldn't find me and he was very very sorry but the group was already on the boat.

I suspected that “the driver couldn't find you” was Turkish for “I forgot to tell him to pick you up,” but I was so overwhelmed by the kindness of the hotel staff that I shrugged it off. I wasn't even a guest there, and I basically wandered in off the street speaking only English (I usually try to learn a little of the language anywhere I go, but I've been trying to convince my brain to retain basic phrases in Farsi, and couldn't manage to learn more than Hello and Thank you in Turkish at the same time) and they spent more than half an hour trying to help me. Next time I'm in Istanbul, I will definitely stay there. If I had children I would name them Yasmak and Sultan.

With an afternoon unexpectedly free, and jet lag starting to kick in, I was making my way back to Eminönü, when I noticed these very comfortable looking cafe chairs on a side street. The owner (in the blue t-shirt above) asked me if I wanted some tea, and suddenly I did, more than anything in the world.

I spent an hour or so drinking tea, and talking with the other customers -- a couple from Hamburg, two guys from Libya hoping to start a business in Istanbul -- then took a commuter ferry back to Asia, where I convinced another non-English speaking cab driver who had never heard of the hotel Sumahan to take me there.