Walking in the foothills of Tehran

So I arrived in Tehran yesterday (Thursday) and met up with John and Mary Smith who flew over from Kuwait a day early to make the schedules work.  I flew in a day early to deal with Jet lag.  I spent most of Thursday walking around the immediate area near my hotel.  But after reading the Lonely Planet guide talked the Smith's into going for a walk up Durban in the foothills Friday.  According to the Lonely Planet it sounded like a nice leisurely walk.

As it turned out it was basically a hike up a mountain on a slightly muddy trail but the weather was pleasant so we decided to continue the hike and walked up for the next two hours.  But then BAM after we had climbed quite a bit we started hitting intermittent small amounts of snow.

Which caused us to re-evaluate the hike idea and instead we stopped for Tea and Coffee while we waited for the rain/snow mixture to lighten up. After an hour of socializing and pictures with the group next to us we headed back down the mountain to avoid the recently suspect and rather cold weather.  Walking down was quicker and after just an hour the sun had come out and we came across this restaurant over the river which we couldn't pass up.  Since it was lunch time we decided to grab a bite to eat and hang out on the river.

We quickly realized that this menu would be a bit hard to work out but with a little bit of perseverance and some bad acting we managed to order some chicken and some lamb with rice.

I am proud of the fact that after being in the city for a day I can already read the numbers no problem which will at least let me order by cost.  As we spent the next two hours having a relaxing lunch in the sun and feeding the ducks we all come to the conclusion that initial bad weather aside we were glad we had made the hike.

We made it back to the hotel in time to get an hour break before the rest of our group showed up.  We used the time to make friends with the hotel Parrot and an Iranian American who ended up buying all of us dinner.  Tomorrow we will head out around Tehran to a couple museums and then hop on a flight to Shiraz (Yes the original home of Shiraz wine though all the vines have been torn out since the revolution)

I'll post more next time I have Internet.

-Cyrus