Made by Mammals is a graphic book on the problems caused by the three main monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Images have been created to accompany quotes taken mainly from leading intellectuals of past and present who criticize religion, its origins and the role it still plays in modern society.
Check out some of the images on the website, madebymammals.com. I like this image:
I don’t entirely agree with it, its very west-centric, and has a simplistic view on polytheism. But I do like that it shows the natural progression from many gods to one god. And perhaps eventually going one god further.
From the TIFF website: The world of Mozart is beautifully re-imagined in this elegant and at times rollicking retelling of the story behind the creation of one of his operatic masterpieces, Don Giovanni. Although there are songs and theatrics in the film, this is not a simple restaging of the opera. Instead, director Carlos Saura dares to probe into the creative origins of Mozart’s work, and emerges with a backstage tale that is full of both drama and the excesses of opera itself. There is love and certainly jealousy, in addition to scheming divas, court composers, faithful wives and ethereal young things. Central to the story is not the great composer but his overlooked librettist, who used all this raw material as artistic inspiration. The fascinating and great Lorenzo Da Ponte penned Mozart’s finest operas, including Cosi fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro and their final collaboration, one of the jewels of the repertoire, Don Giovanni.
As the blurb says, this movie really isn’t about Mozart, but more about the early life of librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. He led an interesting life, this movie chronicles the early parts of it. He was a protege of Casanova, and parts of the opera, Don Giovanni are based on events from Casanova’s life. Many parts of the opera are from his own life.
A librettist is a writer of the words (lyrics) used in long musical works like operas and ballets. As opposed to the writer of the music.
The movie is mostly in Italian, with some German. It has a lot of good music. It’s very enjoyable.
From the TIFF website: It’s June of 1982, and four young Israeli soldiers are assigned to operate a single tank. Their first mission is to enter a civilian Lebanese village to clear it of possible PLO terrorists. Something goes horribly wrong, however, and the ensuing panic leads to miscommunication, death, destruction and hostages. All hell breaks loose around these young men as they face the perennial question: kill or be killed?
This is based on a true story. The director / writer was one of the soldiers in the tank.
This is one of several cathartic movie efforts by directors from Israel. Many war veterans in Israel are struggling with their roles in Israel’s wars, particularly the ones in the 1980s, and have produced several films in the last few years that deal with this subject. This is one of the better ones.
The entire movie takes place in a tank. Scenes on the outside are from the viewpoint of the tank crew, as seen through a scope. It works well, you can really feel the emotion and imagine the smell of sweat, fear, urine and fumes in that tank.
Made me think of a more claustrophobic Das Boot.
This movie won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival just two days ago.
One of the best efforts to come out of this Israeli school of war films was last year’s Waltz with Bashir (highly recommended)
From the TIFF website: When three busty babes arrive at a desert hideaway to steal over $200 million from a ruthless underworld kingpin, things quickly spiral out of control. Hel (Erin Cummings), the caper’s mastermind, is a corporate bombshell with a taste for vengeance. Trixie (Julia Voth) is the bait, a gorgeous stripper with a heart of gold and a dress to match, irresistible to men and women alike. Camero (Ameríca Olivo) is the drug-running, man-hating psycho killer who trusts nobody but herself. Allegiances are switched, truths are revealed, criminals are unmasked (and undressed) and nothing is quite what it seems as the fate of the world is precariously balanced among this trio of smouldering, sexy femmes fatales.
If you like Tarantino’s Deathproof, this is the movie for you. It doesn’t have the snappy dialogue that Tarantino films have, but the action sequences are great. Zoe Bell (the New Zealander stuntwoman who starred in Deathproof) was stunt coordinator on this.
The three women in the movie do stuff that I’d imagine the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad from Kill Bill doing. Theres even a Bill-like character.
This movie is a tribute to the sexploitation films of the 1970s, as well as Tarantino’s work. It has muscle cars, strippers, midgets, lots of cleavage, hot women making out with each other, wet tshirts, hot women standing around, samurai swords, hot women fighting each other… it has a lot of stuff that guys will find entertaining.
This is not a movie for just guys though. I once watched Deathproof at a friend’s house, with several women. They enjoyed it more than I did, the female empowerment and girls kicking ass appealed to them. If approached with that frame of mind, and a sense of humour, I think women will enjoy this movie too.
Watching movies like this with the right crowd is important. This movie was part of TIFF’s midnight madness series. They show a weird / unusual / messed up movie at midnight every night and its great. The crowd cheers when theres a particularly interesting kill, that kind of stuff, they really get into it. I see this movie being played in dorm rooms across North America for years to come.
Cleanflix Mormons can be movie lovers too. The problem is that their religious leaders strongly discourage R-rated content. As one Mormon prophet explained, “The mind through which this filth passes is never the same afterwards.” In order to better serve their Mormon clientele, enterprising video stores in Utah started to offer “clean” versions of popular titles like The Matrix and Titanic. Using digital editing software, self-appointed censors removed nudity, gratuitous violence and profanity, then mass duplicated the clean versions for DVD rental. Soon the idea took off, and multiple franchises sought to capitalize on brands like Clean Flicks and Flick’s Club. For a brief spell, it seemed like the perfect business.
Unfortunately, no one consulted the copyright holders. Hollywood figures such as Steven Soderbergh, Curtis Hanson and Michael Mann became vocal opponents of having their work re-edited. As quickly as the clean movement blossomed, it started to unravel, with legal threats from Hollywood, accusations among rivals and even a sex scandal in the backroom of a clean video store.
The documentary was curiously unfulfilling. It does ask questions about ownership of copyright material. At what point does a movie become “yours” and to what extent? You’re allowed to edit it any way you want for your own viewing pleasure. But what about selling your edited version to to others? How about if you buy an original, unedited DVD of the movie for every edited copy you sell, so that the makers suffer no financial loss? It doesn’t help answer the questions though. I guess it can’t.
It does provide an opportunity to engage in some light schadenfreude at the hypocrisy of some religious people though. It’s not a Ted Haggard or Jimmy Bakker size scandal, but the hypocrisy and shady business practices of some of the religious people are documented.
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The Men who stare at Goats The Men Who Stare at Goats takes war to its illogical conclusion, with hilarious results. George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges are in top form in this uproarious tale about a top-secret brigade of psychic soldiers trained in New Age warfare. Amazingly, it’s based on a true story.
The source is Guardian columnist Jon Ronson’s surreal non-fiction account of the U.S. army’s attempts to harness psychic and paranormal power in the wake of the Vietnam War.
The all star cast does well. This is going to be in cinemas soon, most people are going to see this. It’s worth watching.
The part of the movie I enjoyed most was a running series of Jedi references, that were really funny because Ewan McGregor was involved. I’ll give you an example, the first one in the movie:
Clooney: “You have to think like a Jedi!”
McGregor (aka Obi-wan Kenobi): (looking perplexed) “What is a Jedi?”
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The Loved Ones In order to avoid a ghostly figure in the road, high-school senior Brent Mitchell (Xavier Samuel) wraps his car around a tree, killing his father. Constantly confronted by his mother’s emotional collapse after the accident, Brent escapes into a marijuana-fuelled world of loud metal music to block the pain and guilt. Dejected and out of sorts, he has a shot at happiness with his girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine), a grounded, caring girl with drop-dead good looks – a dream date for the high-school prom. But his plans are thwarted by a disturbing series of events that take place under a mirrored disco ball, involving pink satin, glitter, syringes, nails, power drills and a secret admirer. Brent has become the prom king at a macabre, sadistic event where he is the entertainment.
This is a great low-budget Australian horror / action movie. It’s Jeffrey Dahmer meets Pretty in Pink meets Carrie. Watch it on DVD.
Good date movie too.
My favorite bit of dialogue:
Crazy person: This hot water makes your brain boil (about to pour hot water into hole drilled into victim’s skull)
Machotaildrop
From the TIFF website: Meet teenaged layabout Walter Rhum, who wants nothing more than to become a skateboarding star like his idol, Blair Stanley. His plan? Submit a video of his bag of tricks to legendary conglomerate Machotaildrop, then kick back and coast. When his presence is requested at the company’s remote, mysterious fortress, he thinks he’s got it made, but Walter is about to find out that fame, fortune and even skateboarding can be way totally fraught with complications.
Equal parts surreal comedy, fable and indictment of our co-opting, logo-glutted culture – and 110 per cent just plain weird
This is a social commentary of sorts. But mostly its just gloriously weird, and slightly surreal. Take Willy Wonka, add skateboards, the circus, and lots of hallucinogens, and that might come close to describing this movie.
During the Q&A, the writer / directors admitted doing a lot of LSD in their youth. It really shows in this movie.
It’s sort of a commentary on rampant consumerism and manufactured celebrity. And how nonchalantly we discard our celebrities once they don’t ’sell’.
This movie isn’t for everyone. It proceeds at too sedate a pace for most people. Though if you’ve gotten this far in these reviews, its likely your attention span can handle this movie.
Ever wondered what the afterlife is like? Dev Khanna provides us with a cynical take on romanticized visions of eternal happiness in this charming tongue-in-cheek drama about a woman who waits at the gates of heaven for her soulmate to arrive. When things don’t work out quite as planned, Saint Peter offers an unexpected alternative.
George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead In a world where the dead rise to menace the living, rogue soldier Crocket leads a band of military dropouts to refuge from the endless chaos. As they search for a place “where the shit won’t get you,” they meet banished patriarch Patrick O’Flynn , who promises a new Eden on the fishing and ranching outpost Plum Island.
This was a celebratory moment. Watching zombie movies, especially new Romero films at the film festival is a treat. This was special though. In the evening, before the movie, there was a zombie walk. Fans dressed as zombies, were roaming the streets of Toronto, seeking brain. Then they converged on Dundas Square, where they were greeted by Romero himself. Romero recently became a Canadian citizen, and now lives in his new hometown of Toronto. So the film festival welcomed him with a special gift, a model CN Tower with a severed hand impaled on it. Great Start.
This was a good Romero film. Usual social commentary applies. The zombies in this movie weren’t very scary, they’re ridiculously easy to kill. Not a very scary movie, but still very watchable.
From the TIFF website: Featuring riveting, impassioned performances from real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, Creation is a profoundly humanist rendering of the story of a man whose scientific ideas famously and irrevocably changed the world.
It’s 1858 and Charles Darwin (Bettany) has returned from his far-flung geological explorations on the HMS Beagle to settle into a quiet life in the British countryside. He begins work on On the Origin of Species, destined to become perhaps the most widely read book of natural science. In it, he outlines his theory of evolution through natural selection, inspired by discoveries about the transmutation of species that dispelled the prevailing religious beliefs of the day. After receiving a twenty-page letter from Alfred Russel Wallace describing similar theories, Darwin forges on to finish and publish his work. Met with instant success, the book enacts a paradigm shift within Darwin’s lifetime, inaugurating a new era in biological science
My take:
In the blurb above, I don’t think the reviewer uses humanist in the same sense that I might. I think she meant Darwin, the human behind the controversy. When I think humanist, I think of it in the context of… well I suppose secular humanism and rational thinking. Thats not what this movie is about.
A large part of the movie focuses on Darwin dealing with his daughter’s death. There is a scene in which he loses his belief in god. My take-away from the movie was that Darwin lost his belief in god because he was angry with god and could no longer believe in a creator that took his daughter from him. It was presented as the tipping point. Not necessarily because he found a better answer, and filled in the god gap. I hope this wasn’t the case. I don’t know that Darwin did lose his belief in a god. If he did, I used to like to think it was because of the evidence at hand, not out of pique.
I hear that some churches in Europe are going to be showing this movie to their congregations, and I’m sure the same will happen in the United States as well. I think they might come away thinking that Darwin lost his faith because of his daughter’s death, and that On the Origin of the Species was a cathartic effort by him to overcome his grief.
My favorite quote from the movie was Thomas Huxley to Darwin: “You’ve killed god sir. Congratulations!”
Director Jon Amiel and writer John Collee were available for Q&A after the movie.
Paraphrasing director Jon Amiel: “Darwin was not a typical Victorian father. He gave his children free rein to explore, was close to them, and was the kind of father that indulged them. They would sit on his knees and play with his chest hair, that kind of thing. He also fostered in them a sense of inquisitiveness, taught them that it was ok to ask questions, and not alright to accept things you’re told at face value, without understanding”
The movie definitely did present a more human side to Darwin.
Writer John Collee is a former doctor, and I think he was able to bring some good insights to the script. A large part of the movie consists of Darwin and members of his family drifting in and out of the medical treatments fashionable at the time, which today seem horrific. For instance, we would never give a child mercury to cure a fever, but at the time it was common to do so. He was making a point about science progressing on, and theories evolving. Collee: “The scientific beliefs we have today will be laughable twenty years from now.”
The movie was loosely based on Randal Keynes’ biography of Darwin titled “Annie’s Box”. Keynes is Darwin’s great-great-grandson. John Collee also read much of Darwin’s letters and correspondence, and tried to incorporate that into the movie. The resulting Charles Darwin is definitely not what I expected, the screenplay has him almost schizophrenic in his loss at his daughter.
The orangutan Jenny was one of the real stars of the movie, and probably the most touching scenes involve her.
Some facts the director gave us, which weren’t in the movie:
- Darwin’s daughter died of infantile tuberculosis. Its good to know, you’re kind of wondering what she’s being treated for as the plot progresses.
- Darwin’s wife Emma edited, annotated and approved the final text of the first edition of On the Origin of the Species. Even though what it said were completely antithetical to her beliefs. The movie does employ some artistic licence with this fact.
I enjoyed this movie. Probably because I already know about some of the history of Darwin’s life, such as his voyage on the Beagle. Also, I care deeply about evolution, I believe I understand it as well as is possible for a non-biologist, and it makes sense to me. The evidence that supports it is credible to me, and it should no longer be controversial. I want to see it taught in schools and to see it generally accepted and studied. And through further study or research, if someone comes up with a better idea, a more credible one, I’d be willing to take a look and evaluate it on its merits. However, creationism is just a dead horse that we’re forced to keep beating, over and over, with no end in sight.
There is a another good take on the movie, from a slightly different angle, here.
People who don’t care about evolution one way or another and are just looking to get a good evening’s light entertainment will probably not enjoy this movie as much as I did. It won’t hold their interest the way it did mine.
From the TIFF website: Rwanda is the latest sorry chapter in history to benefit from cinema’s power. During the fifteen years since the 1994 genocide, there has already been a gathering tide of films seeking to understand the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. To date, those films have largely taken the form of epic, moral drama. The Day God Walked Away offers a new approach. Dry-eyed and disciplined, this remarkable debut follows one woman as the horror descends on her world. It is genocide in miniature, and all the more heartbreaking for that.
Jacqueline, a young Tutsi, works for a European family in Kigali. When the rampaging thugs draw closer to their home, the family members flee, leaving Jacqueline to hide trembling in the attic. Director Philippe van Leeuw constructs this sequence as a harrowing piece of experiential cinema, keeping close to Jacqueline in a confined space as threats come at her from all sides.
This wasn’t what I expected. I thought a movie like this was going to be genocide porn. It really was experimental.
Most of the butchery takes place off the screen, with the protagonist being able to hear it as she hides. The genocidal dialogue is believable. The director mentioned it was completely spontaneous, he showed up in Rwanda, gave the locals machetes and asked them to get in the genocidal frame of mind. Nothing can go wrong there I guess…
There was a survivor of the genocide in the audience, who asked the director what point he hoped to make with this movie. He said there wasn’t really a point. However, the idea came to him in 1994 when he was watching the news about the genocide on television, feeling helpless because there was nothing he could do. At the time he was researching the european genocide against jews during World War Two. He found that every time this happens, we say “Never Again” and then allow it to happen again a few years later. Europe, South America, Cambodia, Rwanda…
Most of the movie is about the protagonist’s spiral into despair. Its interesting, but gets trite after a while. You won’t come away with an appreciation of the intensity of the genocide and what it meant, necessarily. My take-away was that its more about the protagonists reaction to what happens to her. This movie doesn’t have much to offer most people, unless you’re a fan of experimental cinema.
From the TIFF website: In the year 2019, a plague has transformed the majority of the world’s population into vampires. These vamps aren’t romanticized gothic heartthrobs who sulk in the dusk, but omnipotent overlords, ruling the earth’s economy and social strata with an iron fist. Humankind teeters on the brink of extinction, in danger of being either turned into vampires or captured and farmed for its precious blood, sold at premium prices. Without a steady diet of fresh human blood, starved vampires feed on one another and regress into terrifying feral beasts. As demand outstrips the supply of plasma, attempts to find a substitute before time runs out have been failures. If humanity dies from the vampires’ bloodlust, the dominant race will become savage animals.
This was a different, but good vampire movie. Humans are being used as resources. You can see the story as a metaphor for almost anything. Oil, Water, Factory farming, the list goes on. Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke were both great, however, having seen Willem Dafoe in possibly the role of a lifetime in Antichrist yesterday, I couldn’t fully appreciate him in this.
This has one of the best movie beheadings ever.
Its a good movie, I think it’ll do well commercially.
Antichrist
From the TIFF website: Ever since his first feature, The Element of Crime, played at Cannes in 1984, Lars von Trier has remained one of the most controversial figures in international cinema. That said, nothing he has done could possibly prepare people for the profoundly disturbing Antichrist.
The film follows an unnamed couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, both of whom deliver extraordinary performances) as they deal with the loss of their infant son. She collapses at the funeral and is hospitalized, but her psychologist husband decides to care for her himself – and insists that she “deal” with her fears. When he learns that she’s terrified of their cottage, which they’ve forebodingly named Eden, he forces her to confront her terror of the place. It’s hardly paradise on earth. Few films have ever presented such a dark vision of the wilderness (even acorns are threatening).
My take:
Written and directed by Lars von Trier. He has several phobias, including fear of flying, he never flies. For this movie, he had no rehearsals. The actors showed up having memorized the script, and he would tell them to act. They wouldn’t even know where the camera was going to be. It was raw, and he managed to get the best out of his cast of stellar actors. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
The cinematography was amazing. The opening sequence alone would make an amazing stand-alone short film.
A large part of the movie consists just of two people talking to each other. But it grips you throughout.
Ultimately, when the shit hits the fan… it brings the fan down and clubs it to death. The fan doesn’t stand a chance against the shit that goes down in this movie.
This is the kind of movie that scares you, but you don’t know why. Theres nothing there that should be scary. Never before has a shot of the wind rustling through the trees produced this much trepidation in me.
Von Trier dedicated this movie to Andrei Tarkovsky. You can tell Tarkovsky has been a heavy influence on the writer / director.
Like many others, this is the kind of movie you should watch in one sitting. Don’t go answer the phone, get popcorn, feed the kids etc during this movie. It casts a spell, and you should sit through it, to appreciate it.
Willem Dafoe from the Q&A: “All that Lars asked me to do to prepare for this movie was to watch Tarkovsky’s The Mirror.”
I saw Willem Dafoe leaving the cinema after the movie. He was really nice to his fans, everyone who wanted an autograph got one, and he posed for a picture with whoever asked him. A lot of actors don’t do that, they kind of just ignore the fans.
Random Guy in crowd: “Hey thats the Spiderman guy!”
From the TIFF website: According to Jennifer’s Body, high school isn’t the best time of one’s life. It’s actually hell on earth, awash with teenaged angst, hormones and fountains of blood. Penned by Juno scribe Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama (responsible for the acclaimed Girlfight), Jennifer’s Body is the shocking flipside to Cody’s slacker teen romance.
BFFs since the sandbox but complete opposites, Jennifer (Megan Fox) is a scorching-hot, boy-crazy cheerleader, while Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is a shy nerd content with her first love, the cute and sensitive geek Chip (Johnny Simmons). Needy tags along to the local roadhouse bar, where Jennifer plans to score with a touring indie group’s lead singer (Adam Brody). The plan literally goes up in flames as a deadly fire rips through the watering hole. Among the survivors are a dazed Jennifer, who is “rescued” by the band and pulled into the tour van, and Needy. As the small town copes with the tragedy, Jennifer reappears with an insatiable hunger for the succulent flesh of her male admirers. Discovering her friend’s diabolical transformation, Needy sets out to rescue the town and save the prom from becoming a demon’s bloody buffet.
My take:
This was more than your average high-school horror. The dialogue, written by catholic schoolgirl turned stripper turned journalist turned oscar winning (for Juno) screenwriter Diablo Cody was edgy. It made the movie watchable.
Megan Fox was cool, she did well as the bitchy hot girl, you really hated her. Amanda Seyfried was the real star though.
Paraphrasing Diablo Cody, from the Q&A after the movie: “This movie has the only sex scene I’ve seen in which the words ‘put it in’ are used. In all the other movies, in all the other sex scenes, nobody puts it in. It somehow magically glides in. If nothing else, thats my contribution to cinema.”
After breakfasting at the hostel (more carrot jam!) on what can only be described as a deep fried egg and nun bread, I walked around for a while and changed money before taking the metro to the bus depot.
On my way to the bus depot, I saw several women on the metro with plasters on their noses. Iran is the nose job capital of the world. The cheapest nose jobs run for about US$1000, and the best surgeons cost about US$4000. Despite the average annual wage being far less than that, Tehran alone has about 3000 plastic surgeons. About 90,000 noses are redone in Iran every year. And if you get tired of your redone nose, it’s not uncommon to get multiple nose jobs. And it’s not just women. Men do it too. Unlike the west, where people who get plastic surgery often lie about it, or get it done while on holiday, Iranis are proud of their nose jobs. It’s a status symbol. Enough so that many people have taken to wearing the plaster on their noses, just so they can look like they’ve had a nose job.
I got to the massive Tehran bus terminal, from where I took a bus to Kashan. Language is an issue in Iran. Nowhere more so than at the bus depot. There are several private bus companies, each with their own ticket counter. I went to a random one and bought a ticket to Kashan, for a bus leaving in five minutes. I got lucky. If I had gone to another counter and they had a bus leaving in three hours, I would’ve bought it and waited. Comparison shopping is hard to do when you don’t speak the language. So, I had my ticket, but had no idea which bus to take. I wandered around for a few minutes, trying buses at random. “Kashan?” “Kashan?” “Kashan?”. After I found my bus I got on, and we were off. The ride to Kashan wasn’t very long, about three hours. On the way we stopped in Qom for a few minutes and I got off and took a quick look around. Qom is one of the holiest cities in Shiite islam, and is home to most of the hard-line clerics that run the country. It is very conservative. Not much to see here.
After making it to Kashan, I walked the few kilometers from the bus depot to the town center. The first order of business was to find a place to stay. I ended up splurging on the Khan-e-Ehsan. My travel budget is about US$30 per day, and in Iran I typically spent US$10 per day or less on a room or a bed. The Khan is a fairly new place; its dorms weren’t ready yet. It cost me $40 to stay here, and was worth every penny. When I say new place, I mean that the Khan-e-Ehsan is an amazingly well restored two hundred year old house that recently opened as a hotel. It’s built around a large courtyard, has several well appointed rooms, and a small stage upon which there are weekly performances by local artists. The owner ploughs the profits from running the place into his NGO, which supports the arts, especially among Irani girls and women. The night I stayed there a group of school girls came in for music lessons. The day I was leaving there was going to be a poetry recital. Iran isn’t the most woman friendly place, I’m glad to support women’s rights and women’s organizations in Iran in any way I can, and staying in the Khan-e-Ehsan when in Kashan is a good way of going exactly that. It’s also supposed to be a great place to meet young educated Iranis in Kashan. After leaving my stuff in my room, washing my clothes and leaving them to dry, I went for a walk.
Kashan is a fairly small town. Its’ claim to fame is that it is the place from which the christian bible’s three wise men set out to pay their respects to the newborn christ. If those events actually happened, this does fit in with the place, given that the three wise men were magi (Zoroastrian priests). The people in the area were mostly Zoroastrian at the time.
It was afternoon, and getting kind of hot, but it wasn’t too bad. I walked to the old city walls, and then checked out a couple of traditional houses. Kashan has several traditional houses built in the 19th century, which have undergone restoration over the past few years. I spent some time at the Khan-e-Ameriha, one of the more impressive houses. It has seven courtyards, and is spread over 9000 square meters. It was really impressive, and in its prime, probably housed hundreds of people, once you include servants.
I saw many traditional doors while wandering around as well. These typically have two knockers, one round and fat, the other long and thin. One is for women and one for men. They give off different sounds so that the inhabitants of the house know whether a man or woman is at the door, and can decide who should answer the door. This was important in a society with purdah.
After the houses, I made my way to Kashan’s Bazaar. This place was huge; however, all the shops were closed for the afternoon siesta. Nobody was around. I took advantage of the solitude to climb onto the roof of the bazaar, and walk around. The roof is paved with mud, you can actually look into the shops through the ventilation holes. The mud keeps the entire structure cool.
Kashan is really laid back compared to Tehran. I just sort of walked around and soaked it in, checked email at a nearby cafe. The shops began to open, so I had some unidentified black juice from a blender at a small grocery shop. It was really bitter, but good. I bought one of the locally bottled colas to try out as well. Because of the sanctions, Iran doesn’t have Coke or Pepsi, or anything made by them. They have some very good local soft drinks though. I think Zam-Zam is my new favorite cola. More on that when I talk about Esfahan. Some of you may be familiar with the name of this cola:
I ended up sitting in the courtyard that evening, watching the stars come out, reading my book of Rumi’s poetryand drinking pineapple flavoured non-alcoholic beer. The non-alcoholic beers in Iran are actually pretty good. They’ve given up any pretense of making it taste like beer, you just have to think of it as a refreshing soft drink. It was a really peaceful evening. After dinner with a fellow traveler, went off to bed. It was really cold that night, I needed extra blankets, and turned the heat up all the way.
The next morning after breakfast, went to the Fin Garden with a fellow traveler. Came back to the hotel, checked out, went to the bus station and caught a bus to Esfahan.
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“Justifying space exploration because we get non-stick frying pans is like justifying music because it is good exercise for the violinists right arm.” by Richard Dawkins
and drinking pineapple flavoured non-alcoholic beer. The non-alcoholic beers in Iran are actually pretty good. They’ve given up any pretense of making it taste like beer, you just have to think of it as a refreshing soft drink. It was a really peaceful evening. After dinner with a fellow traveler, went off to bed. It was really cold that night, I needed extra blankets, and turned the heat up all the way.
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