Iranian hospitality is unequaled, but after a while can become a little tiring. So we learned to say no to invitations now and then. Especially after spending a night at Josephs, who was so kind to invite us in his modest home in Tabriz because all hotels were full of medical tourists from Azerbaijan. Only, he turned out to be a bit grumpy and insisted we’d help him find a Belgian wife for his one-legged friend, so he’d be able to move to Europe. Joseph was willing to pay three thousand dollar to any woman who’d marry his friend, on one condition: she should not be black. No, he did not like black women.

Another time a stuttering man kept following us to our hotel in Kashan, thinking we were lost. On the way he used the tree branch he was holding in his hand to point at every obvious thing we came across: ‘re-restaurant!’, ‘sh-shop!’, ‘wa-watermelon, hmm, ve-very good!’. In the end, the hotel staff had to send him away.