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Re: My Daily Walk (Dec 23, 2021) :-)

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Dec 23, 2021:


I mentioned that as kids we always were attracted to sour stuff. Even 
stuff we kids bought by our own little supply of money from nearest 
shops showed that tendency towards sour things every bit as much as 
sweet things, if not more in fact.

There were no modern grocery stores back then in Iran of 1950s (with 
just once exception). In Tehran for serious shopping you'd go to the 
central bazaar, sections of which were devoted to various food items, 
the rest for other necessities and luxuries, everything. Bazaar is the 
model on which Western "Malls" are built except for the fact that in a 
Mall the type of commodity presented for sale is almost random and 
there's not much of a competition as well as cooperation between various 
vendors of same commodity. A shop that sells toys can price them anyway 
it wants and other toy shops across the town aren't that readily aware 
of the pricing of that particular shop in the Mall. This is not so in a 
bazaar.

In bazaars, all shops that sell the same type of commodities are in one 
area and adjacent to each other. So the prices from shop to shop varies 
only by the quality of that commodity and overall customer need and 
affordability for it, not by competition. And these vendors are fully 
aware of other vendors' pricing. So the prices are more stable and at 
the same time more closely vary depending on quality alone.

For occasional and/or brief shopping people don't go to bazaar; we had 
all these little shops scattered throughout the city for that which were 
specialized in some way and sold same items as in bazaars but at a 
higher price.

One common type sold legumes, rice, peas, loose tea, tobacco, soaps, 
very limited variety of nuts, and limited variety of sweets. The grocer 
weighed what you bought and collected the money. You could not go around 
pick them up yourself.

Another type of shops sold only meat. Mostly sheep meat but occasionally 
chicken and very rarely beef and goat meat. They grounded them right 
there for you if you wanted at no extra charge. Beef, if available, was 
much cheaper than sheep meat cause people didn't have a taste for it. 
Goat meat was about the same price as sheep meat. Chicken was the most 
expensive, cause they were all garden hens who roamed free and their 
meat and eggs tasted like how they should, not the artificial ones you 
can buy today. In that style of selling chicken meat the cost is high. 
Again like in other shops you just told the shop owner what you wanted 
and he'd cut and weigh them for you. You could not go around pick 
anything by yourself.

A type of store baked and sold only breads of all sorts, and some 
sweetened simple pastries. Each neighborhood had to have one of these 
bakeries at least cause bread was the staple food of Iranians (I believe 
today it is rice, not bread) and it was subsidized by the government so 
nobody would go hungry.

Then there was the shops who sold dairy products. By the time I was born 
the pasteurized form had already been in production, so these stores 
always had all sorts of dairy products year round. But there were both 
variety available for customers, pasteurized and hand made real things. 
The prices of the latter was slightly higher of course. But the natural 
ones were seasonal.

The clothing little stores had just started to appear (boutiques). 95% 
of people purchased their clothing needs from corresponding sections of 
bazaars, but some 5% had begun buying them from these boutiques. The 
main competition to bazaar clothing businesses was from Ferdowsi Mall, a 
giant multi-level modern Mall that Hitler's Germany had built in Tehran. 
My father was among this 5% who almost always shopped at Ferdowsi Mall. 
it was pretty expensive but a very convenient way to access quality.

I don't even remember going to bazaar to buy my clothing items or 
anything else for that matter. Anytime I needed something, my father and 
mother took us to Ferdowsi Mall where it was exactly as if you were in 
Neiman Marcus. You'd go around and tried various sizes and the one that 
fitted best and looked good was purchased. Source of these apparels? 
Still in those days in late 1950s it was mainly from Germany :-) From 
the best winter items to the most casual Summer items and all sorts of 
shoes for all seasons and purposes you could find in that Mall. In fact 
it sold everything but food items, but had its own sandwich store 
inside. It had its own modern extra clean restrooms. It was a wonder 
inside the old old old Tehran. It was a piece of what best of Germany 
offered. Almost like a trip to a nice Mall in Berlin or something. I 
have yet to see any useful feature in an American Mall that was not 
already incorporated in Ferdowsi Mall. Nothing. The best German made 
kitchen utensils, house appliances (AEG mark was almost on all of them - 
finest in the world indeed), refrigerators, radios and TVs, heaters, 
ovens, even school material, everything was high quality and almost 
always coming in from Germany.

Heck even the brushes we used in bathing were from Ferdowsi Mall, having 
best quality bristles in three different roughness: soft bristles for 
face or childrens' overall body, medium bristles for rest of body, and 
hard bristles for getting a skin massage as well. I could never find one 
with that quality in USA, and I tried hard guys. Even my Swiss 
girlfriend when she left to Europe to live there took my German made 
bathing brush and tooth brush that I had brought with me from Iran with 
her! She just loved them and had not seen ones so well made.

In 1970s, competition stores to Ferdowsi began to pop up (with Jewish 
owners that were now millionaires and billionaires) and shortly after I 
came to USA Ferdowsi was closed for ever. Somehow the new neurotic and 
paranoid regime associated it with Reza Shah and Hitler. It was indeed 
built by Hitler's Germany to introduce best of German life into Iran. It 
did so effectively indeed. Americans never quite replaced Germans in 
Iranians' hearts. Reason is, or was, that Americans were crooks compared 
to Germans. Whatever Germany did in Iran was honest and lasting and I'd 
say loving also.

Brits? Hehe :) Those sons of bitches were always hated by Iranians. And 
we're not done with them yet.

Back to the little specialty stores I was talking about. There were all 
sorts of them. One sold only toys, one sold only nuts, only shoes, only 
cloths for various use, only school material, only electronics, etc and etc.

And another type of tiny little shops were plenty also, and these are 
the ones I wanted to talk about here. They didn't fit into a certain 
category, so the shops were referred to only by their owners' names :-) 
"maghAze hoseyn AghA!" (Mr. Hoseyn's shop), "maghAzeh hasan 
ghossekhore!" (Sad Hassan's shop) etc. These stores were made mostly for 
kids, so they carried very little of anything that adults might need 
except stuff for emergency use. We kids, as soon as we got our hands on 
a little money (we all had little daily allowances that we collected 
from our fathers before they went to work in the morning) calculations 
would begin! Buy what with how much of it and buy what else with how 
much of it and take to school how much of it (if the kid was of school 
or kindergarten age)!

My allowance was that of a middle class kid's. At age of 4 two rials and 
when schooling began for me (age of 5 - I started two years early) five 
rials per day.

Before schooling began, with one 2 rial coin that I'd get from my father 
I could not buy "kuleyd" (Cool-Aid!) from the nearby tiny shop. Each 
packet there cost 3 rials. So I had to wait at least two days. And boy, 
the moment I had two of those 2 rial coins in my little hands I ran 
directly to that shop and bought one of the flavors of kuleyd. You have 
no idea how many of these packets I emptied in my mouth at once and 
enjoyed the living Heaven out of them... :-)) I didn't even know that 
they were to make drinks with. As soon as the packet was in my hand I 
opened it and emptied the whole damn thing in my mouth. The intense sour 
and sweet taste was indeed heavenly.

What else did those tiny shops sell? Just about everything that made up 
a kid's world in those days, including some unexpected ones as well. 
Like they always had two types of reels of movies films hanging from the 
ceiling. These were 32 mm films from old movies. You'd pay 1 rial and 
get a 20 inch length of the film, then you'd get out in the sun and 
looked at the pictures against sunlight. Some were even color films. But 
one type was more expensive than the other type, cause it was the 
"besooz" type! (flammable). You paid more for the besooz, then after 
enjoying the pictures you'd cut them in little squares the side of the 
width of the film itself and put the squares on top of each other, then 
you'd tightly cover the whole thing with a piece of paper and used 
thread to tie the paper smack in place in two perpendicular directions 
(the way large boxes of pastries were tied down by threads).

Then you had a weapon at your disposal! :) Hehe :-) You would take this 
little package to a cement power pole and rub one corner to it until the 
film inside got exposed, then you'd use a tiny strip of same type 
"besooz" film as fuse wire and stuck it in there. Then you waited in the 
path of mobile vendors with their donkeys loaded with potatoes etc. 
Donkey arrives, vendor is busy selling potatoes to a housewife, you 
ignite the fuse wire and throw the package under the donkey. The package 
within seconds would make a loud hissing noise while rotating fiercely 
giving off a cloud of dense bluish smoke at the same time! Donkey 
stampedes! Potatoes all over the ground, owner running after the donkey! 
Your day made :-)

Any kid I know at least once managed to do that. The scene matched best 
that Hollywood could offer. It used a foot or two of Hollywood "besooz" 
film indeed :)

No donkeys in sight? You just lit it up to watch what it does for your 
own joy's sake.

We kids did much more with various flammable stuff, including making 
firecrackers and making our own gun powder with creative use of what was 
available to us, but that's a whole other story.

Anyway, that's why that besooz type was more expensive. It burned fast 
like ping pong balls. The material was extremely flammable and would 
create very forceful gas if confined. Some older kids even made little 
rockets with them that traveled a whole neighborhood into the next 
adjacent hood.

These little stores had cheap candy, kuleyd packets (three different 
flavors), Ardenokhodchi (toasted garbanzo beans flour mixed with fine 
ground sugar) that you'd suck into your mouth with a short straw, gums 
of all sorts, lavAshak (salty dried pressed flattened fruit sheets), 
noonghandi (the simplest and cheapest form of cooky baked in bread 
stores), yoyos, firecrackers, cheap toy water guns, cheap little dolls, 
pumpkin seeds, watermelon seeds, sunflower seeds, and anything cheap 
that was within the power of a kid's buying power.

Thank god the kuleyd was not cheaper! If it was cheap enough I would 
empty one packet every hour into my mouth! This happened only once a 
year right after new year's festivity (vernal equinox) when relatives 
would visit and give kids money as present. That kind of money was 
enough to get me sick with kuleyd.. But no matter what part of the year 
I was in, I'd sure get more than enough vitamin C from those packages. I 
remember it had become a bone of contention with my Mom. She was afraid 
such powder was not good for my health and checked inside my mouth to 
see if I had emptied another packet there sometime that day :) No way I 
could hide it, so timing of doing that also mattered and I had to be 
careful to do it when my mother was busy for several hours after that. 
But my father didn't mind it much because he knew of its vitamin C content.

The little shops also sold dates, and some food items for emergency use 
by housewives, like feta cheese, sardine cans (tuna cans hadn't appeared 
yet), little sacks of rice, tomato paste, salt, pepper, soap, etc, but 
these items were much more expensive in those stores than they were in 
their own specialty stores a bit farther away, and the least expensive 
prices for them were to only be found in the bazaar.

Soon my father's income grew fast (thanks to Four Point projects that 
were underway in those years - Paying a lot of money to those who could 
deliver real economic and infrastructure results) and we moved from the 
heart of Tehran to its very north suburbs right under Alborz mountains 
and not too far from the old Ghajar dynasty palaces (Shah's Niyavaran 
Palace was not built yet). In that area everything as far as shops were 
concerned was the same with one exception. There was a neighborhood of 
one-story modern houses built right south of the Ghajar palaces, almost 
adjacent to them, that was exclusive to Americans. These families were 
mostly military advisors. For them a supermarket was built close by 
which was open to public. This shop was the only exception in Iran as 
far as I know. The way it ran was exactly like a small supermarkets in 
USA except for the fact that it was more comprehensive and carried more 
of quality products. All sorts of packaged material, food, frozen food, 
frozen and fresh meat, frozen fish, rotisserie chickens, canned food, 
pet food, even toys of all sorts were sold in there. That was the only 
shop in Iran of those days that looked like a shop in USA. We bought 
stuff from there only in emergencies cause prices were high. But 
Americans were buying their needs from that store all the time. It also 
sold beer and wine, and on special occasions you'd see many Americans 
leaning against their jeeps with a Coleman full of ice and canned beer 
in front of them on the ground, emptying the beers in their stomachs one 
after another as if it was water and their stomachs had infinite space 
to take in all that liquid. They just tossed the empty cans right there 
by their cars. When a few hours later the occasion ended, whatever it 
was, probably some American holiday or something, they'd disappear and 
the ground in the area around that supermarket was covered with empty 
beer cans! It was some scene to see by kids.

As long as I was in Iran, till June of 1978, the presence of Americans 
in Tehran showed itself to me. It was part of my life there. Radio had 
an American channel also (AFRTS), so did the TV. From day one that TV 
began broadcasting in Tehran there was an American channel there also. 
So I never really lived a year in my life without some American 
influence around me, neither in Tehran nor later in USA :-) So in some 
ways for me it is as if I'm still in Iran with the exception that there 
are more Americans than before living around me. And this does not for 
one moment means that there's more influence from them on me! I have 
kept my own lifestyle just as the one I had in Tehran. The influence I 
allow coming to me from Americans is very limited and measured. Just 
like how life was in Tehran for me and my family. TV and radio (and now 
internet) here is nothing much more than garbage to me. I'm as before 
careful only to sort out and pick stuff worthy of my time from inside 
all that garbage. Bookstores have few books I would be interested to 
read, just like English bookstores in Tehran. Politics is as nonsense to 
me now as it ever was for me in Iran or outside. I rarely ever read 
newspapers in Iran as well as in USA. When something important happened 
someone else in the family would get a copy and hours later I'd take a 
look at them at home. I wouldn't even go to news stands.

I had my own interests :) Just like today.




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