Flight to Shiraz

The next morning we had breakfast at our hotel, it consisted of eggs, all beef sausages, cereal, OJ, milk, bread, cheese, butter, jam, tomatos, cucumber, coffee and tea. Next we call a cab. Note that we have 7 large suitcases and several carry on items. The cab shows up and it is a pretty tiny car, no chance of fitting all of our stuff. So the guy calls in for backup with a slightly bigger car. We put all of our luggage in one car and rode in the other. I thought the cab ride from the airport to the hotel was scary, but this one was a little worse since it was in the city during the day with lots of cars on the road. I don’t know how to describe the ride, it was nuts, there seems to be no traffic laws at all. I took some video of the ride, it gives you an idea of the chaos but not the whole story.The unwritten rules seem to work pretty well, however, we made it to the airport without a scratch, whew!

We waited for a little while in the terminal for our flight and I needed some caffiene so I went to grab a diet coke or its equivalent. They had diet coke indeed, it was called Coca Cola Light, it was the real stuff. The diet coke set me back 500 tomans, about a 50 cents US. I have a picture of my diet coke that I will post. My wife opted for a coffee at the coffee shop. Turns out we didn’t have enough tomans left to purchase my wife’s coffee nor did they accept dollars. However, since my wife is very charming, she charmed them into accepting US dollars for the coffee. I later discovered that I had more tomans in my bag and I went back and swapped out my dollar. Everyone at the airport was very nice to me. Every time I went to buy something the vendor knew I was foreign and helped me figure out my tomans and rials. They were all super friendly.

We are ready to board the plane. We take a bus out to the plane and climb aboard our Iran Air flight. The pre-flight saftey instructions are given in both farsi and english, I was a little surprised. The meal was quite american, it consisted of a bologna and cheese sandwich, choclate cake, yogurt and a juice box. I’m getting a few stares, but not as many as I expected.

We arrive in Shiraz and some of my wife’s family are at the airport to greet us. They were very nice and so happy to see us. To get home we took one taxi, my sister-in-laws car and my brother-in-laws. I rode with my brother-in-law. He understands and speaks a litte english and I understand and speak a litte farsi so we communicated quite well. He gave me the $5 tour of Shiraz so we drove by most of the main sites of Shiraz, including the famous gate to the city. I have lots of video of our ride, I may post some of it here. I arrived to my sister-in-laws house, whew! in addition to their in-floor toilet they have a sitdown one as well, that’s good news.

This entry was posted on 26. March 2008 at 11:38 and is filed under Experiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.