dead people

Leaving Fereydunkenar meant trading the beach for the road. It meant four days of fast walking, most of it done exclusively on a highway. But one thing it also meant was a chance to take my two new stools out for a walk:

And they turned out to be awesome.

I tried to avoid the highway for as long as possible, so I took a side road west out of Fereydunkenar. Passed a religious kindergarten:

And a mosque that had an impressive facade and a side made of plain bricks:

When I reached the highway, I put in my earplugs:

And they turned out to be awesome, too.

The highway was mostly lined by supermarkets…

…malls…

…and villas:

On the other side of the road, closer to the mountains, there were little settlements that looked like weekend retreats for city people:

There wasn’t very much fun in walking on the highway, but I enjoyed this inflatable chef:

He served as an advertisement for a restaurant, and I ended up having cucumbers with the people who worked there:

We talked about football, and it turned out that one of them, whom I was suspecting to be a Brazil fan, wasn’t a Brazil fan at all:

It was a difficult and long conversation full of ohs and ahs.

Occasionally there were people selling clothes on the roadside:

Judging by the towels, Disney was pretty popular in Iran:

At some point I was stopped by this gentleman:

He gave me something to fix a flat tire, a sport towel, and an inflatable pillow. His name was Kasra Shah.

Why is this post called “dead people” though?

There were posters here and there, announcing that someone had died:

I can’t read Farsi, so I never understood what exactly the posters were saying. But one thing was clear: a lot of people in the prime of their lives were dying.

It was a bit unsettling.

When I reached Mahmudabad, the sun was about to go to sleep:

I bought some apricots from two fruit vendors:

“Don’t you watch the game?” they asked me. They meant the football match in which Germany was playing.

No, I said. Germany seemed very far from me.

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