Yazd / Iran

Alexander's Prison

Qanat (tunnels going down in the ground to bring water up from the depths of the earth)

Badgir (Antique air-conditioning)

These huge structures are carried over the shoulders on a certain religious mourning day.

I travelled to Yazd by the night bus. Bus left two hours later than the scheduled time, arriving at 8:00 in the morning to Yazd. I went over to the trainstation the first thing, found out that there weren't any trains to Tahran for that evening, and went back to the bus terminal to get a ticket. I spotted two guys at the ticket office, who were obviously tourists and were on the same bus as me coming to Yazd. We started up a conversation and found out that we all had the same plans of visiting Yazd for the day and traveling to Tahran at night. We decided to go around together, but first needed to find a storage place to leave our heavy backpacks to. By a new language I invented through mixing Farsi, Turkish, English, and sign languages we succeeded in finding a storage for the day. We left our backpacks and headed over to the city center.

One of the guys in our team, named Lucas, is Polish, and planning on going back to his country after visiting Iran and Turkey. The other guy is Hungarian, and he's on a longer trip like me that covers South Asian countries. Hungarian guy is fluent in English and very talkative, so he keeps talking about random stuff. He has degrees in Geography and Tourism, after teaching geography for two years he decides that his teaching sallary will not be sufficient to allow him to travel the world, so he quits and gets a job at a hotel. I feel sad for him for not being able to teach after listening to him talk so passionately and enthusiastically about geography and his students. He's also very knowledgable about linguistics. Gives us a long lecture on the similarities between Turkish and Hungarian, and the Turkish words they have in their language.

Yazd has been the most interesting city for me in Iran. It's a city in the middle of the desert that integrates and becomes a whole with the desert. One feels in a dreamland walking the streets of the old city. With its mud brick houses, narrow streets, domes, arches, and channels it's come to our day without the slightest change through centuries. Naturally, it's not possible to make such claims for the new city that's been growing around the old city. After stepping a foot on every street of Yazd (well, almost) we go back to the terminal to catch our busses.