As I got information about other tours being in the same price range or not sure or not in a proper length, I accepted Meg’s organization and started a 7 days road trip in the Gobi. One driver with his…
Ulaan Baatar
The airport there appeared me to be very tiny, and I was quickly outside. At midnight, I had to take a taxi to downtown, first to my CS host place, but I couldn’t reach him since it was a wrong…
Iran to Mongolia via Beijing
I flew with China Southern Airlines from Tehran to Beijing with one hour stop in Urumqi. I let made a transit visa in Urumqi to avoid touching the entries of my Chinese Visa. This is actually useless, since my visa…
Economic situation in Iran
Targol and Massoud are both Project Managers in respectively telecommunication and IT security companies, are mid 30 and are married for 14 years without child. They have a good situation (upper middle class) they get before Ahmadinejad became president (2005).…
Language and French influence
The language spoken in Iran is called Farsi or Persian. It is an Indo-European language and while written with Arabic alphabet, it is not related to Arabic at all. It was funny to me to hear some words that sound…
Internet, online banking and censure in Iran
Internet is filtered by the government; some web sites like Facebook are blocked (since the Arabic Spring). Other services are limited from western countries, I think here about online payment. I had to renew the hosting of my website while…
Women and Islam
I’d like first to enumerate some terms defining how the women are covered, in order: headscarf < hijab (you saw the whole face) < chador (the extension of the hijab to cover the whole body until the toes, usually black)…
Iran’s political system
As an Islamic theology, Iran has a very particular political system, which can be split in 2 parts to simplify it: the “normal” democratic branch with elected presidency (now Ahmadinejad) and parliament; and the Guardian Council. The Guardian Council is…
Iran, Behind the scene
On the surface, Iran is beautiful and wonderful. After some discussions with Iranians, you however better understand the political and economical situation. The economy is however in a bad situation, on the down side, everybody told me “it is going…
Last days in Tehran
When we arrive, we were supposed to go to our CS host respectively, but we figured out we had the same! As the metro is closing before 11pm in Tehran, we arrived too late. So we shared a taxi to…