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Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

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The cavernous Imam Khomeini airport seemed almost deserted. I disembarked from the plane, retrieved my bag and passed through customs control without incident. But I had a lingering doubt in my mind — would there be someone to meet me at the airport? I had been told by the astronomer who had invited me that there would, but the secretary who booked my flight never mentioned this to me. There would be someone there, right? I had no map; “Google maps” for Tehran shows the intricate, sprawling mess of Tehrani streets as a single crossroads. No data.

In the end I need not have worried. As soon I left the baggage area I was met by a smiling pot-bellied man holding up a big card with ‘Dr. McCracken’ written on it in 40-point type. This was my driver to the institute. Hello welcome! Where are you from? Well, I am from Ireland, but I live in Paris. Ireland! I worked in England for two months, in London, with my brother. (We were walking down the echoing empty halls of IKA. We took the lift. My driver talking into his mobile phone. He passes me his mobile phone.) Here is my brother, Amir, he says, I speak to the voice on the telephone: Hello! How are you? Are you in London? No, I am in Tehran. We can meet! My brother will give you my number, he says. Nice to speak to you, I reply. Thank you! I hand back the mobile phone. These people like to speak — and to speak to foreigners!

In the taxi, we rolled through a maze of empty roads and autoroutes in the middle of what as far as I could tell was open desert. Through the window, I saw a lone planet and the moon’s pale disk low on the horizon following our taxi faithfully towards the city. It was around ten o’clock in the evening.

By ten thirty, soon after I had seen the first few buildings of Tehran, we had stopped: gridlock. Our taxi idled in heavy fumes of very incompletely combusted petroleum products, and I reluctantly rolled up my window, because the night air was pleasantly warm. I was beginning to get an inkling of Tehrani traffic. Beyond the cars I could see a maze of buildings most of which seemed to have been built in the last fifty years or so, but even so there was still that wonderful feeling of strangeness that always comes after an aeroplane flight to a country you have never been to before. In only five hours, everything changes.

After another half an hour or so, a gleaming, glittering tower appeared on the horizon. From a disk near the gracefully tapering peak needles of light shone and flickered. Was this the Iranian Tour Eiffel? My taxi driver became more and more exited. Very nice, very nice, beautiful, he muttered to himself repeatedly under his breath, all the while craning his neck to see the tower, like an excited child approaching the north pole just before Christmas. There is a very big party there tonight, he told me. Tonight is opening night. Then I realised we were actually driving right towards the tower. We passed the security barrier, drove to the foot of this immense luminous tower. Here is my brother! my driver exclaimed. I shook hands with small man in a dark suit. Hello! I said, Nice to meet you. I won’t take up your time, he told me. Welcome. If you need to contact me, here is my card. Have you eaten? He will take you to a restaurant. I thanked him, but I wanted to see my bed before my dinner. And we left the tower, and in an another half an hour I had arrived at the IPM.

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

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I’m now a good five thousand kilometers to the east of Paris, in the Iranian capital city, Tehran. Tehran! I am here to teach at a school in observational astronomy. The Iranians have ambitions to build a three-metre class telescope, but almost no-one here has any experience with real data; most astronomy in either the hard-maths variety of theoretical cosmology or observations of nearby stars using detectors at least a generation out of date. So a change of culture is needed, really; modern observational astronomy with modern detectors and modern data reduction software. And no matter there is no telescopes just yet: there are gigabytes of data freely available over the internet — the only problem is downloading it. Despite the fact that the IPM (Insitute for Physics and Mathematics, where the school is being held) has amongst the fastest network connection in the country, we struggle get above a few hundred kb/second. But then I am used to my office in Paris not far from the centre of Renater, the French networking agency, so I am a bit spoiled. I will be spending almost two weeks in Tehran before flying to Shiraz for a few days.

So that is why I am here, but I didn’t talk about how I got here — at the very comfortable IPM guest house, from where I am writing these words. Well — by aeroplane of course. Iran Air run a direct flight from Paris Orly to Tehran twice a week. I thought for about two seconds about Nicolas Bouvier and his trip to Tehran from Geneva in his Fiat Tupelino — but i wanted to arrive this year at least, and I had sadly sold my opel ascona many years ago.

The aircraft cabin seemed modern at first: the plane’s age was revealed by an ancient in-flight entertainment system. I was reassured by the presence of it seemed at least half a dozen airline pilots in the seats in front of me. I felt strangely relieved that there was no useless in-flight magazine that I would waste my time idly flipping through. I watched attentively (at first) the in-flight film, in Farsi with English subtitles, but as the flight wore on it became harder and harder to follow. (After the extremely tedious ‘man from London’ by Bela Tarr which I subjected Marie-Laure to last weekend I felt I could sit through anything). It seemed to be the story of a young girl, a psychology student, who works with old people and who becomes intrigued by the painting of a veiled woman who may or may not be connected with one of her patients. The film shows many broad tree-lined boulevards, elegant buildings and also features a lot of driving (something normal in Tehran — as I am sure I will describe in the next few days). Noticing the odd colour cast of the film (surely a feature of the in-flight entertainment system), the cars that most people seemed to be driving and all the chunky cream-coloured plastic telephones everyone used, I was convinced that the ‘action’ of the film took place sometime in the 1970s — until an e-mail address was exchanged, and I realized that we were really some time in the last decade or so. But — as I said — my attention wandered. This I realised was partly because of the English translations (and partly because of the extremely wooden acting), which seemed to be almost transliterations more than translations. Given the very different word order in Farsi, almost everyone spoke like they were reciting lines of poems, with the subject buried at the end of each sentence. But very soon after we arrived in Tehran, at the Imam Khomeini Airport.

Descending beneath Paris: second part, at minus 25

Descending beneath Paris: second part, at minus 25

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The first impressions deep underground are always the same: it’s damp, cold and dark. Wellington boots are an essential element of clothing. The tunnels are very close to the level of the water table, and flooding is frequent. In certain tunnels the water level can easily reach waist level, although thankfully we avoided those. The water is a silty white colour, full of limestone dust.

But passing through the hole, further into the tunnel, you should pause and look around: the surface of the walls are smooth and well-preserved. Here, we were at almost the southern limit of this particular segment of the network, and we would have several kilometers to march before we got to where we wanted to be — near Denfert Rochereau, underneath my house, near the Observatory.

The underground passageways for the most part follow faithfully the above-ground streets, as a consequence of an arcane part of French law: anyone who owns a bit of land on the surface also owns what is below. So no boring tunnels under other people’s houses: the tunnels would have to be where the streets already were. At times, this leads to some strange effects, as the tunnels in places were constructed hundreds of years ago and were given the names of above-ground streets which no longer exist, or which do exist but which changed their names.

We followed one such street, the Avenue D’Orlean, which is now the Avenue du General le Clerc at street level. Walking down the narrow tunnel of course I kept my eyes to the ground but my friend leading us was inspecting carefully every inch of tunnel and ceiling. He showed me an inscription on the wall, some ancient graffiti — someone had scrawled “la republique ou la mort” — ancient revolutionary graffiti dating back a century or two. Above ground, everything changes, but down here at minus twenty five metres below, all is frozen preserved, perhaps like astronaut footsteps on the surface of the moon.

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We made a tour of a few of the more well known sites in the 14th — old rooms packed to the ceiling with ancient human bones, student wall murals dating back a few decades, plaques proudly announcing to a public that hasn’t been down here for a century or more the names of the engineers who built the walls and tunnels and pillars absolutely essential to keep the new Paris metro disappearing into a large hole. For almost any construction work to be carried out in Paris one of the first things one must do is find out just what is exactly beneath your feet, and build down there, too.

We emerged into the fading evening light after spending around eight hours underground. It is always strange be once more in a world with light and colour where there are trees which move in soft summer breezes and one can hear the distant sounds of the city, birds singing, people talking, cars in the street. All so different from the silent, dark, frozen parallel Paris which we left behind but which remains very close…

Descending beneath Paris: first part, some history

Descending beneath Paris: first part, some history

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A few weeks ago I once again descended deep beneath the city, twenty-five meters below ground, to visit the carrieres of Paris. It’s my third trip there now, but this time I was in the company of a expert, a specialist in the subject, a man who has made his life’s work the study of every kind of man-made tunnel and cave. He is the co-editor of one of the reference works on the subject, and so it was something of a privilege to make this trip. A friend of a friend introduced me to him, and on one fine warm Sunday afternoon we left behind a pleasant Parisian summer afternoon (elegant well-dressed people drinking espressos on terraces, summer sunshine illuminating parks and beautiful broad boulevards, that kind of thing) to descend into the dark and the cold of the Parisian Carrieres.

Some history: there are hundred of kilometers of tunnels here in southern Paris, many of them centuries old. In medieval times, limestone was quarried extensively from deep underground, leaving behind many caves and tunnels. Later, in the 18th century, as the city limits rapidly expanded, suddenly buildings were collapsing, holes opening up in the street. These ancient underground caves had collapsed, the earth had subsided. No-one expected the ground to carry all this weight, after all it was open countryside when they were quarried. This was the origin of the ‘inspection des carrieres’ (IDC) who joined up all these underground caves and quarries with tunnels, who drew up detailed maps of where everything was. In Paris, the owner of a patch of ground is also the owner of everything down to the level of the carrieres; almost the first operation in any building work here is assessing how solid the ground below actually is — and reinforcing it if it isn’t, which can be expensive.

Over the years, many of the tunnels have been closed off or filled in, but in large part the network still exists, and inspections are still carried out regularly by the IDC- but of course, they are not the only people down there. At one time, almost every public building in Paris boasted a set of staircases going down, an entrance underground; today, most of these entrances have been closed off. But a few still exist…There are manhole covers in the street which go down, but these are for the large part welded shut; but every so often, one will open; some work needs to be done, the manhole cover is opened and …

There is one way to enter, one way to descend, that has always remained open, more or less. At one time, a railway followed the outskirts of Paris, an outer circle: it was called ‘le petit ceinture’, or ‘little belt’. There are parts of the railway that still exist today, although no passengers have crossed the platforms for perhaps a half-century. In one location, not far from where I write this, a tunnel takes the abandoned railway lines underneath the current tracks of the line four metro. In the middle of this cold, damp tunnel (it is actually underneath the “parc montsouris”) there is a hole in the wall — that hole leads to the carrieres.