Piranshahr looked beautiful, covered by a thin layer of fog the next morning.
It wasn't too hard to motivate myself to leave the dirty mosaferkhaneh the next morning. On a previous occasion, in southern Iran, finding a mosaferkhaneh had been a God-send (or an Allah-send) as it saved me from having to use my tent in the wet. On that occasion, I had the one-room mosaferkhaneh all to myself.
A short ride 50km to Piranshahr over some slightly hilly terrain was over by lunchtime. Merging with the busier main highway before Piranshahr suggested that the route through Oshnavieh had been a good choice.
Via couchsurfing.com, I had found a host by the name of Salam Salimi in Piranshahr. He turned out to be a very friendly 29 year old jeweller, who had only created a profile on couchsurfing a few days earlier. Coincidently, he had met or hosted a few travellers I had met in Iran a few weeks earlier, including Lukas on a motorcycle and Gaetan on a bicycle.
Salam spoke English well and was keen to meet travellers, all of whom would be passing through Piranshahr to or from Iraq. I was introduced to his English teacher, and some very interesting conversations followed while having a stroll on a hill overlooking the town with a population of 40 thousand.
Apparently, Piranshahr had its own fair share of 'tycoons', ten to fifteen of them, who had been very successful in business and would occasionally take long business trips to China. Some of these tycoons had began taking English lessons but had dropped out due to their busy workloads. No matter, some attractive female translators would be awaiting them in China. Surprisingly, even Kurdish is spoken by some Chinese (ladies), as an Iraqi Kurd later told me, gleefully describing his sex escapeed with a Kurdish speaking Chinese girl during his recent business trip to China.
Also on discussion was the 'problem' of the desire for young men and women to be free to have relationships. It wasn't so much a problem that sexual relationships before marriage were illegal, for it was easy enough to find a discrete location. According to the English teacher, the problem was that most men then later expected their brides to be pure and clean. Apparently Tehran has overcome this problem of 'unreasonable expectation'. Numerous Iranians and Iraqis spoke about Tehran as THE place to go to meet a girl.
An invitation to a late night English lesson produced many questions about Australia, particularly about immigration. I've now become a little more experienced in dispelling the myths of living in Australia and living the 'good life'.
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