Qashqai Wedding
Where are your fellow travelers from?” the police officer asks Kamran as we are about to board the train.
“The Global Arrogance,” Kamran answers. The police officer laughs, stamps our tickets and sends the three of us through the gates where we hurry to meet the overnight train.
The train leaves the station exactly on time. A couple of minutes after departure, a porter comes by with clean sheets. We fold the seats down and make our beds. “This is great,” our British friend says. “I just love the train. It’s so comfortable, so great to sleep in.”
“The cabins were larger when I was a kid,” Kamran comments. It’s his first train trip in Iran in more than 25 years.
“No, you were smaller. Trust me.”
At 5 the train stops and we are woken up by the call to prayer booming in over PA system.
“They never let you forget where you are,” our friend says sleepily.
We pull into the train station and take a cab into the city where we are meeting friends of friends who will take us out to a Nomad encampment some 2 ½ hours outside Esfahan.
We make our way through highways, small towns, dirt roads, gravel roads, and tarred roads and, after a spot of car trouble, head towards our destination where there is one teenage boy and some sheep.
“They’re at the wedding,” he tells us. “They’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
There are weddings everywhere in the encampments. We passed one on the way here and now our hosts are at another. We manage to get ourselves invited and are quickly surrounded by huge groups of young and old, women and men, boys and girls, all curious about the two foreigners in their midst. “George Bush is very, very dangerous,” a teenage boy says to me.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” I ask jokingly.
“Afraid of you… No!” they laugh. “You are afraid of us!”
“Terrorist,” says a boy pointing at his own chest. The others laugh. They know we think of them as terrorists.
