Tehran, part 2

-11. Even though this is part II I will take you to the first impression I got from the airport (all my flights were nearly fully booked, so yeah, the Iranians do get permission to leave their country). I had a Visa-on-arrival arranged for me (tourists should not need a Visa, but a travel plan might be required) but before I could get my Visa I had to get the mandatory insurance - even though you have one of your own, this is a mandatory step. Costs something like 7€ for two weeks, 20€ for a month (about).

When you have the insurance, you go queuing for the Visa - or hope to get the attention of the man standing in front of the Visa officials who then takes your passport further. When this is done, you go to another queue and pay 75€ for the Visa. Next you wait for someone to shout out your name - now your passport is updated with the Visa. So this took close to one hour, but this of course depends on how many foreigners arrived on your plane.

On my firs entry I managed to select wrong luggage pic up point (there are only two of them, so the airport is not that big) and since the Visa procedure took as long as it took, there was no info about my flight anymore.. Anyhow, I was able to enter the second luggage collection point (which would not succeed in many European airports at least).

Then I could finally go and ask for a car - my hotel arranged a taxi for me; a VIP taxi (Toyota RAV4 is VIP level).

And going by taxi to the city centre is about one additional hour - 25€. There shall soon be metro access though.

-12. Then about the food - a very important topic :)

In Tehran at least the most restaurant/lunch places are serving kebab - but not what I expected at least - as it is not the Turkish style of kebab. It comes with rice (extra order) or bread (which always belongs to a meal - freshly made).

All meat is available for you except pork, here a lamb kebab:

And a bread, specially prepared by the chef for us - they didn't all look this fancy :)

All meals we had were served with grilled tomatoes and fresh onions and at least one grilled chilli pepper - some hot, some very hot.

You can even get a beer to go with your food - but that would of course be a non-alcoholic one.

Some more traditional Iranian cousine - we had one of our customer's employee showing us around - a very commonly made soup where you first mash the meat yourself and then it it all with bread.

I felt very international when I had a Cesar salad in Tehran at a restaurant at Gandhi road:

You can even get very tasty burgers in Tehran - this is just one example:

My best dinner I had at the SÓL Cafe - grilled salmon:

This dish though went up to almost 25€.

BTW, you can also get all the Coca Cola Company products in Tehran - the real coke licensed since 2007.

-13. Then be careful when shopping in Iran. This country is not part of the agreement to fight agains copyright infringements. You can get sneakers that are labelled both Nike and Adidas if you want to... In the hotel lobby I noticed that they had a set of clocks on the wall showing times in different major cities. I first thought it was Casio clocks, but when looking a little closer - the font was right, but it actually said "Gasio".

And if you fancy a filled bread, you don't go to SubWay but there is a "FreshWay" instead. You can probably guess the size of the characters.

And this coffee place might not be what you expect it to be:

This shot I took in July 2016 - already November 2016 the name had changed -
hmm... :)

How many of you have heard about "Royal Bucks Coffee"?

Coming up - part III - some of the sights I managed to check out.