T-Tail-Tall-Tail:
Coffee In a Strange Land
Mike Novack
This Ain't No Stinkin' Denny's
On a trip to Tehran, not too long before the US
Embassy was taken over, we
spent the night at a hotel in downtown Tehran. On
the way in to town from the
airport we saw women washing clothes in the gutters,
and a block later you'd see a guy relieving himself in the same
gutter. Well, what do you know?
The water flowed downhill (just like it does, by
some magical process, ALL OVER
THE WORLD) in the direction of that lady washing her
clothes. Right then, we should have known something wasn't right, because
this wasn't like any place
else we'd ever been, and water was not supposed to
flow downhill in this part
of the world! It said so in the approach charts.
The driver seemed to be taking a lot of twists and
turns instead of making a
bee-line for downtown. This was not a cab, it was a
blue crew bus, with
USAF printed on the side, so, unlike the normal crew
worried about this sort of
thing, we were not worried about the fare. We asked
what was going on and the
driver told us they were instructed to take a
different route to and from the
airport on every trip. Somebody knew something we
didn't know. The reason for
that seems all too clear to us these days, but then
it seemed bit strange. I
guess nobody could read the letters "USAF" or see
the color blue so we did not
think a thing of it at the time.
The next day the nav (we still had them back
then) and I went down to the
hotel coffee shop (if you could call it that) and
ordered some coffee.
View from Intercontinental Hotel in Tehran. Copyright: Bryan McPhee
They poured us each a cup and he picked up a sugar dispenser (one of those ones with a little flip top on it) and poured a bit into his coffee.
Full Disclosure: The picture above is a little Photoship pic I created, for fun. The fly was not visible in our sugar dispenser, until it found it's way to freedom in the nav's coffee cup.
Along with
some dirty looking sugar out popped a dead fly or
two. Our Tehraneese phrase
book only had "There's a fly in my soup", so we were
stuck. The nav waved his
arms wildly and got the waiter's attention, beckoned
him over to the table, and
pointed at the mess floating in his coffee.
The guy took the cup and sugar container over to a
cleanup tray, dumped the
coffee into a bucket, then filled the same cup with
more coffee. Then he picked
the remaining flies out of the sugar and brought the
'fresh' stuff back. We
left Tehran hungry that morning.