The Persian travel

by Luca Colantonio (Italy)

I didn't expect to find Iran

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We wont always see the Iran country that has always fascinated me for its history and culture: a millennial past made up of successive Empires, peoples and cultures that have coexisted for centuries, until the 70's. So Disembarked at Imam Khomeini Airport around 4.00 in the morning, after the quiet passport and visa checks, we lingered in the small arrivals area where wait until the morning, to kill time, and we spent another hour speaking with friendly abusive taxi drivers who were looking for customers to take to the city. Once out of the Terminal we choose an elderly taxi driver who takes us to his old green car "VIP Service" (in Iran in general you do not expect to find shiny new cars, because of the embargo, many taxi drivers still drive old Peima, small and badly dressed (usually white), but they will take you wherever you want. We reach Tehran in half an hour: and after giving him the address of the Hotel a couple of times, the taxi driver deposits us in front of the entrance which still seems closed. For the race we pay 1,000,000 rials, which currently correspond to just uless of 20 euro. In Iran everyone uses prices in toman, a currency that does not officially exist, just add a zero and all the accounts come back. The taxi driver gives us the price in rials, but he could have said "500,000 tomans" and in that case it was enough to add a zero. The reception in the hotel is unexpected by "western" standards: after checking in and joking with us, Fatima, the attentive "boss" of the hotel invites us to have breakfast in the dining room. The receptionist carries out early check-in for us, without problems (theoretically we could enter the room from 14.00, but in Iran if the room is ready they give it to you immediately) and asks us where we come from, at the news that we are Italian she smiles at us and reminds us to get off to take advantage of breakfast before 10.00. After cooling off a bit, we go down and have a hearty Iranian breakfast of orange juice, butter, sweets, tea, Iranian bread (Nun), carrot jam, feta cheese and a few slices of cucumber and tomato. We thank them for breakfast and go to rest (in fact we are very tired), collapsing into a deep sleep until noon.In the meantime, the city wakes up and when we go out for a ride, we find it hard to recognize the street: a riot of lights, electrical shops (we find ourselves in Tehran's "electric street"), and we try to find our way in a metropolis of more than eight million of habitants. If you walk around Tehran, print some maps or use the GPS with your mobile phone to find your way. We finally arrive on Imam Khomeini Square and find the subway, where we take line 1 to go back and in a couple of stops we reach Enghelab Street, which intersects Ferdosi Street: the street of the money changers of Tehran. On lunch time we stop in a kiosk to eat delicious liver kababs, with raw onion, fresh chillies and chopped tomatoes accompanied by some Persian bread. We understand that we have gone wrong when we left the metro, having no reference points, so we go back on foot and reached Ferdosi street, we finally find an open money changer, after changed money we go back by metro to the stop near the hotel. For dinner we stop in a restaurant near the city bazaar. Fforget to find spirits in Iran, so we order two glasses of freshly squeezed fresh orange juice and bottles of water. After dinner they ask us if we want to smoke a qalyan with scented tobacco (Iranian hookah), but we decline, it will be for another time, we need to take a walk to dispose of the food, so we wander around the surroundings of the closed bazaar, where they pile up waste and remains of food. The scavengers have not yet passed, but the next day everything will be clean, as if all this waste had never existed.