One Year in Iran: Why I’m Here. How I feel. What I’ve learned.
Iran. What comes to your mind when somebody mentions this country?
I’ll really leave this question up to you to think about.
Personally, I didn’t really have very much of an idea what to expect from Iran before I came here. I only knew what we read in the media every single day. And, on the other side, some vague descriptions about ordinary life from some Iranian friends that I had in Australia.
To be honest, I moved to Iran for simple reasons. It was the time after the nuclear deal, and I was hoping for a lot of German businesses to enter the Iranian market soon.
Other than that, I also had just spend 2 1/2 years in Australia, and I wanted another experience of moving to a country with a culture completely different from the German one.
And, I thought that if I could handle moving to Iran, then I could handle moving anywhere in the world as Iran — I thought Iran was as far away culturally from Europe as it could get.
Lastly, I also wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of learning a completely new language other than English. After all, I had failed relatively badly at my first attempt in Indonesia to learn the local language after 3 years of living there. At best, after 3 years I had reached lower intermediate level, perhaps even lower than that.
So how do I feel now after one year of being here?
To be upfront: none of the potential fears that you might have had when hearing that I moved to Iran are even remotely necessary.
The hospitality of Iranians especially towards European foreigners is world-class. I hardly had any negative experience with anyone here until now, except perhaps with taxi drivers who wanted to screw me for money.
As such, the reality of what I will describe to you here in this article is pretty boring.
Living in Iran is just like living in any other country. If you had any Indiana-Jones type of adventure in mind, then I have to disappoint you completely.
I am spending most of my time every day working in front of the laptop. Other than that, I spend time with my partner and friends in cafes, museums, nature, theater and so on and so forth. Just like anyone else.
So, now that we’ve got that out of the world, let’s get a bit deeper into my feelings about Iran here.
Perhaps you would’ve thought that the limitations on things like alcohol would have bothered me. Well, in my case that’s quite irrelevant since I didn’t drink in the first place.
But there are indeed some issues that sometimes make life a bit frustrating here. One of them is that if you want to have any chances in the Iranian market, you really are forced to live in Tehran.
And Tehran is not really a pleasant place to live in. The pollution and the heavy traffic are one thing. But the complete lack of access to nature is what really gets me.
I catch myself staring out of the window while working or during my Farsi class just to look at the few trees standing in front of the window sometimes.
Tehran really makes you deprived of nature, even though it has beautiful parks. Nature in Tehran feels so… artificial.
It’s no real surprise then that most Iranians regularly drive up to the north of Iran, where the landscape is quite different from the rest in the sense that it is much greener.
The second point is the bureaucracy in Iran. Everything works incredibly slow, and you spend a lot of time being sent from one government agency to the other, partly because the employees themselves do not know where the right place is to get this particular job done.
Yes, it can drive you mad sometimes knowing how much time you waste just dealing with simple things like extending your visa or opening a bank account.
Other than that, though, living in Iran has been quite a valuable experience for me and I am happy to have made this decision.
I have met amazing people, and got great insights into a fascinating, ancient culture.
On a quick side-note, perhaps this ancient culture is also Iran’s greatest weakness in some way. While it is absolutely fascinating what Iran has to offer in terms of poetry, music, theater, literature, historic sights and so on and so forth, people somehow focus so much on the past achievements of the country that they sometimes “forget” about improving on the present and the future.
Cultural insight #1: a time-orientation towards the past, if practiced too intensely, can be detrimental to development in the future.
Business-wise, things are moving quite slow at the moment. I have greatly over-estimated the number of German (and other European) companies that were supposed to move to Iran in the aftermath of the nuclear deal.
Companies are still very cautious of the uncertainty from the side of the US in regards to the sanctions and the still poorly-understood business environment in Iran.
It is obvious to me that there is an enormous potential for business here in Iran, but it is still extremely difficult to tap into this potential.
Moving to the Iranian market requires a lot of market-research, collaboration with the right partners, access to a network, an understanding of the local market conditions and linguistic expertise. Unfortunately the support-network to develop these elements is still poorly developed in Iran as well.
Lastly, let’s talk about the culture and the language.
Culturally speaking, I was surprised to see that Iran is actually closer to Europe as compared to Indonesia.
For the 3 years that I was in Indonesia, I really felt like I was living in a completely different world. Everything seemed to be different: from the way that people are interacting with each other, to the way that they are approaching time, to the way that they are dealing with conflict, to the way that they are building a corporate structure.
Two things first: perhaps this feeling was only so much stronger because it was my first time of moving overseas. And, of course, the fact that every aspect of life is different compared to Europe is the case for Iran as well.
And yet, I still feel that Iran is culturally closer to Europe than is Indonesia.
It is certainly more collective than Germany, but not quite as collective as Indonesia. It is more hierarchy-based than Germany, but not as much as Indonesia. It places less priority on effectiveness and efficiency when it comes to time-management as Germany, but much more so than Indonesia.
I certainly can’t list all of the factors here, but I think that you understand my point.
My assumption that if I can manage to adapt myself to the Iranian environment, then I can do the same anywhere in the world, certainly wasn’t true at all.
Now, I am relatively sure that cultural adaptation in other countries in the world such as in East Asia, South-East Asia, Africa or other parts in the Middle East would be more difficult to handle than it is the case in Iran.
In terms of the language, I can say that learning Farsi certainly is hard for Europeans.
One thing is the alphabet, which is certainly quite different. The other aspect is the vocabulary. Here, the main problem is that there is almost no overlap at all between European words and Farsi words.
I always give the example that I once opened a french book in Iran after maybe about 7 months of learning Farsi (also taking lessons). I was able to understand more from this book despite the fact that I have never learned any French at all as compared to a similar book in Farsi.
But: I have more or less achieved my aim of proving to myself that I can learn a second language other than English just as well as anybody else.
Although I am not fluent (yet), I couldn’t possibly have expected this after one year. My level now is intermediate, and I suppose that after one more year of staying in Iran it will reach the point where I would be able to operate as an interpreter.
Three lessons I’ve learned by living in Iran
Lesson #1: stereotypes created by the media are complete non-sense. It’s not so much the case that I didn’t know this before, but now I have seen it with my own eyes and have been able to ingrain it into my psyche completely.
I can state with absolute confidence that the people of Iran are not only one of very hospitable and caring towards others, but that they are also very open-minded towards foreigners.
It is absolutely clear to me that the media are abused as a tool for consciously maintaining conflict with Iran in order to suppress its influence in the region.
Lesson #2: doing business in a country like Iran is absolutely dependent on an understanding on local market conditions and the local cultural environment.
Having partners who have experience in operating in the local environment is crucial, but at the same time one needs to be cautious to become overly dependent on such a partner.
Due to the uncertainty of the Iranian market many companies are making the mistake of not even sending a representative from their own country to live permanently in Iran.
This has drastic consequences, as the local company turns into a fully-fledged Iranian company while nobody is there to supervise its progress. Ultimately, misunderstandings which develop between headquarters and the Iranian branch make it extremely difficult to make the venture a success in these cases.
Lesson #3: adapting to a new cultural environment is never easy, regardless of how many times we have done it before.
I was expecting that I, as somebody who has had 6 years of experience living in two different countries by the time that I moved to Iran would have had a much easier time adapting to the Iranian cultural environment as compared to before.
But that wasn’t really the case. I still struggled a lot to adapt my behavior to local conditions. I still struggled a lot to understand certain behavioral patterns in the Iranian environment. I still often got feelings of discomfort, even rejection of certain parts of the cultural environment.
We have to keep in mind that no matter how many belief systems we have ingrained into our minds, adding a new cultural framework to the existing one’s always will remain a disruption of our identity and our core beliefs.
It will simply never get easy, although it does get easier to some degree.
We simply need to remind ourselves that adapting to a new cultural environment is always an important learning experience, and that every culture in the world has something valuable to offer to us.
Lastly, if you want to receive regular updates on intercultural communication using stories from my time in Iran, Australia and Indonesia, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter by visiting my website below.
