like the grape

shiraz is a living and breathing city with tons of old buildings and...other old stuff, fancy castles and such. very impressive. the city has a nice feel, artsy. and it's fairly alive. we saw the slum, the fancy parts - a good overview.

we are staying with Emads friends family, they have a big nice flat. and the elevator in their building plays instrumental versions of 80s ballads. the father of the family was a pilot in the war against Iraq and is now retired. he got his pilot education in the US back when Iran wasn't ...like this.



we spent the morning and noon in the bus, coming from Isfahan. took about 6,5h and we slept most of it. we almost missed the bus as we were first directed to the wrong terminal (Kaveh) at the other end of the city. we took a 25min taxi drive to the Soffi terminal, and the bus had graciously waited for us, they had been informed we were coming. anyway, the bus didn't even start immediately after our arrival, they tend to be late here.

we ate a lunch in a fancy local restaurant. but the portions in Iran are humongous... we can never finish. later we had coffee & ice cream in a very modern (steel, glass, dark wood, stone) Café, where they had a wifi!!! our dinner was pizza in a local fast food place. it was not very good unfortunately, pizza is popular here but it doesn't suite my taste very well. the ice cream in Iran is suberb though, oddly enough hard to find in turkey as Turks have developed their own ice cream recipe.

tomorrow we r planning to go to Persepolis, Emad is our guide. and we realized that some of our earlier plans for exiting the country through Urmia are not doable, we had wrong info. i was then counting on trains but train connections dont exist, or they run on the wrong days. checked flights too, again, wrong days and times. so we need to take a bus from Shiraz to Tabriz, which is 20+ god damn hours, and from there another bus or shared taxi to Van, crossing the border, which is 8h. and due to schedules, we need to leave Shiraz as early as Friday afternoon 1:30pm - to make it to Van by 3pm on Sunday which is when our flight leaves. a lot of bus traveling coming up. and I don't like it. but if we get to Van by Saturday night, maybe we get to see some of it. short and superficial excursions are exactly my specialty. I look inside a mosque/castle/park and I go like "ok"and then im ready to leave. I don't know what's wrong with me, why am I so horribly uncivilized and 'dull'. ive always been like that :(

i read that there was another earthquake near Van. :(