Tehran 29-01-09

Another great day in this city with 15 million people.
In the morning I went to the museum of ancient at. And we are talking 7000 before the year 0.
Saw this incredible Venus. If art is old enough it becomes modern art by itself.
Saw very old woodwriting and their translations. Same sort of text as the Bible and the Quoran, other sort of Gods.
The buildings are just extraordinary beautiful. I love the rythms and patterns….When I told the people that I just love these Islamic patterns, they were very insulted…”much older than Islam, much older than Christianity”.It is really painful to feel that all of the world views Iran as just Islamic while the history is so much older.
Lots of stuff in the museum from Persepolis, the greatest success of the Achaemnid Empirem 500 BC, and according to the Lonely Planet a true multicultural empire. I met great people in the museum who all spoke French, and so we were chatting away and having fun, very modern and very old Persians speaking French in 2009.(see pics below)
In the evening had dinner with the Dalton Brothers(the Daltons are quit famous here by the way). 6 brothers living together, all in the arts, and they prepared this great meal for me. After dinner they told me about Yazd, the oldest living city in the world. It has been inhabited constantly for 7000 years. I was watching pictures of it all evening. Never seen such beauty and mingling of cultures as I know them today.
A mix of Marrakech and Mali, mud-brick buildings, ornated wooden doors and stunning mosaics in the middle of a desert.
My head flipped back and forth talking about ancient and modern history. Things are always different than you think.
One of the guys was a buddhist, so we talked about the bombing of the buddha’s in Afghanistan…they as I am still in shock about it. There is a big hate and fear of he Taliban here. That is why in Iran Bush is not seen as a bad president by some people, as he is seen in the rest of the world now. Young people quit like him overhere for wat he did with Sadam and Afghanistan. People do not understand why we hate him and are all in love with Obama.
And being here it was not that easy to explain for me suddenly. It is what I love most of travelling. You come to see things differently by meeting strangers.
I have to say: Iran is just another great country, because of the people.