Between the cultures - Essay Example

The city was strangely quiet. Nobody was in the streets and it seemed like everyone was dead. Since it was my first night in the city, I was wondering what kind of city it was. I forced my way back towards home with no bread, and ready to starve till the next morning. I was eighteen years old, and I had been accepted in Yazd University, in the city of Yazd in my country, Iran. I rented an apartment with three other friends of mine and we moved in only that day. It was the first time we had left our homes.

All of us were inexperienced in the home affairs, and now we were in a new and strange city with weird people for studying. I had grown up in Tehran, which is the capital of Iran. It had a population of more than ten million people. Whenever you wanted, you could find a grocery store, a restaurant or anything else you wished. Many people immigrated from country sides to Tehran for business, studying and residence in the most developed city of Iran. Tehran was a multicultural city. Every Iranian enjoyed living in such a big city like Tehran.

But at the age of eighteen, I moved four hundred miles far from Tehran, to the city of Yazd. It was a small city with religious and intolerant people. Most of the men in Yazd wore beard and women used black burka. People of Yazd had a traditional life which was very hard for me to adapt. The new environment, situations and differences between my hometown and Yazd caused the feeling that I was living between two different cultures. I always liked my hometown’s culture, but I was not interested in the culture of Yazd’s people.

It was really annoying for me and the students from the other cities to be a part of the same. I was in a constant struggle between the two cultures, however it was hard to ignore and get rid of it. The next day after starving, I and my friends went to the university to start our new semester. The university was similarly a weird place like the city of Yazd and its inhabitants. The security freaks the fashion of every boy and girl at the entrance gate of the campus. They had banned jeans pants for the boys, and it was obligatory for girls to use black burka.

Every physical and verbal contact between a boy and a girl was reported immediately to the student life office. Also in the classrooms, front seats belonged to boys and rear seats belonged to girls. The university had lots of rules for segregating boys and girls. They knew their rules according to the Islamic creed. They tried to unify students’ culture, which I felt disgusted about. Sometimes I thought Taliban moved in from Afghanistan to our university in Yazd. I and my friends had never seen such a university like that.

We had never expected anything of this sort. On the way back home, we bought lots of food to keep in our cooler because we didn’t like to suffer due to hunger after eight o’clock when everything got closed. When we got home, we were still surprised and wondered about our first day at the university. We started to talk and laugh about ridiculous rules of our university. After a while one of our friends, who had a late evening class arrived at the main the door of the apartment. Since the door bell was broken and he didn’t have the key, he called through his cell phone to us, and asked us to drop the key for him from the balcony.

One of my friends went into the balcony and dropped the key for him and he came upstairs. As he walked into the apartment, we heard a very loud sound. Someone was knocking the main door of