Stephen Orth - Couchsurfing in Iran - Revealing a Hidden World

I take a quick shower. One of the seldom expressed truths of couchsurfing is that, above all else, it is the activities that take place in the bathroom and all the associated collateral damage that can most easily sour relationships with hosts. Politeness, same wavelength, a particularly apt present—all for nothing when a guest blushingly announces that an emergency call to the plumber is required.

Nowhere else in a strange apartment lurk as many traps as in the bathroom. Idiosyncratic flushing devices, fittings that drop from walls, and rebellious shower heads/tap levers, just to mention a few of the harmless variations. Last year an Iranian host warned me on my arrival not to touch the warm water switch. There was something wrong with the cable, and within minutes a smoldering fire would result. (A thankfully never-posted online review: Thanks for the accommodation. Sorry again that I torched your apartment complex. The pancakes at breakfast were delicious .)

The differences in intercultural usage of toilets are also treacherous. In Iran squat toilets are standard, with a hose for cleaning purposes, which is usually on a small hook near the washbasin. Sometimes, next to it, there is a roll of toilet paper, sometimes not. Sometimes there’s a small garbage can nearby, sometimes not. At the entrance there is always a pair of flip-flops available as the floors are mostly wet in quite a number of places. A sociologist should research the behavior of a hundred western European test persons in such a toilet, just to see how many variations they could come up with for using the few available objects.

In some countries the paper can be flushed away, in others it belongs in the garbage can. Elsewhere, both are wrong, and the routine is to leave as little used toilet paper as possible in places where people might potentially see it. Iran belongs to the last category, which is why the hose usage should be practiced every day until perfected, and less and less additional paper is necessary. Mastery has been reached when public toilets, the highest level of difficulty (dirty, no paper, stink level—ammonia synthesis reactor), can be approached reasonably fearlessly. In most of them there aren’t even paper towels for the washbasins.

Maybe here I could mention a typical beginner’s mistake. A German friend, on returning from a trip to Iran, remarked that Iranian toilets were ideal places to train thigh muscles. Now, if the Iranians, Chinese, and Indians hadn’t learned, at the latest as three-year-olds, that the best method is to squat as low as possible, then they would all have thighs like weightlifters.

In Masoud’s bathroom there are two challenges. First, there is only a tiny hook on the wall for towel and clothes. This is fairly common in most Iranian households, and it doesn’t seem usual to hang anything in the bathroom except on the door handle. Second, the floor of the shower is level with the bathroom floor, so I unavoidably flood the bathroom, because the tiles are not sloped enough to channel the water into the toilet’s drainage system.

Probably it would have been okay to leave the bathroom with a couple inches of water on the ground. But as a guest you always want to do things particularly well. Unfortunately, there is no available equipment for mopping up water. And that is why if someone had opened the door, they would have found the following scene: a clumsy foreigner on all fours, with a towel wrapped around his waist and wearing the right flip-flop, balancing the naked left foot on the narrow doorstep, trying to guide the water toward the drain with the left flip-flop. I think my new BDSM friends from Tehran would have found it all stunningly humiliating.

MASOUD AND Igather our jackets and a bite to eat, then go with Saler to the main road to wait for Masoud’s “fishing buddy.” I suddenly notice that I’ve forgotten my headlamp, and Masoud gives me the keys to the apartment. I walk back, knock briefly, and enter to find on the spotted sofa a strange woman, in jogging pants, very pretty, and with the opulent hairstyle of a 1970s soul singer. She looks shocked, and in a split second I realize that I’m looking at the unveiled version of Mahbube 2. She looks totally different. I quickly duck behind the door. “Come in,” she says quickly, and I apologize profusely. She doesn’t seem very happy, and I hope that, at least partially, it is because of our fishing trip and not just my stupid faux pas.

Masoud’s friend Darius arrives somewhat late, with a backpack and fishing rod. He is roughly in his mid-fifties; has white hair, a white mustache, and black eyebrows; and can say guten Tag in German. We take a cab to the fishing port, driving to the end of a long pier. The man behind the steering wheel keeps asking whether this really is our destination. We climb over a few rocks, and Masoud and Darius prepare their rods.

“Bring a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” announces Masoud.

So he proceeds to teach me how to fish. Well, at least partly. My task for the night consists, after baiting the hook, of attaching a clasp with two small bells to the fishing rod. The ringing of the bells signals that the rod is bending significantly, indicating that a fish has probably fallen for the bait. Sometimes, however, a gust of wind is enough to create the sound.

While the two rods are jammed between rocks, and we wait for the jingling of bells, I ask Masoud where his perfect American accent comes from. “I’m a great fan of the American motivational speaker Anthony Robbins,” he replies. “Once I searched for his name on Skype and actually found someone. Not the right one, but I still wrote to him. Now we are friends, and I’ve practiced a lot of English with him.”

I’ve always understood night angling to be an activity where men keep the conversation to the essentials, contemplate the stars, the waves, life, and death, all while nipping at a hip flask every now and then. None of this applies to our first hours on the shore. Initially, I had considered Masoud to be not all that talkative, but now he opens up.

He tells of his half-hour online session that he booked with one of Anthony Robbins’s assistants. “He asked me what my aim in life was, and I said I wanted to be a millionaire. He said: ‘That’s the wrong approach—simply formulating an aim. You have to focus on yourself first. Do you know any flight dispatchers or part-time English teachers who are millionaires? No. Then you have to change something in your life, found a company, for instance.’” Masoud already has an idea for a business, and soon he is planning to move to Shiraz to set up a language café for Iranians and foreigners.

“And become a millionaire—with a café?” I ask.

“No, not with that. But it’s all about having an aim in life. For example, my grandma is eighty-five and buys enough stock of some provisions for ten years. She will probably live that long simply because she is firmly convinced of it.”

Masoud recommends some books to me: Think and Grow Rich , [1] Hill, Napoleon. Think and Grow Rich . New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2011. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change , [2] Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. and Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny ! [3] Robbins, Anthony. Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny ! New York: Summit Books, 1991. He has absorbed many of the principles described in them and uses them daily.