My Iranian American BFF.

I'm going to write about my friend Sarah* because I miss her dearly, and she is one of (if not, THE) neatest girls on the face of the earth.

And trust me, she's walked it.

LITERALLY.

Not to mention she was born in Iran, immigrated to the US as a toddler, now goes to university in Scotland, speaks French and Farsi and of course perfect English, takes jobs and studies abroad all around the globe.

Case in point- she recently came off a year-long stint studying abroad in Cairo, summiting Mt. Sinai and frequenting tombs of Tut for pleasure. Because why not?

Oh, not to mention her whole family converted to Mormonism when we were nine years old. Her brother served an LDS mission in London (speaking in Farsi to some people, way cool huh?) and recently married a darling LDS girl.

Pretty much the neatest family ever.

Literally.

Their mom is this lovely tenderhearted woman, and their dad is the jolliest man I have ever met, constantly smiling and joking around.

For instance, on her 16th birthday, Sarah gets a specialized license plate from her dad that reads ' SHIBBE* '... because it is some joke from Austin Powers, of course.

I know, right? Whose parent is hip enough to even know that?


So anyways, Sarah and her brother use the word 'literally' a lot, which comes intuitively from living in the UK.

(Don't worry, she also uses the word "queue" in place of "line." i.e. "where does this movie ticket queue begin?:)

And not the way Americans say 'literally' by mushing the pronunciation together so it sounds like "lid-er-ully." Sarah's pronunciation is the perky British "LIT-ER-A-LLY."

Emphasis on the 't.'

It's adorable, and I LOVE it.

So much, that I laughed so hard when she told me about her apartment-finding woes while she crashes at her friends' place in tha ghettooo of Harlem (we're talking West 150th) and accidentally taking a train into the Bronx after work one night.

For those of you who are not familiar, Harlem is mostly on the west side of Manhattan and the Bronx is on the East.

This was the gist of our conversation:

S: "I have never been so scared in my life. Like, they have guns there!"

Me: [laughing] "You've surely had scarier experiences than that, right?"

S: "You'd think! But even Syria, Egypt, Turkey are far less scary than the Bronx at midnight. Those countries have nuclear weapons or...nothing at all! There's no in-between. I thought I was going to die, literally."


I miss you.

Literally.