Two nights in Tabriz - <!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } -->The hotel we are in is pretty shabby and has one shared toilet for a whole floor and no showers, but hey, it's a bed. Today we walked around the bazaar for a while - it's pretty big but nowhere near as frantic as the one in Istanbul. We didn't get hassled at all to buy things, just wandered up to look at bits and pieces. Bought a few things to try to fit in a bit better. Most of the women there wear a huge piece of light, black fabric draped around them, which they have to hold shut all the time and looks quite annoying. Other young women wear black coats and look quite fashionable. It also seems quite liberal here as a lot of women just have their scarf tied over their head and have quite a lot of hair showing at the front.

We had hamburgers for lunch as food places seemed a bit scarce. Everything is so cheap here - it only cost 50000 rial (about US$5) for 5 hamburgers and a drink each... only trouble is that the money is so inflated that you have to carry around a huge wedge of it in your purse.

Shane and I ran into a group of a few others who were being taken to a tea room by a local tour guide guy. It was inside a shopping area, upstairs - we would never have found it and as it was full of men , Heather and I probably wouldn't have gone in if the guy hadn't said it was okay. We had tea (just normal black tea) and smoked a couple of nargile (I'm not sure what they are called in Farsi) for a little while, before heading up to the Blue Mosque. The mosque used to be covered in blue decorated tiles, but it was badly damaged in an earthquake in the 1700s and has only just been rebuilt. There are still some decorated areas remaining inside and there have been parts painted back on where bits are missing.

The boys watched a bit of football at the hotel (important Man U - Arsenal game, couldn't miss that) while we waited to go out again in the evening. At about 8 a big group piled into as many taxis as we could fit into and headed out to the Park to see if the fair was still on. What a crazy taxi ride! He just changed lanes randomly and passed people on either side, tooting and flashing lights.. it was great fun if a little scary. Shane, Amy, Jasper and I didn't think we were going to find any of the others when we got to the park, so we just went into a pizza place for Amy and Jasper to get something to eat before we headed over to the fair Unfortunately it didn't look anywhere near as busy as it had been the previous night, but we still went in for a look around. It cost us 3000 to get in, then we went on the ferris wheel and the viking ship, which were about 5000 each and like a watered-down version of fun. The viking ship wasn't going very high but the girls opposite us were screaming - I guess the rides in western theme parks are a bit hard-core by world standards. We had icecream and tried out a couple of the sideshow games, although one guy tried to charge us a load for one of them (we think he was just after money from the tourists). We were like a tourist attraction ourselves - people followed us around and girls giggled - it was weird. I guess they don't get many tourists around here! In general the people are really friendly and they all know how to ask "where you are from?" and they always say "welcome!" afterwards. Quite a lot of people speak a bit of english and most know the important stuff like numbers and "how much?" and that... we are still working on learning some farsi.

We eventually got a taxi back to the hotel at about 11.. another long day but good fun. Tabriz isn't the nicest looking city and there's not a lot to see, but the people are really nice and it was a good introduction to Iran. The headscarf thing is pretty annoying and I don't think we will ever fit in and look like locals, but I'm getting used to it all.