This is how many people are needed in a band for Persian music to have all of the elements it needs.

I went to a Persian music performance with my mom, and every single occupant of one of the 100 seats in the 20 rows of the theatre was Persian. It felt great to be able to tell people to stop taking pictures with the flash turned on, or that they were in my way, in a language other than English, just like in Germany. That's one of the most frustrating things about not speaking English. I can't say "excuse me" if I need to get by someone, so I instead just have to wait. I suppose this is a good thing, however, because the usual "excuse me" or "um, excuse me please?" doesn't work in Germany. One has to say "Entschuldigung!!!" loud and firm, making it perfectly clear that the person in front of you has to move so that you can get by. Having absorbed that piece of German culture while I was there, I did not want to sound rude in the US by saying "Excuse me!!!" Well, there is no need to worry, because this English boycott has actually made me more patient by making me wait for people to move instead of automatically saying "Excuse me!!!" I think if I said "Entschuldigung" to people here, they would just look at me with no clue that I had asked them to move.

Today, my sister Lily came back from an adventure working at an organic farm, and we saw eachother for the first time in 8 months. My dad doesn't speak Farsi, and my sister doesn't speak German, and yet I had no problem talking to both of them, because they both got the gist of what I said in either language. For example, when I pointed to my sister's new nose piercing and asked "ist das neu?" she knew I was asking her if it was new. My dad has been known to understand the occasional thing in Farsi, after 12 years of being married to my mom, who always spoke to my sister and I in Farsi (the other day, I was talking to my mom on the phone, and my dad heard me say "hitchi" and started laughing. After I hung up the phone, I asked my dad what was so funny, and he said "well, you said 'nothing' so I assume she asked what you were doing.")

During my conversation with my sister in the car after getting her from the airport (in which I spoke Farsi and she spoke English), I found myself blanking on the word for "time" in Farsi. I asked my dad in German what the word for time was in Farsi (saying "wie sagt man 'Zeit' auf Persisch?"), and amazingly he knew what it was, which I was not expecting.