Waiting for a telephone line to be connected in Tehran means entering a strange world of bizarre excuses and broken promises. If you don’t know someone in the telecom office and then if you don’t grease his palm, you are guaranteed horrific service. If you do know someone that you can appropriately “tip” then you just get bad service.

After several broken promises, we were told: “The guy who can connect your phone had a death in the family.”

I found that I could not be sympathetic. “Iranians always have a death in the family,” I responded. “It seems to be a favorite excuse.”

Everyone laughed.

Later that day, we ordered pizza to be delivered. It arrived an hour late and cold. When we called to complain, the manager told us that his delivery person had just died.

Again we laughed.

Last summer I stumbled across this breathtaking graphic on View from Iran, a blog written by an American woman living and traveling with her husband in a land many of us will never know, never see. I loved reading Esther's posts about weddings, about casual taxi cab conversations, about daily life in Iran. We traded a little bit of mail and I'd hope to recruit Esther to participate in an audio project I was working on. Hamstrung by bandwidth issues, she wasn't able to participate, but I continued to follow her blog. For a while, she was gone and then, it turned out, oh, she's back stateside under her real identity, Tori Egherman. She was kind enough to answer questions about her life in a country that we hear lots of rhetoric and little truth about.

Let's get this done right out of the gate. A Jewish American woman in Iran?! What the hell? Are you crazy?

I think crazy is a fair term. You have to remember, however, that we arrived in Iran when Khatami was president and there was not quite as much anti-Semitic rhetoric coming out of Iran's official mouthpieces.

Did you ever out yourself as Jewish while you were in Iran? What happened?

I outed myself all the time. I admit that there were times when I let people, particularly Armenians (who are mainly Christian), assume that was Christian. No one ever assumed that I was a Muslim.” What religion are you?" is considered small talk in Iran. Everyone is assumed to have a religion. It would have been much worse for me to say that I was an atheist than to say that I was a Jew. Having no God is unimaginable for most Iranians that I met. When I did out myself, I was almost always met with a story of a childhood Jewish friend or general curiosity. Being Jewish is acceptable in Iran where we are considered "people of the book."

Why were you blogging anonymously? Did you talk blogging with any of the Iranians you met? What did they have to say about blogging in Iran?

I was blogging anonymously mainly to allow everyone to pretend that I was indeed anonymous. After a few weeks in Iran, my husband was in a meeting with some provincial bureaucrats. At the end of the meeting one of them quoted from a blog post that he had written. This made it obvious that we were being read and watched and identified ands the reason that Kamran stopped blogging for a long while. Remaining anonymous, however, allowed the charade of anonymity to continue for all parties concerned. I did write about this issue for Reconstruction, in an essay entitled: My Life in the Panopticon: Blogging from Iran. I never spoke to Iranians about blogging. Ever. Most Iranians I knew read blogs: particularly those about soccer and Harry Potter. There were also a couple of political news sites that were widely read by the Iranians I knew.

You were in Iran for three years - is that right? What did you miss from the US? What do you miss from Iran now that you're back? How’s the culture shock for you back here in the US?

I was therefore almost four years... wow... While I was there I missed free speech and clean air the most. Now that I am back, I miss my friends, Kamran's family, and the mountains. And, yes, I am experiencing culture shock. I don't want to sound like a prude or anti-consumerist, but I am shocked at the marketing to children. I watched an animated episode of Batman and heard Batgirl comment on "Corinthian leather." I don't even know what Corinthian leather is like, why should tweenies?I am also shocked by the variety of cereal at grocery stores and by liberals who drive over-sized SUVs.

Did you meet travelers from other Western nations? What did you talk about?

I did meet travelers from other Western nations. We mainly swapped stories about traveling in Iran.

Iran is this weird black hole to me. I perceive it as virulently anti-Semitic, misogynistic, backwards... admittedly my ideas are from the Western press. So...

Funnily enough, I encountered very little casual anti-Semitism in Iran, even when no one knew my religion. This was strikingly different from when Kamran and I lived in Amsterdam, and I heard casual anti-Semitism regularly. (I would never categorize the Dutch as anti-Semitic, though.) So virulently anti-Semitic? No. Not at all. Misogynistic: Again, I would say that the people are not as a whole misogynistic, although this is a much more difficult question to answer. The laws are definitely difficult for women. Once I was talking to an Iranian male friend, and I said that Iranian men seemed to be in love with their wives, while their wives seemed to be less than in love with them. "Exactly," he told me. "That is the Iranian man." In many families, I saw that the women were manipulative and controlling while the men seemed to depend on that very manipulation and control. Women complain all the time about how lazy the men are, and men complain all the time about how manipulative the women are, but neither seem to want to change the situation.

Are Iranian women as oppressed as we think they are?

No. Iranian women are the toughest women I have ever met. They find ways around everything. I do not feel sorry for them.

What’s the basic thing you wish Americans could know about Iran?

The most important thing to understand about Iran is that the public life of Iran is all theater. It is impossible to understand the population of Iran through what is presented in public. It is difficult to discern the intentions of its politicians through what is said. Oh and another basic thing: Iranians remember their history for thousands of years. We forget our own history after just a few. Context is key.

What surprised you most about Iran?

What surprised me most was how similar my Jewish culture was to the Iranian Shia culture that I encountered. The sense of humor, the hospitality, the strong matriarch, the attitude towards food, the knack for whining, their attitude towards education and the professions, the love for ritual... these were the things that made me feel so at home. Before leaving for Iran, I thought that the culture I grew up with was European. What I learned in Iran was that most Jews owe more of their culture to Persia than to Poland.

Do you have a list of Iranian blogs you can share?

• A Feminist Skeptical Muslim: (unfortunately she does not write enough! Why not, I wonder?) Her husband's blog, Kamangir, is a good source of information
• Forever Under Construction:I particularly love the art.
• Global Voices-Iran
• Pars-Arts
• Iranian Truth
• Mideast Youth

Tori Egherman is the co-author with Kamran Ashtary of a book of photographs of Iran. During their nearly 4 year stay in Iran, Tori and Kamran took thousands of pictures, traveled all over the country, took part in private and public rituals, and documented it all in the book Iran: View from Here, available for purchase online at ashtarydesign.com.

Pam blogs about travel and other adventures at Nerd's Eye View.