Today marks the start of a long series of family visits. In the coming days I get to see many living rooms and get to drink countless cups of tea. I get to meet numerous aunts and uncles and an even larger number of cousins. The Persian language, Farsi, has an interesting way to indicate uncles and aunts. For example the uncle from Mother’s side of the family is called daee and the uncle from Father’s side amoo. Cousins are therefore the ‘daughter of daee’, the ‘son of amoo’ etc. In spite of that I still quickly lose track of who is who, and everybody has fun when Keyvan tries to explain the family relationships to me.

We spend the evening with Keyvan’s sister Shahin and her family. Keyvan grabs the chance to use his digital camera to ‘copy’ a lot of pictures in old photo albums. He does not own many family pictures himself, sinces when his parents’ house in Khoramshahr burnt down when the Iran-Iraq war started.