My uncle Ben (yes, just like the rice) lived in Sonoma for part of his life. He had a little house on the farmland with a barn, a horse, and a dog. When I was eight-years-old, I had my birthday party at his place and I remember asking his wife (my aunt) Katya how early they get up in the morning to feed all the animals.

“We rise with the rooster,” she told me. I never forgot that answer because I thought it was so cool that they didn’t set alarm clocks; there wasn’t a set time to get out of bed. It was just whenever the rooster felt like waking up was when they’d get up. Later, I learned that the rooster, like clockwork, would cock-a-doodle-doo every morning at the break of dawn. In Sonoma, that usually meant around 5 or 6 in the morning.

Which is precisely what time I woke up my first morning in Shiraz, to the ear-piercingly loud “cock-a-doodle-doo” call of a rooster. It sounded like it was in the room, it was so resonant. I woke up and stepped out onto the balcony to find the lil bastard and, breathing in the Shiraz air, I noticed it wasn’t as polluted as in Tehran. In fact, the air smelled slightly sweet. Or it might have been the aroma of the sweet breakfast spread that was awaiting me.

Yeah, I awakened to quite the feast…

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Neda and Solmaz, my Shirazi sisters, prepared the breakfeast because they’re the sweetest girls in all of existence.

Afterwards, Hamid agha arranged for the three of us girls to head to the traditional bazaar by getting a family friend — Moshtabah — to be our driver and bodyguard. He was super nice, protective, considerate, and accommodating. Always there with cold bottled water, gum, food (he went to the ice scream store TWICE in one day for me) and helped us navigate around town. The people I met in Shiraz were some of the kindest, most warm-hearted people I’ve met in my entire life.

Moshtabah

More pictures of Shiraz to come. For now, here’s a vid of us driving to Bazaar Vakil