The longest day...ever.

Ah, safely in Iran. All ten fingers, all ten toes. Yay!

My travels up to this point have been quite exciting, actually. We almost missed the cutoff for checking our ten suitcases at O'Hare because we were packing suitcases till literally 5 minutes before we left, but we made it just fine. Flight went off without any problems, (Lufthansa is great, I highly recommend), but when we landed, again the Ghadiri procrastination gene reared it's ugly head. As we left so close to school ending, none of us had a chance to really do good research about Germany and Frankfurt and the surrounding area. We always schedule an 8-12 hour layover in whatever country we travel through to get to Iran so we can go wander around and have some fun. My mom had a student this past semester from Germany, and her student recommended that instead of staying in Frankfurt, we should travel to Heidelberg, which is an hour and a half train ride south of Frankfurt. It was a good recommendation, but we had some issues with figuring out tickets and such. This is where Sara saved the day. Her four years of German were basically the only reason we didn't end up getting stuck in the airport. Yes, people in Germany can speak English, but not all of them, and not all of them very well. It wasn't like in Holland or Switzerland where everyone we talked to basically spoke English. Anyways, we got on the train to Heidelberg at around 7:50am to begin our ziptour of Heidelberg.
I really loved the architecture of the houses we passed as we were on the train. There were TONS of solar panels on a good number of houses as we were passing them in the countryside. I also did not expect most of the houses to have terracotta shingles—I have no idea why I expected them to have roofs more similar to ones in the US. Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked. We arrived in Heidelberg around 9:30. I should point out at this time, none of us had really slept on the 8 hour plane ride from Chicago, and it was the wee hours of the morning at this point in our journey. We realized on the train that we were pulling our first family all-nighter. Made me miss Grinnell. What this family all-nighter meant was a grumpy family for part of the morning, but in the long run, it paid off because my sleep schedule now that I'm in Iran is all fixed already. Internet here is dialup for now so I am not going to even try to upload pictures. Heidelberg, however, is beautiful. The castle is really awesome and old and ruin-y and has a BILLION stairs to get up to it because we didn't want to pay the 5 euro for a round trip ride up, and the Alstadt (old city) is quite picturesque. Sara had a ball in Bismarkplatz because all the parties had fliers out so of course she had to go and talk to each one and get all their pamphlets. She then proceeded to geek out over everyone. I have no recollection regarding our return train to Frankfurt because I passed out for most of the ride. What I do remember was people watching on the train. I was watching this mother and three children, and I was listening to the language they were speak and they were speaking Kurdish! It was really cool.

Now to the Iran part. I zonked out on the plane there to Tehran and we flew into the new airport, surprisingly named Imam Khomeini International Airport, arriving at 1:30am. It was really nice. A significant contingent of our family met us at the airport and the second we walked out of customs I was swathed in hugs and kisses and flowers. Everyone was so excited to see me, so my ego is currently nicely fluffed. I promptly fell asleep when I crawled into bed around 3:30ish. My first full day in Iran, I had fresh Iranian bread with cream and peanut butter and I never want to eat American food that's not peanutbutter ever again. Misha and I went out with my uncle and cousin shopping to their sort of equivalent of a Dominicks but is everywhere like walmart and bought the ugliest trash can ever it has what we have dubbed "the Snamster" because its like this ugly squirrel thing that looks more like a hamster and with a snail shell behind it. By the time we were back a small army of people had congregated here to say hello. I love it here. It's just amazing. I had a conversation with my cousin about ancient cultures and anthropology and totally geeked out. All the worry I had about my Farsi skills horribly lacking, and here I am talking about anthropological theory with my cousin. It was just stellar. I love Iran. The food, the people, the traffic and pollution not so much, but I am so happy I'm here.

I'll attempt to update about things sometime in the next couple days. Love you all dearly.
&hugs,
Mona