Photos from my time in Iran, 2017

Lately I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s lively and well-written biography of Mark Twain, one of my personal heroes. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,” Twain wrote in 1869. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

With that spirit in mind, and of course with current events in mind as well, I thought I’d share some photographs I took during my visit to Iran in September of 2017. I was there to attend the wedding of my sister-in-law. Afterwards, we took the opportunity to travel with my wife’s family in a big loop down from Tehran to the historical capital of Isfahan, then southeast to Shiraz (Iran’s wine co…