Learn Persian with Chaiang Conversation, Shabishir with Yara.

This is our very first episode of this, Yara.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm really excited to do this.

So the idea behind this series, so Shabeshire is something that's very popular in Iran.

People get together and they read poems together.

They interpret them.

They have lots of choi.

So we thought that we'd make these short and sweet poems a little bit shorter than we usually do in our longer sessions.

We'll go over some poems that we maybe don't

really have exposure to otherwise. And the background of this comes from my grandfather, which I've

talked about on the podcast a lot. We were very close. So when we moved to the United States,

I lived in a house with my grandparents. So I grew up with them. And my grandfather,

he actually retired before we moved to the United States. So he was very young. He was like in

his 60s. And then he moved from Tehran, this bustling city to the suburbs, which you know

Yara is like a major culture shock. So the suburbs of Dallas, where there were no Iranians to talk to,

no, you know, ham shatties to talk the same language, nowhere to go.

Like Target was the only place to go to, you know, the grocery store, just a total culture shock.

And so he was very bored often.

And one of the things that I think saved him is later in his life, like through his 80s and 90s,

he started getting back into Persian poetry, which we got him a calligraphy pen.

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