Happy New Year! Sal-e No Mobarak! Today is the start of the Persian New Year 1388 - which occurred at 7.44am Washington DC time, 3.14pm Tehran time to be precise. This is always a huge cause for celebration in my book because it gives me a chance to start again with my New Year's resolutions, which have usually lapsed pretty significantly by mid-March. I wrote about the origins of NowRuz (and my goldfish anxiety) last year so won't repeat it all again now
as you can read about it here. However, I am delighted to say that we have our own
Haft Sin table this year and the local toy shop provided a solution to the live goldfish issue I have been struggling with since the rather unfortunate incident in Tehran involving our cat Habe (yes,
the same furtive feline who is currently residing in France).
We held our own NowRuz celebrations in D.C. earlier this week with a
Chahar Shanbe Soori party that proved a great excuse to get together with friends from Iran old and new. Many of our friends who were posted to Tehran at the same time are now in Washington too (in fact, more than a dozen of us have relocated to D.C. which must have the Iranian conspiracy theorists rubbing their hands in glee) so this was a wonderful reunion and a chance to share some very happy memories of our days in Iran. We enjoyed a Persian feast prepared by a local Iranian caterer who, in a true flashback to our time in Tehran, arrived an hour late with twice as much food as we needed and some fantastically inventive excuses (the name of the roads around here have changed, the map was wrong). However, the
ghormeh sabzi and
kabab koobideh were so authentically delicious that all was eventually forgiven.
The climax of the evening was the fire-jumping - a NowRuz ritual that dates from Zoroastrian times. We are pretty sure that it is illegal to have a burning bonfire in your garden in D.C. (if you're not allowed to hang the laundry out to dry, then we thought it unlikely we would be allowed to light open fires on the patio) and were actually quite worried that the neighbours would call the fire brigade and we would be deported in diplomatic disgrace. However, all went well and here are the photos to prove it:
And whilst the entire US-based Iran-focused diplomatic corps was busy with our fire-jumping frolics, President Obama was hard at work composing this NowRuz message to the Iranian people, optimistically title 'A New Year, A New Beginning'. What a fantastic move. (Transcript is here).
And to all our Iranian friends: Eid-e shoma mobarak indeed!