Persian Carpets
Few people went on vacations in 1950s Iran. To leave the country, one had to pay a hefty exit tax and to travel inside Iran meant driving over miles of rough, unpaved roads with few stopping places. My family hadn’t taken a vacation together that I remember. There are pictures of my mother, sister, aunt and uncle at the Caspian Sea before I was born, but in my memory, the first vacation we took as a family was when I was nine, and we went to Hamadan. That said, my father didn’t join us on this vacation; it was my mother, my two sisters and my baby brother who went. My uncle drove us there, the one who had taught my mother to drive. Intrepid as my mother was, she wouldn’t have braved dirt roads, flat tires, car repairs, miles of wilderness, and no maps or road signs. Travelling outside Tehran was a fairly primitive and intuitive affair. One stopped wherever there was a village to ask for directions and to have punctured tires fixed. We took food and water with us since there we