Iran - Tehran

23 Mar 2019 . category: Travel . Comments
#Iran

Arrival in Iran

The flights were pretty uneventful, other than (1) us lucking out and getting an adjacent empty seat on both flights (2) me getting to see the ridiculous

Lamp Bear at Doha’s Airport, allegedly purchased for 6.8 million dollars:

We arrived in Tehran after nearly 20 hours of travel, fingers crossed that we were really going to be allowed into the country. After waiting in a single-consumer foreigner queue for quite a while, I was let through! But then the agent asked Dore behind me if we were together, and upon hearing yes, pulled me back through the line to write down my occupation and other details on a piece of paper. I’m not sure what happened - perhaps Dore looked like a sketchy character? Or maybe he had just forgotten with me? Regardless, we were in! We quick met our guide for the week, who I’ll refer to here as Q out of respect for his privacy.

Tehran

Our first stop that evening was the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was quite an impressive structure, with beautifully detailed ceilings on the inside. This is perhaps unsurprising given the degree to which Khomeini is revered in the country (image not mine - there was some unfortunate construction):

Iran is one the few places I’ve been where leaders’ faces peer at you constantly, from above hotel counters to inside restaurants to outside buildings. For example, here’s Ayatollah Khamenei’s image lit up at night on a governmental building:

Someone should correct me, but I think the only other countries I’ve visited where this is true are North Korea and China?

Driving in the City

The next morning, we woke up to begin our day of sightseeing in Tehran, and quickly experienced the total chaos that is Iranian driving. The city experiences an absurd amount of traffic/gridlock, and at all hours of the day. But more importantly, the chaos of the roads is the worst I have ever experienced. The only place that I think even comes close is Morocco. As Q said, crossing the street is like fighting a war. At busy intersections, you basically just have to set out into traffic hoping that the cars will stop. And to be fair, they always did… Once you get used to it, I claim it’s not actually that dangerous. Because it’s so chaotic, no one is going that quickly, and everyone is on edge for craziness because that’s just the everyday. This is actually a real phenomenon: e.g. see this article from the Atlantic about how making roads feel more dangerous actually makes them safer. If you’re ever in Iran, my advice is that you should always look both ways when crossing the street. It doesn’t matter if you have a green light, or if it’s a one way road, or even if you’re crossing some tiny alley. The one time you don’t look, a motocyclist going the wrong direction will almost wreck you. Q liked to say that Iran is a country where everything is negotiable, and this also extended to the directionality of traffic. This general caution is coming in handy as I write these blog posts from London.

This seems like a good time to share a picture of our trusty car for the week - a white car in a sea of white cars. This was one of many similarities with Uzbekistan:

U.S. Den of Espionage Museum

Out first stop the next morning was the “U.S. Den of Espionage Museum,” the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It was of course the site of the 1979 hostage crisis. It was abandoned by the Americans afterward, and has since been turned into this museum:

Usurprisingly, this was the most overtly anti-American place we visited, as the exhibits were all about proving America’s spying activities, the reasons for the students’ actions in 1979, etc. There was also this wonderful poster above the guide’s desk:

Though honestly, if you read the history of the 1953 Coup, the Iranians have a point here. The U.S. Embassy really was a base for spying and general meddling in the country’s local affairs… See All the Shah’s Men for an account of how the Americans, led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr. (TR’s grandson) successfully pulled of the 1953 Coup that returned the authoritarian Shah to power. Regardless, I think the embassy is definitely worth a visit - I had to ask to add it to our itinerary, so I get the impression that it’s not particularly popular? It was hard to tell, as everything we visited in Tehran had approximately no other tourists.

Other Sights in Tehran

Next was the Sa’adabad Complex, where we got a glimpse of the extravagances of the Shah. Summary: he liked Rolls-Royces and French furniture.

We then visited the Milad Tower which I thought was pretty forgettable, though Dore really liked the views of the city from the top. Honestly, the two things I found most interesting were

This Subway knock-off, Freshway:

And the relative lack of Western brands in a convenience store we walked into. Basically everywhere I’ve gone in the world, you can walk into a Western-owned market chain (e.g. 7-11, Carrefour, Walmart) and find products from the big conglomerates: Coca Cola, Lays, Oreos, etc. In Iran, these were much rarer. Coca Cola and Pepsi were somewhat available, but there basically weren’t foreign fast food or retail chains, and the number of Western food brands was just much lower. Relatedly, I think Iran has the highest % of cars from unrecognized brands of any country I’ve visited. Rest assured, there is Barf though!

Finally was the Tabiat Bridge which was beautiful, but not particularly notable otherwise.

Money and Spending in Iran

We also finally had time in the afternoon to get our hands on some local currency. Money in Iran is generally rather confusing, for a variety of reasons. Most of these stem from recent inflation/devaluation:

• There is a thriving black market for IRR/USD, which was about 3x the official rate when we were in the country (~130k vs ~42k)
• The currency is the Iranian rial. But it’s common to quote prices in toman, where 1 toman = 10 rial. Perhaps this is b/c IRR is so worthless? In fact, IRR is apparently the least valuable currency in the world at time of writing. But even that is quite cumbersome, so actually things are often quoted in 1000 tomans = 10k rials. So a menu might just say “13 = 13k tomans = 130k rials = $1.” This all makes it rather hard to be very confident in the prices of things as a tourist, especially with all these unfamiliar bills that have a ridiculous number of zeros at the end.
• The largest “legal tender banknote” is worth ~80 cents (the 100k rial note). But larger “Iran Cheques” do exist, worth up to 8 dollars! We received almost all of our cash in these 80 cent notes, so I suspect these cheques don’t circulate very much. And even then, we often had trouble paying for things with these 80-cent bills, as people wouldn’t be able to make change for them. The result was that I was constantly carrying around a ridiculous wad of cash. Here’s a photo of our cash bounty:

If you’re wondering, Dore is holding 37.5 million rials in his hand (against 300 USD in his left). This ridiculous currency situation was also quite reminiscent of the situation in Uzbekistan. Though I believe the black market has mostly disappeared there due to governmental action, and they’ve starting printing 10k, 50k, and 100k so’m notes, making the largest bill worth $12 instead of ~80 cents. As written here, “Nowadays, you can just carry a wallet instead of a backpack.” Unfortunately, we weren’t so lucky in Iran, though backpack is a bit of an exaggeration.

One final strangeness of the currency was that it was surprisingly difficult to get our hands on it. We went to an area with many exchanges openly advertising the black market rate - a bit surprising, but convenient. Amusingly, they were on the same block as an official exchange shop. Compare the black market rate:

to the official rate:

These are in toman of course. Not sure if that 0 for JPY is because they weren’t interested or b/c they didn’t have enough digits… Also, note the ridiculous implied GBP/USD and EUR/USD rates, the pound hasn’t traded that high relative to the dollar since 1967. Unfortunately, none of the many exchange shops actually wanted to buy USD when we walked in. Though there were plenty of men milling around on the street who were advertising their willingness to do so… On maybe our sixth attempt, just as Dore and I were thinking this was the definition of insanity, an exchanger finally showed a bona fide market of 125k, which we happily took. It’s unclear why the other buyers weren’t actually buying / didn’t just widen out their markets? There must have been a price at which they were willing to buy USD, and the posted market was weirdly tight (less than 1%). Dore’s hypothesis was that they wanted to advertise unreasonably tight markets so that USD buyers (of which there maybe there are more) would think they were getting a good deal? But even then, it’s strange that no one was just telling us a different rate when we walked in… Regardless, we were happy to get our bounty of 37.5 million rials!

Riding the Subway

We ended the evening with a short subway ride. I try to always ride some sort of public transit when I’m traveling, as I feel like it’s a fun local experience, and gets one away from just Ubering everywhere. Also, the tickets/rechargeable cards make great souvenirs. Unfortunately, we didn’t really have anywhere to go, so we just took the subway two stops in one direction, and then two stops back. Q was slightly puzzled by why we wanted to do this, but nicely indulged us. The subway wasn’t very notable, other than the ratio of men to women traveling on it. There was a women-only car, and maybe 5 other cars that were almost (but not exclusively) for men?

We finished the night by going to a Chinese restaurant, because where else does one eat in Tehran? It was surprisingly good given our somewhat low expectations. If you’re ever in Tehran and craving some fried rice, TBI Chinese is a good bet.

Note that we always ate dinner by ourselves (sans Q), and were generally free in the evening to do whatever we wanted. So while you do need to go with an official tour and guide, you’re not being supervised 100% of the time, and are free to talk to whomever you please. I imagine this has some limits, say if you ditch your official tour on the second day or something, but generally I didn’t feel restricted at all while visiting Iran. Being booked on a private tour helped with that as well, as I did a fair amount of customizing ahead of time, and also Q was pretty flexible during the week.

The Azadi Tower and Leaving Tehran

We awoke the next morning for one last stop in Tehran, after a great hotel breakfast during which they inexpicably played Christmas song remixes. The Azadi tower was built by the Shah but renamed by the current regime to the Azadi, or Freedom, Tower. Q took this opportunity to talk about how he felt like the current regime was no more free than the Shah, and perhaps even worse. More about his political/religious views later. Unfortunately, getting to the tower was surprisingly difficult, as our guide wasn’t able to drive his car in Tehran that day. It was some sort of Beijing-esque even/odd restriction, which on one hand seems like good policy given the ridiculous traffic, but on the other hand seems insufficiently effective given that traffic. It meant that we had to take a cab to a parking lot near the tower, and then drive past the tower in bumper-to-bumper traffic before finally making a U-turn. All in all, this took over an hour, which was a bit frustrating. But, the tower is an iconic sight of Iran, so stil worth it I thought. Here’s my jumping for joy at finally making it to Iran:

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