It was time to finally travel to Iran, the country I was very excited about visiting, the way to it wasn’t as simple, find out why.
Getting to the airport
I wanted to check in my flight online and found out at 10pm that my flight would not leave from Hamburg. Due to protests it was moved to Hannover, around 1,5 hours away. Usually not a huge problem, but the workers of the train also did some protests.
It was very stressful, especially due to the fact that the flight was in the morning. I packed during the night and left before six in the morning with the car to Hannover. My trip would have been three weeks and luckily I found a good parking spot where a ticket wasn’t needed.
The airport in Hannover is actually quite big and decent, not what I was expecting. Everything worked and actually a lot of people made it to Hannover, the people were quite annoyed though.
Istanbul
I arrived at the SAW airport, probably the worst one out there. Here I had to be for around 10 hours. Went to this airport a few times already and I already regretted booking the flight like that, before even arriving.
I went out to explore the region a little bit. I Got my entry stamp from Turkey and walked through the neighborhood, found something to eat and returned to the airport.
Surprisingly they had some free wifi this time, which doesn’t make the airport any better. I was waiting for the flight to Tehran. Somehow my passport was gone, I searched it everywhere and couldn’t find it. The police listened to me, but didn’t really try to help me. My stress level went to the maximum quite quickly and I ended up missing the flight. Many thoughts went through my head “should I just fly home?” “why do I even do that?” I was calling a lot with Marla and I wasn’t the nicest on the phone for sure. She motivated me to still fly to Iran.
Stress with police
There were two options, waiting another 20 hours in the SAW airport, or take a bus to the IST airport, which is the new one of Istanbul, and catch a flight there.
I decided to do the second option and paid more than double for my flight, it was cheaper than canceling the three week trip. So I had to catch a bus at the latest two in the morning and had still over an hour until that time, for a distance of 500 m walking. Usually not an issue, but not in Turkey!
The security didn’t let me exit the airport, the thing was that I didn’t even have a boarding pass for anything, so why did they need to keep me there?
I had to get the permission of the last airline I was flying with, that they allow me to leave the airport. This paper was given to the police and they had to agree to the permission and then the immigration also needed to check it.
This whole process took over one and a half hours which led me to miss the last bus. I am usually a quiet calm person, but I for sure wasn’t. Being rude to the police after knowing that there was no chance to catch the last flight was the nicest I’ve done.
Getting to IST
After finally being outside of the shithole of an airport, I had to take a taxi for 50 Euros, because there was just no other option. The flight to Tehran would have arrived three or four hours later.
The taxi driver was friendly, but not as easy to talk to in general. I arrived at the airport and it is to be honest quite fascinating. The new airport of Istanbul is just massive! The internet is also not an option, one hour for free at least.
I was getting ready to fly out and it was getting better. This time I had my passport ready and the trip could officially start, after leaving the house over 24h’s before. I was just exhausted and highly depressed. It could only get better from that moment on.
Finally arriving to Iran
It took so long for me to finally reach the country of Iran. I wanted to go there for so long already, but it shouldn’t be like that before. Covid happened and other events in March, because I wanted to visit during the Persian new year.
I had a evisa from an agency and I thought it would have been the final visa, but I still had to pay the visa cost, plus insurance and fees. I was at around $100US which is in my opinion quite a lot. When wanting to enter there was no stamp for myself. I really wanted one, but they didn’t want to give it to me, because then I would have issues visiting the USA for example. Honestly speaking, besides the fact that I would not like to visit in general right now, I probably would have issues anyway with stamps from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and especially Afghanistan.
I met two guys from the Netherlands who actually bought a sim card for me, very friendly. I had in mind that it would now be easy to get around and visit my friend Arian, who I was hosting more than four years ago.
The sim card was basically working but not really. The government is blocking everything on the internet, besides email, google and google maps. No Whatsapp, Youtube and so on is working. For this you need a vpn, but not all are working. I was so smart and forgot totally about that point.
Had to discuss with the taxi drivers a lot to get a good price in order to make it to Arian. The official exchange rate at the airport is worse than in the city itself, so I was receiving a bad rate and had to pay almost 10 Euros to get the one to one and a half hour drive. Of course in Europe it is unbelievably cheap, but you always need to think from a local perspective.
Seeing Arian again
It took more than four years until I was able to do what I was promising. I finally visited Arian in Iran. We were spending christmas together back then and he was one of the first people I hosted from Couchsurfing. Over the four years we were on and off the whole time in contact and I was happy to see him again.
He opened the door and it was just great. He showed me the house, he is living with his father together, but has his own apartment in the building. It wasn’t fancy or anything like that, but I felt comfortable from the first moment on.
Over something quick to eat and drink we were chatting a lot. We waited for Amir to reach home, his roomate, also a very great guy who I met there for the first time.
We went out by car into the crazy traffic of the capital. I believe it must suck as a driver a lot to drive around there. All of us had a great time with each other, but we arrived at a mall in which we went to the rooftop and I was amazed. The mountains, which surrounds the city, were covered in snow and it was very beautiful and very cold. Nothing which I expected before coming to Iran.
Eating some local food
We went out to eat some local food. I had some fried potatoes in the form of a mushroom or something like that. Adding to this I had some rice which had cinnamon flavor, some cooked tomato and something to drink.
The food was very tasty and the rice was probably the best. The potato stuff was quite dry.
It was a place in which you could choose from some options and everything was already pre-made for display in front of you. Now the energy returned.
Checking out the region
After the food we went to a very local bazaar. The new year would happen soon and you could buy a lot of things for the celebration. It is important to display some things which start in Persian with a S.
Adding to this a lot of people are buying gold fishes, some artificially colored. Besides the fishes also many people were buying turtles, some of them also colored. It was weird to see, but that’s the different culture of course.
The bazaar was super busy and people were really friendly, probably for a person who doesn’t like to be around so many people that would have been overwhelming. In Germany it would have been overwhelming, but during traveling it is usually fine for myself.
It was interesting to see, I witnesses people smoking weed and doing public dancing and singing, things which are strongly forbidden in Iran. Also many women didn’t cover themself at all, everything was quite unexpected and interesting to see.
People trying to convert me, again
There was a cool looking mosque, which ended up being a mausoleum, so I just wanted to check it out. The religious buildings in the Persian regions are in my opinion very beautiful so I was quite excited.
When we arrived there, a woman was screaming and crying and praying, while falling to the ground. It was a bit too much, but she did what she felt like doing. I went inside by myself, because for Arian and Amir it wasn’t something they were excited about. In general most people in Iran are not into Islam that much, not as you assume.
The Mausoleum was amazing, a lot of glass everywhere, besides the ground and the person who took care of it was talking to me. He was fluent in English and didn’t really feel like leaving me alone to explore it for a moment. He wanted to show me Islam and tried to convert me. It was not the first time that this happened to me, so crazy when thinking about it. To be fair it also happened with Christians.
It was hard getting out of it, but I made it after he wanted to read out of coran for me, which would have taken way too long and there were people waiting for me.
After being back, they were curious about my experience and were surprised.
We drove back home and went quickly to bed. We were sharing the ground with each other. Arian was putting a mattress to the ground and then it was time for sleeping, quite comfortable.
What’s up next?
Next week you can read more about my time in Iran and just about what happened next, so stay tuned!
