We went to Tehran with the poshest bus possible, of which I didn't make any good photos because I suck, but in turn I can tell you about it: it was a beautiful bus with leather-covered seats, with 2+1 seats each row (so about 25% more space for each seat than a normal 2+2 seater), unlimited cold bottled water (by the way this comes on every Iranian buses for free), a nice long Persian carpet in the quite wide aisle, an attendant and all that.
When we got to Tehran and got rid of all the taxi drivers who attacked us (as always), we soon realized that those nice Iranian traffic-planners somehow managed to place the stations of the new subway they just built in such a clever way that the closest station to the big bus station is a 30 minutes' walk away from there. Wtf? I'm not an agriculture expert and stuff so I'm not saying it was they mistake, for sure they got a reason for not being able to place the metro line closer, but still it's rather inconvenient.
The other bad thing was that the time we got to Tehran it was 5AM, and the metro started commuting at 6. But no worries, we waited a half hour and took the metro to the area with many cheap hostels, according to Lonely Planet. We didn't find the hostel we wanted, but we found one with a guy and a suitcase standing in front of it. I asked him in English what's up, but I instantly heard from his accent that he's Hungarian. He's called András, studies Persian at a university in Budapest, and it was pretty random meeting him :)
We hung out together with him for a day and a half, he showed us a couple of cool places because he'd been in Tehran formerly. We drank a lot of fresh juice, we checked out the bazaars and the such.
Judit in the bazaar:
Judit started feeling bad at the stomach once again, and I wasn't completely fine either, but by the end of the first day we kind of recuperated.
We went to a museum which was nothing special so I didn't put a picture of it even. We met a couple French, Czech and German people, it seems to us that only these nations travel, as everyone was just staring at us when we told them we were from Hungary ("Macaristan"), "Wherz that, Africa?".
Anyway, what else we saw in Tehran. Women in scarves staring at the modern clothes in the slops and slobbering:
And canals. Lots of canals. There are canals everywhere in Tehran, they are on the surface, and there is a lot of water flowing in them, a lot of it. On one hand, this is a good thing, as they function as dumpsters. There are hardly and trash bins in Iran, so people just throw away their garbage. But in Tehran there are these canals where the water flows so people throw their garbage in these, and the water carries it somewhere, where I think it gets cleaned, or not. Oh, and the water also cools the city and waters the plants/trees. We saw a huge pipe at a hillside at a quite high point, and from that came all the water, flowing through all the city (because the city itself has a slight slope all under it). It's very strange but if half of the reasons I made up are true then it may even be a good idea.
I made a short video about it if anyone is really interested.
The annoying thing is that although it's true that we're always in search for cheap hostels because we're on a tight budget, and of course these cheap places are never at the most elite places of the town but it was the second time for us to live in a place where they were selling only tractor tires all around. More precisely, in Tabriz we managed to settle down right in the middle of a hardware store: in our street all you could find were shops selling extension cables, phone exchange systems, light bulbs, car alarm systems, public light fixtures (!), water pumps, welding kits and stuff like that. And our hostel. While in Tehran our street was rather a car shop, selling mostly car parts and tires. Lonely Planet even wrote:" In Tehran it's very easy to find food as in any street there are at least 2-3 kebabis. Except the area of Amir Kabir because there are none." Well, Amir Kabir was our street. The first morning we walked around for more than 30 minutes to finally find some breakfast not made of rubber.
The biggest tire in our street:
