One night towards the end of summer Ardi, Kamyar and I were hanging out with some other friends from the neighborhood. We gradually got bored and as some of us were single and others weren’t able to get in touch with their girlfriends, we started asking around if anyone knew any girls that we could hang out with. As we continued asking around, we came across a kid from Sixth Street who always acted as if he was a big-time player with connections although he rarely delivered on his promises. One time in a similar situation we asked if anyone had any movies, porno or otherwise, and he pulled us aside and asked what type and how many we were interested in, implying that for the right price he would gave us access to his vast collection of movies. He told us that he knew a girl, a professional as he referred to her, and he could have her come by Kamyar's empty apartment around 7:00pm. As far as the cost he said she should be ok with 100 tomans but if she gave us a hard time about it to...
Saeid Zeiaei and his wife Hadija Faraji became U.S. citizens last year. They have two young children born in the United States. Even though all four members are American citizens now, and they are embracing American culture, the family continues to preserve their Iranian heritage, too. Zeiaei ended up in West Virginia because his parents had friends there. That made his dad feel better about sending him so far away. Zeiaei says what little the Iranian media says about Americans isn't good, and when he got here, he discovered the misperceptions cut both ways. Fellow students would ask if his dad had an oil field. They figured that was the only way he could afford to go to school in the U.S. "Or they were asking, like, do you guys, everyone have a car there, because every time we saw a movie, they portrayed people either walking bare feet in desert or everything's in chaos. And that's the only impression they got from that country."