Bank clerk

Forgive the cliché, but my blogs are like buses: there isn’t one for ages and then two come along.
Yesterday I visited Bank Parsian in order to transfer money from my account to our joint and pay for the Greece fares. Hossein advised me to go at about 3 pm when it shouldn’t be too crowded. I got there at 3, and pulled out queue number 523 from the machine. At the time queue number 397 was being served and out of the twelve counters only half were open. I thought I wouldn’t get to be seen until 4, when the bank closes.
I asked a woman sitting next to me how long she had been waiting for. She told me for an hour and a quarter, and her queue number was 463, but a man had given her his number (405), so she gave me hers, which brought me sixty numbers forward.
Eventually, I got to the counter at ten minutes to four. I had a couple of transactions to do and was tying myself in knots (I still mix up the digits as they are written in Iran). It didn’t take long before the clerk asked me where I am from. (Is it the smile that betrays me?)
“From Greece,” I replied.
“So what are you doing here?”
“Erm…living?” (as good a candidate as any).
“Pretty place you’ve chosen to live, haven’t you?” he asked and fed my passbook into the machine.
“What’s wrong with it?” (my chance to do some research for the book).
“Sign the back of the slip, here. Do you think it’s good?”
“It’s very good. The people are friendly…” (and you’ve got fresh, steaming bread and real cream cakes, I wanted to say).
“No, it’s not good, not as it used to be. There’s nothing for young people here.” He took the slip. “So, do you work here?” (maybe he was an interrogator in another life).
“I am writing a book on Iranian culture, which is very interesting.”
“So Iran is a good place, but we didn’t know it,” he mused, counting the fifty-thousand rial bills.
I wanted to tell him that the fact that he struck a conversation with a total stranger should point him to the right direction.