In which I Learn Persian

Back at the start of the academic year, I signed up for a course of beginners' Persian.  I've been a bit of a Persephile for as long as I can remember, and meaning to take lessons in the language for ages.  Then I learned that the University offers language classes to the public, and that Persian is on the menu.

So I signed up.

It was either that, or blowing the cobwebs of French, or grinding the rust off Russian, or starting German from scratch.  All had their advantages.  But I chose Persian.

Lessons are for three hours on a Tuesday evening; I've been providing a potted précis on Facebook week-by-week since.  But it might be interesting to repost those updates here, with a little elaboration as I deem fit.  I'm going to try to ensure that they appear in "real time" - to the greatest extent possible, the posts will not alter according to what I would come to know or think later.  Having said that, it might be impossible to add to what I was thinking at the time without that kind of distortion.  We shall see.

So, over the next few days, that's what I'll do.  Spoiler alert: I'm not very good at it.

In the meantime, here's a couple of photos from my trip to Iran in 2004.  (Some people go on package tours to the Algarve.  I went to a totalitarian theocracy - albeit one where the totalitarian theocracy seemed only to be skin-deep.)

This was taken in Yazd, where I ended up with sunstroke.  Annoyingly, I can't remember the names of most of the other people who were in the group.  I think the guy with the moustache that you can half-see was Paul.  But I do remember the name of the guy in the foregroud.  He was a German teacher from Aberdeen called Kenny.  Kenny had a very low tolerance for bullshit - in Esfahan, for example, he noticed that there was someone who was following us around during a bit of free time when he, I, and one or two others went for a wander around the city.  He was suspicious that our shadow might have been a policeman of some sort, so went to engage him in conversation.

In the course of that conversation, our shadow claimed that he'd worked in Germany for 20 years.  Naturally, Kenny responded by talking in German.  The shadow had no clue what he was on about.
"But I thought you lived in Germany for two decades?"
"Yes, but we never left our compound."
"For twenty years?"
"..."

Iranian police informers need to be a bit less obvious, I think.

Kenny also had a habit of joking that he was the Hidden Imam.  While the jokes were in English, they were also in public.  I'm not sure of the wisdom of that.

Anyway.

Here's another photo, this time taken under the Khaju bridge in Esfahan.  There's no story that attaches to it in any way; I don't know who the man is.  However, I do like the photo for a couple of reasons.  First, it's one of the rare pictures that I've managed to centre more or less correctly, so the perspective is good.  Second - I can take no credit for this at all - I like the way that the guy's outline follows the lines of perspective: his right arm following the vertical axis, and the line from his head to his left shoulder following the diagonal from the centre to the bottom right.  There's another reason on top of those that I like it, which is that there's a very similar photo that's on the cover of a fairly popular book - though I can't remember for the life of me what it is.  Anyway: that version of the photo on the book doesn't have anyone in it.  I think my picture is better.

So there we are.  The drip-feed record of my adventures in the language will begin anon; in a couple of weeks, we'll be up to the present.  Maybe one or two people will be interested.