My Uber driver was an Iranian and very much interested in talking, so I got an -- not "the," "an" -- Iranian perspective on the current situation with all that. He was actually visiting Iran during the last round of anti-regime protests before the US attacked.
Summary: He believes the higher estimates of people murdered by the regime forces. He said that the last part of his visit was mostly consumed by helping friends and acquaintances to the hospital after they were injured in the protests. He doesn't like the war, but he does hate the regime -- he regards the Revolutionary Guards as murderous thugs and the theocratic politicians as corrupt oligarchs (and wonders why his country calls itself a "republic" when it has a "supreme leader"). He doesn't particularly like "Crown Prince" Reza Pahlavi himself, but found that the guy is more popular there right now than he would have expected.
Very nice guy, and a live-action reminder that just because someone is "from" Place X it does not mean that that person's ideas and observations will conform to whatever we think we "know" about Place X and the people who live there.
Once in town, I met an online acquaintance whom I know from another job and attended the Friday sermon and afternoon prayer at his mosque with him. While I've known Muslims, have been "around" Muslim communities, etc., that's the first time I've been invited into a Muslim house of worship. Quite interesting.
One thing I found particularly interesting was that the sermon, apart from the scripture being the Quran and many references being to Muhammad and his companions, etc., it could just as easily have been preached from a Protestant pulpit. To inadequately summarize, it was about "thinking with one's heart," treating people well, and leaving harsh judgments of one's opponents to a higher power.
Another thing I found interesting was the obvious size of the Muslim community in the Tampa area. This is not the only mosque in the area, but its campus (including an associated K-12 school) was easily as large as what I'd expect to be a Catholic equivalent in, say, Boston.
At a rough guess, there were at least 200 men (quantity of women unknown -- there were a lot, but when they were together for prayer they were not visible from the male area) attending prayers on a Friday afternoon (for religious purposes, think of Friday as the equivlant of Christian Sunday).
After the service, my host and a friend of his took me out for an incredible Mediterranean meal (hummus, tabouleh and a giant "meat grill" with vegetables and rice all baked into a light crust).
Then the three of us drank and talked at a local Yemeni coffeehouse. There are several in the area, and apparently they do well for several reasons. One is that Starbucks seems to have got itself sideways with the "pro-Palestinian" movement. Another is that Yemen is smack-dab in the middle of the area where coffee first became a thing and they do it incredibly well. I had Mufawar, a fine-grind coffee spiced with cardamom, because it's served with cream. The basic "Yemeni coffee," the barista told me, doesn't work with cream because the particular spice blend tends to curdle it.
A fine time, a very generous and engaging host, and then I met with Tamara after her conference ended and we drove back home.
The part about not missing living in a major urban metro is, as you might guess, the traffic. Over many years in St. Louis, we got used to racing all over various bumper-to-bumper road networks, but when you don't do it every day anymore, you understand how nerve-wracking that really is. Purely from a driving standpoint, we were glad to get back to "country highways" with reasonable numbers of fast-moving vehicles.
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