Please share us with yours!Hello friends! سلام دوستان
Thanks for visiting my website again! It’s so great to see you all enjoying my letters! China was fun, but there’s a lot more world out there to see, so I hopped in my red air balloon and headed almost 3,000 miles west, over two countries called Pakistan and Afghanistan, to a really old country called Iran, right on the west edge of the continent of Asia!
Photo of Persepolis Above By Hansueli Krapf [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Iran, also called Persia, is the eighteenth largest country in the world and has had ongoing civilizations living there for almost 6,000 years!
When I was flying into the country, I went almost all the way to the west end, near the Persian Gulf. I flew over the ancient ruin of a city called Persepolis, also known as Takht-e Jamshid (Throne of Jamshid) which was built over 2,500 years ago! There’s not much of it left, but it was pretty amazing to see the sphinxes still holding up a couple of walls.
This month, Iranians are celebrating Nowruz (noh-ruze), which is their biggest holiday honoring the start of spring and the New Year. I wanted to learn as much as possible about Iran, so I headed to Tehran, the capital city.
The people on the street were so friendly, everywhere I went I heard them say “salam” (sa-laam), which means “hello” in Persian. Persian, also called Farsi, is the most common language in Iran. Persian is written right to left - does that mean you have to write with your other hand? I quickly made friends with a boy named Ali and his sister named Bahar. Ali was very funny, and laughed a lot when I told him I knew a girl named Ally in another country. Bahar is named for spring, and I thought that was a fun coincidence, since I was in Iran to celebrate spring with them!
Photos Above Courtesy of Hana Esfandiari and Mahmoodreza
Iran is mostly mountains and deserts. In the summers, it is dry and hot, except along the south near the sea where it gets pretty humid (that’s when the air gets kind of sticky). In the winter it can get pretty cold, and the mountains can get a lot of snow. Lucky for me, it is spring right now, so here in Tehran it is cool and sunny!
Food, and hospitality, is a big deal in Iran. Once I got to know my new friends, they insisted on taking me to their home for
dinner. It smelled AMAZING, and the food was delicious! There were strips of chicken and beef called kabobs, mountains of rice with crispy rice called tahdig (tah-deeg), and naan-e-barbari (delicious flat bread) served with tangy paneer (feta cheese), herbs and honey! YUMMY! There was even a stew called ghormeh-sabzi that had a lot of herbs and beans in it. Mmm!:)
(Photo of Mount Damavand By Arad at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL] or [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons).
While there, I learned how to play a traditional drum called a tombak. Ali played a traditional guitar called asetar and Bahar danced a beautiful dance with fun steps and pretty hand and arm movements. There was a painting of Persepolis on the wall, and another of Azadi Tower, an interesting tower that shows how much fun Iranian architecture can be! Ali’s mom and aunt kept bringing us a beautiful smelling black tea called chai that had rose water in it, which they poured from the biggest teapot I’d ever seen! Sometimes, I didn’t even notice them refill my cup!
Click on the picture to download the Iran coloring page. Ask your parent, guardian or teacher to mail it to [email protected] to see it featured on our website's gallery!
Here is a video of a friend of mine who shares how to count from 1 to 10 in Farsi. Follow along with her and see if you can count in Farsi too, friends!
There are so many amazing sights to see here, including the Azadi tower I mentioned earlier, so I found a wonderful video made by www.toiran.com to give you a better idea of every thing Iran is about.
I'm having such a great time! Come back next week when I’ll write about how the people of Iran celebrate Nowruz. Hopefully I’ll get some of your coloring pages back and can show them to Ali, Bahar and all my other friends around the world!
To learn more about the ancient country of Iran, it's culture and people, check out these interesting books from my friends at Kids Travel Books!
Goodbye friends!
Khoda hafez خداحافظ
-Joy Sun Bear
Author: joysunbear
Please share us with yours!
English
Wow! Awesome introduction to Iran!
I think this is one of your best posts! Nowruz is so colorful and filled with such meaning. I love the recipes, thank you, and the videos and pictures are lovely! Iran is interesting to me because of its history and because I have family from there.