Our safe arrival last night in Düsseldorf was accompanied by intense feelings of relief. Our last 40hrs in Bangkok proved stressful beyond belief. While we were aware that many countries in the Middle East, Iran included, deny visa requests and entry to individuals who have been to the occupied territories (the way Israel is referred to amongst those states who refuse to recognize its existence as legitimate), we did not know that Iran also denies transit to individuals who have been to the occupied territories (we flew the Tehran based Iranian airline Mahan Air). S and I have both been to Israel, but S, lucky her, was travelling on a passport that had not been. We debated everything from ripping out the page to glueing it to the adjacent page to sticking the baggage tickets over the prominent Ben Gurion visa stamps. We decided to nothing hoping that always showing the passport already opened to the picture page would deter the impulse to flip through the other pages. Plan B invovled S practicing phrases of Koranic Arabic that she would use to plead to the authorities in case of emergency. S was right to assume that the Farsi speaking Iranians would understand her basic Arabic, but we found this out by ordering vegetarian lunch at the cafe and not through an unpleasant confrontation with Iranian customs officials. The passport was checked twice and in both instances only the picture page was examined. The drama of the situation was highlighted by the lead story that headlined Iran´s english daily "Iran News" -- "Israel is Flag of Satan". It was a pleasure to read this story as the plane took off on its way to Düssedorf. It was interesting to note in Tehran´s Airport just how few interenational flights actually pass through the country daily. Only one (that we could see from the flight board) flies to Europe (the UK recently revoked Mahan´s license to fly its daily flights to Birmingham and Manchester on safety grounds). The country is isolated and it´s not helping that Condy Rice just took steps to have Iran Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization in order to further control the country.