Morning revealed an ugly city under construction using ancient building tools and techniques. We stood gazing out the hotel room windows as an endless circuit of running workmen pushed primitive wooden wheelbarrow loads of hand-shoveled dirt up rough-hewn plank ramps out of a pit about 20 feet deep just across the street. No backhoes or cranes or any other modern construction equipment were anywhere in sight. Traffic on the streets was as chaotic as it was noisy. Cars and trucks and donkey-pulled carts jostled for position on lane-less streets by sheer force of will and inscrutable trust in judgment and quick reflexes of fellow drivers. Traffic lights were nonexistent. A few brave jay-walking souls waded out into traffic to cross streets, somehow avoiding death. Vehicles surged and weaved and lurched and halted in a random flow that reminded me of army ants on fast march along jungle trails. 

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Watching the vehicular maelstrom of Tehran was as fascinating as it was frightening. We discussed the wisdom of our parent's plans to venture out into it together as a family, having just experienced a few days earlier a wild ride from airport to hotel in Beirut which shook us all up considerably. Dad and I had been in one taxi on that ride, my mother and brothers in another which had rocketed away from its parking spot at the terminal exit at breakneck speed the moment its driver had closed his door and fired up the engine. Dad had blanched at the sight of that, thinking we had just lost half of our family to kidnappers, but it had just been a friendly race competition between our taxi drivers through the narrow, hilly streets of Beirut to see who could arrive at the hotel first. We all arrived safely within seconds of each other and nervously laughed about it as we checked into the hotel. But Beirut's traffic was mild compared to Tehran traffic. I was pretty worried about our first ride in it.

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After breakfast we bathed and dressed and went out into the city to begin getting acquainted with all it had to offer. Farsi was the language spoken so we immediately began learning the basics of it. Counting  up from zero and learning the number pronunciations, their symbols and names printed on colorful Iranian currency: 

• Zero, sefr. صفر. ۰.

• One, yek. یک. ١.

• Two, do. دو. ۲.

• Three, se. سه. ۳. 

• Four, chāhār. چهار. ۴.

• Five, panj. پنج. ۵.

 . . . 

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And taxi speak: turn right (dast-e-rast), turn left (dast-e-chap), go straight (mostaghim), go faster (zoot zoot) and stop (vâysâ).

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At 16, my mind was a sponge capable of absorbing much more than it knew what to do with and eventually I learned to speak Farsi well enough to converse with cabbies driving ubiquitous government-sponsored orange cabs throughout the city. The best part was that you could take an orange cab almost anywhere in the city for a few rials (mere pennies) back then. You just had to be careful not to get dropped off in an area where taxis did not run or you ended up hoofing it back to civilization. In addition to the orange cab, there were big lumbering blue taxis and private citizens would even give you a ride for a few rials too, sometimes in the bed of their beloved, strange-looking little Citroën pickup trucks, a wild way to travel the streets of Tehran.

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A few days after arriving in Tehran we enrolled in classes at Tehran American School and started pretending to learn stuff there, but the real learning experiences happened outside its stale, dank classrooms in the various districts of the city, especially the old districts in the southern side of Tehran. I played hooky a lot with classmates and alone without worries about truancy police catching me out, although I did have to be careful not to stay out after curfew for risk of being jailed by Iranian police. Being thrown in jail in Tehran was usually a one-way trip to nowhere good. I failed to get home before curfew one night after visiting a girlfriend at her house a few miles away from our house one evening, and while walking home I was detained for about an hour for questioning and general harassment by two Iraninan policemen. Scary.

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Overall, though, the six months I spent in Tehran were rewarding in the most unexpected ways. Our choir teacher, Janet Hartnell, hauled her class to Tehran University one day where a small rock band I was a member of performed Peace Train and Horse With No Name on stage there. When the curtain opened, a TV camera operator briskly wheeled his camera out on stage and pointed it directly at us. Somehow we managed to avoid freezing up from stage fright and rocked through both songs to the delight of a large Iranian audience of university students. We learned later that the performance had been beamed out live across the country on Iranian National TV.