Here comes winter - and the steamy fish

If someone asks me which weather I like the most - I would not hesitate to name winters. Ask me why so - well if you really asked, let me tell you why.

Winters bring with it all types of steamy fish that one does not care much about the rest of the year. And what could be more fun in sitting out in cold night with a freshly baked fish right in front of you with its steamy aroma making the night romantic and memorable. But that is not all.

If a bonfire is nearby, sit close to it and get a warmth permeating through your body from the side of the fire - while the other side of the body is still chilly and cold. And then come the steaming halwa of carrot or dall that cements the joy of the night forever.

Photos: Jalal HB

In winters, one must keep oneself warm lest many 'traditional' winter ailments come attacking. And one of the best antidote against winters cold is eating fish - and lot of fish before the winters pass away, unfortunately these do so very quickly.

Those living in Lahore are lucky as there are lot of places in Lahore where one can buy quality fish. Sardar and Ibrahim are to names of Lahore that make best fish, served sizzling hot if you want to eat right at the shop. And sitting outside in the cold, eating steaming hot fish has no parallel. I you haven't tried this, do it this winter - it will be a lifetime memory.

Although I have varied experiences of eating fish, a night at Ramsar, Iran is unforgettable. I was attending a course in Iran in awhile ago and my neighbour who had a villa in Ramsar, invited me there. So when we had a winter break, I packed up my small Renault car with my family and went to Ramsar. Remember Ramsar? Ramsar is located right on the Caspian Sea and it was here that the first and inaugural meeting of RCD (Regional Cooperation for Development) between Pakistan, Iran and Turkey was held.

And it was here one night that my Iranian host told me that he would be serving us freshly baked Sturgeon fish, which was otherwise forbidden to be caught for it is only used for high quality caviare.  And at night right there in his drawing room on the well lit wood in the fire place, he put the skewered Sturgeon fish and served us sizzling hot. And I can only tell you that that was the best fish I had ever eaten.

Why eat fish? Well food experts and doctors say that fish is high in protein, vitamins, minerals, and omega 3 fatty acids, which are found lacking in most diets, and can reduce some problems associated with PMS, memory loss, cardiovascular functions, colon cancer, and stroke. The tissues of oily fish provide fish oil which contains the omega-3 fatty acids, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), precursors to eicosanoids (believe me it is hard to pronounce such medical terms – so I write exactly as I found out) that reduce inflammation throughout the body and are therefore recommended by experts for a healthy diet.

Now while eating fish is beneficial for health, the kind of fish we eat at Sardars and Ibrahims or anywhere else which is heavily deep fried in vegetable oil is certainly not the kind of fish we should be eating. and I have seen people eating the deep fried fish in kilos, am not joking. These fish friendly people, specially in Lahore, sit outside in the December nights and the 'in flow' of fish continues in consignments of kilo in succession.

We need to eat fish, preferably steamed with least oil applied. While I was in Iran, my land lady would often make the steamed fish and I tell you that nothing tastes like a steamed fish. So when eating fish, try to eat steamed fish, but certainly not in kilos. However, one should eat it often 2-3 times a week in winters.

One should also be mindful of type of sea fish as some of these contain higher amounts of mercury like Tilefish, swordfish, king mackerel and shark and should not be consumed at all. However, Shrimp, salmon, pollocks, canned light tuna, shrimp and catfish contain lower levels of mercury, but should not be eaten more than 12 ounces in a week.

So lets be healthy by eating fish this winter steamed not deep fried!!

(Improvement on an earlier post 'Winter and Fish go together')

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Landmarks and Parks of Tehran

I stopped short of discussing landmarks and the beautiful parks of Iran in my last post as it was getting out of my hand. I never wanted to prolong it any further, lest the interest of the readers was lost.

At that time, the best landmark of Tehran was the Azadi Square (top right in the photo). Actually its name was Shahyad Tower, when it was built to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the once great Persian Empire in the Shah of Iran’s reign. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, its name was changed to Azadi (freedom) Tower. Beautifully lit at night, it can be seen from miles apart. Whenever driving at night, it always served as beacon for direction keeping. Now I hear that another impressive tower by the name of Milad Tower has been added to Tehran’s skyline, which overshadows the Azadi Tower to an extent. But I really cannot comment on it any further as I haven’t seen it except in photographs, in which it looks impressive and pragmatic.

Apart from this, there are many museums and cultural centers. A number of erstwhile royal palaces have now been converted into tourists sites (though expensive items, paintings and furniture has been removed) and are centre of attraction of anyone visiting Tehran, and so for us as well. These palaces included the Golestan Palace, Niavran Palace and Saadabad Palace. The famous Peacock Throne of the kings is placed in the Golestan Palace. We also “roamed” in the vast green lawns of Niavran Palace, where once tourists like us could not even dream of entering. Beside palaces, there are a number of museums that include the Carpet Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Quran Museum and Painting Museum. Carpets are the specialty of Iran and one can see the most expensive, exotic, minutely woven and ultra big carpets displayed in the Carpet Museum, which was closer to the Park-e-Laleh. The Art Museum had some masterpieces from Picasso and Van Gogh, said to have been chosen by Empress Farah Deeba.

Teheran has wide roads and “Utu-baans – a Persian translation of the German Autobahn.” Beside many others, there were two that would interest us Pakistanis. These were the Bozarg Rah-e-Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Muhammad Ali Jinnah Expressway – the founder of Pakistan), and Iqbal Lahori Street in Eastern Tehran (the national poet of Pakistan Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal had his initial poetic work written in Persian and is still revered as a great poet in Iran and his poetry is taught in schools and colleges. Although born in city of Sialkot, he had his higher education from Government College Lahore, where he was on the faculty later on as well. Perhaps for this association, he is known as Iqbal Lahori in Iran).

If I am allowed to say that Tehran is nothing without its parks, I may not be very wrong. Besides Park-e-Laleh (that I mentioned in my previous post) there are more than 800 small, medium and large scale parks spread all over Tehran, of which Park-e-Millat, Park-e-Niavran and Jamshediah Park are the major ones. I along with my family was a regular visitor of Park-e-Laleh and Park-e-Millat.

Almost on every Sunday, like most of the Tehranites, I would also take my family to either of these two parks to spend the day. And the best thing was that despite being visited by thousands of visitors, there would be no litter left behind by anyone. That’s something unbelievable. There were some fine restaurants in these parks where one could enjoy the traditional Iranian cuisines. Park-e-Millat is the largest of all parks in Tehran. In the imperial times, Park-e-Millat was known as the Shahansahi Park (the Imperial Park). There is a big lake which looks majestic at sun sets, with the reflection of Alborz Mountains. There were boats to enjoy the lake rides. The park has elaborate amusement facilities for the visitors which includes skating lanes, snack bars and coffee shops and a small area with birds in cages. There also is a horseracing club adjacent to the park. I am told that the park has now home to the first musical fountains in Tehran, established in 2008, like that of the Dubai Mall.

Closer to Park-e-Millat is located the Tehran international Fair grounds, where exhibitions of international level are held. I once went with a friend, a geologist from Pakistan who later died in a helicopter crash in Iran, to a book fair and was fascinated to see the interest shown by the Iranians in the books and other AV equipment and aids.

Sandwiched between the Carpet and Contemporary art Museums, Park-e-Laleh (pictured top and bottom left above) was more frequented by us as it was closer to our house. We would walk down to the place in the evenings to enjoy the lush green park with a huge fountain in its centre. There was a Kangaroo at one of its entrances, which is centre of attraction of my sons. No sooner it started to become visible, both of them would leave us and rush towards it and sit in its lap. Chalo Kababs used to be our favourite dinner, followed by delicious coffee ice-cream. On our first snow fall, we rushed to the park and enjoyed the snow fall right there in the open. I would never forget that (though on our way back we found our car to be covered with a heavy sheet of snow and took quite a while to remove it and drive back home).

Well, that’s all for now – but my description of Tehran is far from over. I would write more about people of Tehran in particular and that of Iran in general besides describing the Shehr-e-Baazi (the Sports City) in my next post.

Related Reading:

My memories of Iran - Tehran

Isphahan - Nisf-e-Jehan

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My memories of Iran – Tehran (Part – I)

I wrote about Isphahan awhile ago, but my journey began from Tehran where I along with my family and two other “students” landed at Meherabad International Airport of Tehran on one bright September morning, although it didn’t have to do anything with the September Morning sung by one of my favourite singers Neil Diamond. We were received by a senior representative from the Pakistani Embassy and lodged temporarily in one Hotel Atlas. Not very impressive, but was easy on our pockets as we had to pay the hotel rent till we found an apartment for our year long stay in Iran.

No sooner did we reach the hotel and dumped our stuff, we were out on the streets to watch the hustle and bustle of Tehran. As per one explanation, the word “The-Ran” means Bottom (The) of the Mountain Slope (Ran) and surely it is located at the foothills of towering Mt Alborz. Tehran is quite a big city, developed with wide roads, buses, cars and lot of people, both men and women. Cars weren’t impressive as majority was the indigenously made vintage shaped. A few imported cars could be seen on roads, but mostly the cars were homemade. In the initial few months, till we started to get our salary, we travelled on taxis, both official and non-officials. Well official taxis meant hired taxis as anywhere in the world. But unofficial taxis were just like “Sawari Tonga” of Lahore where you along with others could share the same taxi till your destiny at very nominal charges. Otherwise the official taxis were very expensive and if taken exclusively were called “Darbast (if I remember correctly after some twenty years now).

We stayed in the hotel for a week or so and then shifted to a two-bedroom apartment in an area called Amirabad, a few streets behind the Pakistani Embassy. Now I hear the embassy has shifted to another location. Our apartment was in the middle of a three storied building, with our landlords (or may I say the landlady as she was more dominant than the lord) in the ground floor and their daughter and her family on the top floor. Well our landlady was “quite’ a lady and kept us in a strict discipline for the entire year.

I, along with the other two students from Pakistan, would go to the military college in the college car early in the morning and came back by three in the afternoon. And then the next duty with the family would commence to end late a t night, wandering in markets and parks. Our best place to roam and shop was the Shahrah-e-Wali Asr (the erstwhile Pehalvi Avenue of Imperial Iran days – the photo at the bottom above) and Al-Quds super store, followed by the most expensive Maidan-e-Mohsani shopping malls. Closer to our house was one of the grand parks of Tehran, Park-e-Laleh (The Tulip Park). My children would enjoy rides and ice creams while we would eat “Chalo Kababs (a plate of boiled rice with two seekh kababs).” These were my elder son’s favourite. Murgh Sokhari (perhaps the Kentucky Chicken previously) was another treat to eat. This eatery used to be so full, that customers were issued with token to wait for their turn. Later we found a pizza shop in one f the posh localities of Tehran; I have forgotten the name over these years. We would go upstairs, so that our pizzas could be “transported” in a tiny lift from ground floor to the first floor – a delight for my children as they would stand in front of the lift to come up and bring to us our sizzling pizzas.

It was hard for us to find bread (double roti and roti/chapatti) in Tehran as bread (nan-e-farangi) was almost alien in Iran. It was with great difficulty that we found a shop which sold these and had to travel almost 35 kilometers round trip to get these. As for chapati like bread, we had to get used to the local bread available from bakeries only. We could not get flour (aata) from any source as it is not a custom to bake breads at home. There used to be two lines at the bakery: one for those wanting a couple of bread and the other for anything more. Since most in Tehran were working hands, they would prefer buying in bulk to last for a few days.

There are a number of site seeing places around Tehran. The best perhaps is the Mt Damavand and its ski resort Dizin (centre photo above). In the winters, the entire Tehran would converge on Dizin to enjoy skiing and sizzling hot food in a wooden restaurant atop the Mt Alborz. There were chair lifts and cable cars to transport tourists from car park to the skiing resort. Once atop the top, one would shiver with extreme cold – but nobody cared at all, rather had fun. My elder son was one of the people enjoying the most. He would lie down on slopes and slide on the snow during the entire time while we were up there.

There are a lot of landmarks and parks in Tehran that attract tourist attraction. It would require another post to cover details, which I will do shortly.

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Isphahan –Nisf-e-Jahan

There is a saying in Persian, “Agar Lahoor na bood, Isphahan nisf-e-jahan bood,” meaning if there was no Lahore (Pakistan), Isphahan would have been half of the world. I don’t know how far this saying is true, but those who haves seen Lahore, the show case of Mugul architecture, and then visited Isphahan, would be able to correlate the cultural and architectural richness of both the cities.

I heard this saying from my landlord when I had gone to Tehran, Iran for a yearlong study stint. Being a Lahorite, this saying promoted me to visit the nisf-e-jahan on the first available opportunity. So when our college was closed for a week on a mid tern break, I dumped my family into our Saipa (the Iranian version of Renault) and headed towards Isphahan.

Isphahan, located some 340 kilometeres south of Tehran, is the second largest city of Iran and was at its peak of development during the 11-17th centuries. The city is famous for its Islamic architecture with the Persian blend, besides beautiful mosques, palaces, bridges, gardens, monuments (dating back to 1000 BC) and bazaars.

The road was not very good, but the excitement to see nisf-e-jahan made it meaningless for us. When we reached the city, we found it very friendly and attractive, the same way when a visitor enters Lahore. We booked ourselves in a hotel and immediately went out for sightseeing.

Since it was about evening, we dashed to the Pol-e- See-o-say (33 arched bridge – bottom left above) on the Zayandeh Rood (Zayandeh River – river in Persian is called Rood). And believe me one is spellbound to see this beautiful scene when the sun is setting and the lights under the arches are switched on. We sat on one bank and kept watching the reflections of the bridge and its lights in the river for almost an hour – awe stricken. I cannot really do justice by explain the site, nor would a photograph of the bridge. You got to be there to see it for yourself. Beside Pol-e-See-o-say, there are ten more bridges on the river including Pol-e-Jolbee, Pol-e-Khajoo and Pol-e-Shehrestan. Although we also visited Pole-e-Khajoo, we found Pol-e-see-o-say to be more beautiful and a marvel of architecture.

Next day, we visited the Naghsh-e-Jahan Square, and spent almost our entire day there. The square is said to be the biggest square in the world and its magnitude stands true to this fact. It is a rectangular square, if I remember correctly, with a complex of mosques towards east, “Imarat-e-Ali Qapoo” – the building of Ali Qapoo to its opposite and a huge bazaar on its third end, where once you enter, you are lost into a unique world for as long as you are inside it. There are shops of every size and shape, selling traditional Persian rugs, carpets, jewelry, utensils, decoration pieces and lots of eatables. “Gaz” is one of the famous sweet dishes of Isphahan, rich in pistachio and almond kernels and saffron. One, who misses to eat this, loses an opportunity of having tasted a heavenly thing. We bought tins of rounded Gaz, besides eating many there. We also had the famous Beryooni (made from minced mutton and lungs and eaten with a special bread) for out lunch under the shade outside the bazaar from a small shop. It was very tasty. One can have a ride on the horse driven carriages around the square.

We also went up the Ali Qapoo building (top left above), located to the west of the square opposite to the grand Sheikh Lutf Ullah mosque, by climbing its narrow stairs. The seven storied building provides a panoramic view of the square. The building has seven floors and the beauty of the architecture is that each story is accessed by a different set of stairs. We could not go to the grand Sheick Lutf Ullah mosque (top right above) as it was closed for maintenance. The buildings around the square are a true reflective of Persian and Islamic architecture and the entire complex has been included as a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO.

On the third and last day in Isphahan, we went to see the Chehl Satoon (Forty Pillars) Palace (bottom right above). This is a beautiful pavilion in the middle of a lush green park, decorated with countless colourful flowers. In the olden days of the kings, the pavilion was a venue for princely receptions. Our next destination was the Chaharbagh (Four Gardens). Unfortunately, we went at a time when the venue was closed. I made repeated requests to the watchman there that we had come from Pakistan and that that was our last day in the city and we be allowed in. But he wasn’t impressed and did not allow us entry. So we missed the place, which is said the motivation for building the Champs Elysees of Paris. The four gardens are spread in a six kilometres long corridor like shape connecting the north and south of Isphahan. Due to shortage of time, we also missed a beautiful Hasht Behest (eight Heavens) Palace and Abbasi Hotel.

We left Isphahan with a very heavy heart as there was much more to be seen. I wish I had time to see this beautiful city in all its grandeur and might. And let me confess it really is nisf-e-jahan.

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