The first thing (beside the beautiful new airport) that hit me when we were driving on the road, was how people drive, I mean it just very different,  after getting used to driving in U.S. , the shock factor after seeing the driving in Iran is huge, I mean you just can’t compare the two together. The roads are somewhat the same but following the path by drivers is not possible, even if a driver wants to obey the rules and drive between the lines, it’s just impossible.

The other thing was the many building and too many skyscrapers that were build and there are more in progress. 

The other thing was the timer on the traffic lights; it just keeps getting more interesting (in a strange way) as we are riding in the car. The timer for red light is 3 minutes, and for green is one minute. So what do you think a driver, stopping behind a red light for 3 long minutes, will do after the light turns green?  Well you guessed it, pressing on the gas pedal like there is no tomorrow!  And do you expect this driver to respect other drivers and share the road?

When we got to secondary roads, the traffic lights got interesting, most of them were blinking, and I thought like here, after 11:00 pm, all the lights in smaller roads become blinking lights, and I thought to myself that’s very interesting, but i guessed wrong, the lights like that all the time in the busy road, and don't underestand why is that!

After all these years I was so excited to find out everything and anything about everybody, you know just get updates from everybody’s life. I knew bits and pieces but being there and talking to them was so much better. We got to my sister’s house and dear Emaan made us some fresh tea, it was very good. We were so tired that we couldn’t sleep so we sat and chat for few hours, and then we had to get some sleep if we didn’t want to get sick on this historical trip!

Landing in Tehran

It was very exiting and overwhelming, I was worried and happy at the same time. I don't know but thinking about seeing my family after all this time made me very anxious. Finally we landed at Tehran's airport after 4 hours flight, @ 1:00 am on Tuesday July 12. We wanted to get out of the airplane as soon as posible, but that's not how they had planned for us! After 30 minutes we were finally at the stairs to get on the shuttle to go to the airport but then again, it is Iran and everyrthing is different there, there was only one shuttle and it got filled quickly and we had to wait for the next one! Anyway, we got to the airport after 30 more minutes, there was a long line to go through the gates! after another hour, we finally were cleared to enter Iran :) We took the escalator to go down stairs to claim our luggage, then behind the glass wall my wonderful family were standing. I got so exited that I forgot about our luggage and went toward the glass wall and after a brief inaudible communication, I went to get the luggage. It seemed that everything was moving in slow motion, I wanted to go and hug my family but i had to wait and wait and wait, why this line is not moving???? Finally we were greeted with hugs and kisses and more hugs. It was such a nice feeling, we were in Iran and with our family :)

Landed in Germany

After 8 and half hours, we landed in Frankfurt. We had 2 hours until our next flight, so we walked around, took some pictures, and eat some expensive food!

The food was from McDonald's but since we didn't have euro, we had to spent dollars, a meal from dollar menu cost us $17!

Continue

We got to the airport @ 3:30pm and after waiting in line, we found out that our plane to Chicago is going to be delayed, so they change our plane to Washington instead, we were ok with that as long as we can get to our second flight. Well everything went well, except they forgot to mention (or we forgot) that there is an hour time difference, by the time we got to Washington airport, we had only 30 minutes to get to our next flight, long story short, we had only few minutes to spare by the time we got to our plane!

Hello again after a long time. This time I hope I can continue writing and keep up with this blog. I am going to share some of my highlights of my trip to Iran this summer.

After 8 long years I finally was able to travel to Iran and visit my family and friends. Not that I had any problem that prevented me to travel to Iran, it just didn't happened, getting everybody in a same schedule and making plans it's very hard, but after all these times we (me and my son Mortaza) were able to plan our trip to Iran.

After buying our tickets, and making certain that we are actually going, we started packing our luggage, at least I did, Mortaza waited until the last minute! :)

And on Sunday July the 10th, at 3:30 pm we were at the airport to start our journey.