Iran - Shiraz

26 Mar 2019 . category: Travel . Comments
#Iran

Day 7: Arrival in Shiraz

We arrived in Shiraz in the evening, with just enough time to wander around a bit. Highlights included this bookstore that bizarrely had Dr. Phil works:

as well as bodybuilding magazines?

Also, I think I make for a beautiful Persian princess, don’t you agree?

Day 8: Shiraz Sightseeing

In my opinion, Shiraz was definitely the most beautiful of Iran’s cities. Even the bus stops have stained glass!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also the city where we saw the most tourists, and especially in large tour groups. It seemed like French groups were the most common, followed by Spanish.

Q was also from Shiraz, so he got to spend our time in the city at home with “the boss,” his term for his wife. While we visited the city, he lamented the loss of three things that Shiraz was historically known for: great wine, poets, and…women? Not sure what the boss would think of that.

Nasir-ol-molk Mosque

The day began at the ‘Pink Mosque,’ perhaps the most famous sight in Iran. It’s certainly the most Instagram-worthy, as the morning light shines through the stained glass, creating colored dappled patterns on the carpeted ground. Here’s one of the better pictures I took:

Note the woman posing in the background, who I think may have actually been an travel Instagrammer given her perfect posing and the care lavished on the photos. In my opinion, the place does live up to the hype, though take care to not visit at the same time as a tour bus, which showed up half way through our time there. This was one of the only places in the country where it felt like everyone was crowding around to get the same photo, as the inside area is quite small, and the light was coming and going through the clouds.

Zinat Al-Molk House

This was another older house with a garden. I would’ve skipped mentioning it here were it not for the most beautful “you are being watched!” signs I have ever seen:

MashDonald’s!

People may be aware that I have an unhealthy obsession with McDonald’s, and try to eat at one in every country I visit. This means that I’ve probably eaten at one in over 35 countries, a real traveler’s badge of honor. Unfortunately, while an Iranian McDonald’s used to exist in the 1970s, it closed in 1979 due to local political events. Fortunately, in the vein of Freshway and ZFC, there is a local knock-off, MashDonald’s! I looked it up ahead of time, and made sure to ask both our tour company and tour guide about taking us there. Q was nice enough to drive me to the location, but unfortunately it was closed! A true low point of the trip. At least I got this photo of the logo…

Shah Cheragh

Though not as Instagrammable as the Pink Mosque, I think this may have been the single most beautiful thing we saw in Iran. It’s a monument to two brothers who were the sons and brothers of Imams. Unfortunately we weren’t able to take pictures inside, but I would describe it as combining the beautiful mirrorwork of the tomb in Yazd with the architectural grandeur of the Ayatollah Khomeini mausoleum in Tehran. Which is all to say, it made for quite an impressive sight. We felt very lucky to be able to enter, as Q said it until recently was only open to Muslims. Here’s a great video by Great Big Story about it, incidentally a Youtube channel that I follow.

The environment in the interior was quite strange. There were clearly people in the middle of intense religious devotion: praying, reading religious texts, etc. In addition, there’s a doorway that everyone walks backwards through, because walking forwards would mean turning one’s back toward the sarcophagi. On the other hand, there were loads of people who were basically treating it as a place to chill: talking to each other, napping on the floor, or browsing on their smartphones. There were also a fair number of children just running around the place. It was especially odd because the people treating it casually seemed to be locals, not tourists, which I recall Q confirming.

Hipster Cafes

We of course had to find a local hipster cafe, which ended up being just minutes from our hotel. The hotel’s coffee was very disappointing, so we came here at least one morning, as well as two nights just for a place to sit and get some food. Loved the frames decorating the wall, felt like it could’ve been in Bushwick:

The service was a bit haphazard though, with Dore remarking that were we somewhere else, he would’ve assumed that our waiter was stoned…

Day 9: Last Full Day

For our last real day in Iran, we saw Persepolis and Necropolis, two ancient sites often visited together. Though we first made an important stop.

Souvenir Shopping

In general, I don’t buy souvenirs while traveling, North Korea being basically the only exception. But recently, I’ve been trying to acquire meaningful items when I travel. So all week I’d been looking out for something I’d want to buy, though it’d unfortunately been just the usual knicknacks. But, mid-week I realized that what I really wanted was a poster of the Ayatollahs, similar to the ones we saw hanging in hotels, shops, etc. Q actually wasn’t sure where to acquire them and found this to be an incredibly bizarre request, but finally this morning he brought us to a religious store that had what I was looking for. So I’m now the proud owner of several Ayatollah posters. They were either one or ten cents each, so I figured I might as well get a couple. Here’s one hanging on my wall, internet points to anyone who can identify the surrounding posters:

Hint: it feels to me that they “make up” for the weirdness of having this poster on my wall. Also, later on the way to or from Persepolis, Q randomly stopped on the side of the road next to a construction store. We were a bit confused until he explained that we could buy a length of pipe to fit the posters inside. So that’s what we did, and I came back to America with a length of plastic pipe dedicated to protecting the precious Iranian cargo within. Thankfully no one asked any questions about it while clearing security in either Shiraz or Doha.

Persepolis and Necropolis

We begun at Persepolis, a vast complex of ruins from the Achaemenid Empire (e.g. Darius the Great, Xerxes, 300). Before visiting Iran, we’d almost given this up in favor of adding a trip to Mashhad, but I’m glad we spent the day here. This is also a way in which Iran differs substantially from e.g. Uzbekistan, in that there are ancient ruins that still remain, despite Alexander the Great’s best efforts. Behold Dore gazing out upon the ruins:

It’s definitely worth it to have a guide, as Q was really helpful in pointing out what the various carvings meant. Though amusingly, he also enjoyed making light of other guides’ commentary and what he thought was “bullshit.” Mostly, it seemed like he was more conservative in his explanations, whereas others were more willing to go with myth and legend regarding the significance/meaning/origin of things.

I got a kick out of seeing old grafitti carved into the stones from early Western tourists. For example, here’s Stanley from the New York Herald in 1870:

Necropolis describes a particular set of tombs of the Achaemenid rulers, which are carved high into the rock face. They are described by some on the internet as a mini-Petra, though I’ve not been to Jordan at all, so I wouldn’t know. Sadly, my best picture of them has Dore doing this in the foreground:

Best Food in Iran

For lunch, we ate at the Shater Abbas Restaurant, which was by far the best food we had in our week in Iran. There was an eggplant based appetizer as well as a “sour chicken” kebab that were both really quite good. Just our luck to discover the best dishes on the last day, but if I’m ever back in Shiraz, I’ll know where to go at least! The fact that Q is a local probably helped in this regard. For those who are curious, the way the tour worked, we ate together every day for lunch with the company footing the bill for whatever we ordered. And then we were usually on our own for dinner if we felt like it. Though we tended to eat very late lunches, so often we weren’t super hungry. Overall, I thought the food in Iran was good, but not particularly special. Lots of kebabs and rice, which did get old after a couple days.

But the true culinary highlight was later that afternoon, as we had some free time and I asked Q if we could drive past MashDonald’s again. And hallelujah, it was open! Oh what a difference a day makes, from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. I ordered a nondescript burger from the menu (which again included pizza and fried chicken), and just had an incredible time. Look at how happy I am:

Dore also took about a million photos of me eating the burger, and I took some food-stylist-worthy shots with the logo in the background. This unsurprisingly greatly confused the couple of teenagers in the restaurant, along with the staff. To be honest, the burger was pretty meh, though it was better than the fried chicken at ZFC. Dore asked Q afterward if he’d ever had a guest request to visit fast food places, and Q just responded in a very flat tone “no that was very strange.”

Key2Persia

We also got a chance this afternoon to swing by the Key2Persia offices and meet Aliye, who had been the one planning our tour:

We’re holding some postcards the tour company gifted us. It was nice to be able to say thanks in person, and meet the person I’d been corresponding with for weeks. I’ll have more thoughts about Key2Persia overall in the next blog post.

Goodbye to Q

We then had to say goodbye to Q, as someone else would be driving us to the airport the next morning to catch our flight. He was really a great guide in my opinion. He put up with my strange culinary requests, did a good job giving us the right level of history and detail for the various places we saw. and was just all around a fun person to spend a week with. Of all the tour guides I’ve worked personally with (admittedly not a large sample size), I think he was easily the best. If anyone is going to Iran and would like his real name / contact info, please shoot me a message. It’s of course common to tip guides in Iran, and we felt like Q was really excellent. But if you remember, most of our bills were worth about 80 cents. So, as we left, Dore very smoothly handed over a wad of cash that was probably over an inch thick…

Shiraz Metro

For one final souvenir, I ventured into the Shiraz metro to see if I could buy a rechargeable card, as the one from Tehran was more of a fob. Unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble communicating to the woman working at the booth that I wanted just the card with no value on it. I’m pretty sure she refused to give me all my change back in favor of loading like 15 cents worth of value onto the card or something. There was then a bunch shouting as we turned around and went “the wrong way,” right back up to the surface. I did appreciate that they really meant well - I don’t think a “confused” tourist would be given the same (in this case misplaced) guidance in New York City. Here’s Dore in front of the map, demonstrating the long-and-skinny shape of Shiraz, which makes a one-line subway more useful than one would expect:

Locals at the Cafe

We ended the evening at the Joulep Cafe which seemed to be popular with tourists and locals alike. We shared a table with two sisters from Shiraz, one in high school and one in college. Chatting with them was pretty fun. Some takeaways:

• Friends, to my delight, is apparently super popular in Iran. They were aghast that Dore had basically never seen it.
• Ahmadinejad is an idiot. They told some funny stories about him doing stupid things - it reminded me of the way some people spoke about George Bush in the 2000s.
• “Everyone” has a VPN, and can therefore access the unfiltered internet, including blocked apps like Telegram.
• Authorities really do care about wearing hijabs, they noticeably pulled theirs up/forward when a police officer was nearby.
• In many respects, they felt just like women their age in America. The older one even had a boyfriend who showed up a bit later in the evening. He had a cat with him, which in hindsight was a bit strange.

Day 10: Departure

Leaving the country was pretty uneventful, though it was pretty terrible to wake up for a 4:45AM flight (to Doha). The flight out of Shiraz was delayed, but thankfully we had plenty of extra time going this direction for the connection. Naturally, I killed time the airport by shopping for caviar. You can’t afford to not buy it given that it prevents cancer, depression, and multiple sclerosis!

We of course had to clear extra-special-at-the-gate security in Doha, where two out of three of Dore’s redbulls were confiscated, part of his plan to beat jetlag. I was flying to London in a couple of days, so I just quickly adjusted the couple of hours to London time, and held myself there for three days.

So ends the travel journal part of these blog posts. I’ll write one last one with some general thoughts about the trip.

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