(soft upbeat music)
- After showing you around
the sites and attractions
in Iran in my video series
I want to give you some
tips and insights about traveling
Iran independently in this episode.
For this, I sat down with my buddy David
in a cafe in Shiraz during our trip
and answered some of the most
frequent questions we get.
Moreover, I put together a comprehensive
travel guide for Iran on my blog
with all information needed.
You can find the link
in the info box below.
So, first things first, taxi drivers.
Like, there are many things
which are different in Iran,
but taxi drivers it's more or
less like in Europe, right?
It's actually quite funny,
because the taxi drivers
when you walking through
the streets, I guess everybody is assuming
that you're a tourist,
so you're pretty lazy
so you don't want to actually walk.
Even so, for example, here
in Shiraz it's a really
walkable city, so you can easily get
from place to place in like
10 minute, 20 minute walk
you can get to all the major attractions.
But, when you walk,
like every, every minute
someone is driving by
horning, honking at you,
saying taxi, taxi, you
want to take the taxi?
And then it's way overpriced
than it should be.
If you don't speak Farsi,
then it's really hard
to negotiate a price, so
you should ask a local
how much it would be for
the distance, and then you
should stick to this price.
In Tehran, you can use Snapp
and the metro are quite
easy, so you don't actually
have to take a cab.
And, I found that the unofficial taxi,
so basically everyone here
in Iran can be a taxi driver
so, someone with a
private car can just like,
drive by and say like, if
you want to come with him
and you give him some money
and I found them to be way cheaper.
And they were also really nice.
- Yeah, they were really
nice, but I think you
have to, when you are
talking to the taxi driver,
or the private drivers, you have to make
a fixed price before.
- Yeah, that's really important.
- So.
- Before you get in,
you should fix a price.
- Yeah, because afterwords,
you can't say anything.
- The next thing, which
is really special for Iran
is all their prices are in toman
so you have, as a currency
here, you have rial,
which is basically, 40,000 rial is like
one euro, but they say it in toman,
and toman is one zero
less, so they say like
4,000 toman and 4,000 toman
is actually 40,000 rial.
Which is kind of
confusing, it's not really
easy for tourists, when
you haggle, when it's about
prices it can be really
confusing and at the end
you maybe end up paying
ten times more because you
weren't really calculating that.
Another thing which we encountered here
walking through Iran, is like when you
walk through the streets
it smells like gas.
This is kind of weird but I guess like
all the heating and like
for the cooking and stuff
they use gas and there
are gas lines all over,
and you have these little, I
don't know what it's called
but you have these little
things hanging out of
the buildings everywhere
and they are leaking
so when you walk through the streets you
actually smell gas and here in Shiraz,
you also smell oranges.
So the smell is quite interesting.
- It's a mixture orange and gas.
- Yeah, but I guess they
have so much gas here
it's like a really oil rich country,
so gas is not really expensive
but it's yeah, it's
one of the first things
we noticed when we walked through Tehran,
it was like smelling like gas.
Okay, nicer topics, the people
I guess like the people,
beside all the monuments
and attractions you've seen,
the most, yeah, would say like the,
one of the most important reasons why you
should visit Iran, really
nice people you will
meet here on your walks
through the streets.
And one of the most popular questions
you will get is where are you from?
So you walk through the streets,
and when you look like
us, like western tourists
obviously, everybody is interested in you
and they come up to talk to you
because most of these people here, I mean,
most of the young people
they learn English
and they want to improve their English
so it's a great way to
interact with foreigners
and as traveling abroad
is really expensive,
it is always a good opportunity
to practice your English
with a foreigner when you're
not able to travel yourself.
What do you think about it?
- Yeah, definitely I think
the people are always,
you know they always come
up to you offer their help.
They want to give you
advices to any questions
you have about Iran.
- Another thing, when you are here in Iran
we highly recommend
getting a local sim card,
because data out here
is really, really cheap.
About 600,000 for like
two weeks of traveling
is not too bad 600,000 is like 15 euros
for a sim card, for data
for calling, and I really
highly recommend that
because it's easy to use
Google maps to get around,
and then you should
also install the app
Telegram, besides What'sapp
so you can communicate with
the locals and you have
a local sim card so you
have a local number.
And, this is also one of
those questions you get
when you get in touch with locals who come
up to you, to talk to you, for example
when you hang out in a park and then
you, yeah, you can
communicate with them and
they maybe invite you for a tea.
Or, we actually use tele
a lot to ask for help
if we have, like, for example
problems with reading Farsi
and then we can just easily ask them
to translate that for us.
In your cellphone, you
should also have the Farsi
keyboard activated,
that's pretty easy to do.
Let's talk about taroof.
Yeah, taroof is actually a word for,
it's like a special thing
you have here in Iran,
and people say they don't want
to have money for something.
But you need to ask twice,
or even three times,
and they will always no, no, it's for free
and then at the end they
will mention the price.
And we actually, yeah, we
have a taroof experience.
So we have this guy coming
with us, he was actually
guiding us through the
bazaar, he was guiding us
through Shiraz, it was just like half
an hour or something, or an
hour, and we asked in between
like how much do you want
to have for guiding us?
And we thought, because he said
he learned German in school
and he wanted to just
to practice his German.
So we thought, okay, he can come with us
and we just want to do
this and this and this
and he explained some stuff.
And he also showed us a
really cool place where
you can smoke water pipe.
- Water pipe, also
called, what was the name?
Hookah.
- Hookah.
- H-O-O-K-A- H.
So, hookah, we smoked hookah,
- Like in a really traditional,
place, really local place.
And it was a different kind of hookah,
it wasn't like a standard, water pipe,
it was like a wooden
stick, like a wooden pipe
you stick on the--
- Yeah, on the thing.
- On the thing
and it was like natural tabac.
Not like, apple.
- [Man] Shisha, right, shisha.
- Shisha, yeah, not like in
apple tobacco or orange tobacco
it was like a natural tobacco.
- Really strong.
- It was really, really strong.
- [Man] Really strong.
- And it was like, yeah,
you had to drink some
black tea afterwords.
- Yeah, a lot of sugar
to make up for that.
But the thing about that was the guy
was actually telling us,
yeah, everything is for free.
For you, no, no problem, I
will show you a bit around
and stuff when we were
sitting at that tea place
he told us, he asked us for the tip.
And the tip was like one million.
One million rial?
- Yeah, like when we were
smoking the water pipe
he was like, out of nowhere, he was like
hey guys, um, yeah, can
you give me a tip now
and we were expecting like, how much,
like 200,000 rials, maybe?
- Which is five euros.
- Five euros, which is already, like a lot
for how long did you show us around?
Like an hour, half an hour?
And he was like, yeah,
500,000 rials for each person.
- For each, which means one
million, is like 25 euros.
Which like would normally
be cool when you do
a big tour or something
like that in Europe,
and in Iran maybe like a half day tour.
Just to put into perspective,
we've just been to Persepolis,
which is like a one hour drive from here
and we took a cab.
We haggled the price with the cab driver,
so it's like one hour
from here to Persepolis
and back and we stayed two hours there
so it was like all together four hours
and we paid for that cab about that price.
Like 900,000 we paid for that cab.
So for this half an hour
it was quite a lot to ask
for so and this is one
of those traps you should
be aware of, the thing
which is called taroof.
You should say like no
taroof, so they understand
that you, that they shouldn't
do this kind of thing
or that you mean it that
you want to really know
if it's for free or not, so
you should say no taroof.
Selfies, so a lot of people
actually come up to you
because you look European
and Iran, they really
look up to the Europeans or like people
western looking people
and it's the same thing
I experience in Argentina.
They are really looking to Europe
and they want to also go
to Europe at some point.
And they are really looking
up to the people in Europe.
And so you have a lot of
people actually asking you
if you want to take selfies with them.
I guess until now I took
at least 15 or 20 selfies
within one week with a lot of people.
Which is, which is really
nice, I mean that is
like the thing about Iran, the people here
are just so nice.
The food is really good.
I mean, if you, you
really should really find
out what is the special
food for each region.
For example, we were in Ispahan,
there they eat biryani, here we eat
what was it called?
Gobera sabshi, or something like that?
- [Man] Yeah, which you
ate yesterday, right?
- Ya, and Falloda, which is the--
- Here is the original falloda.
- Here's the original falloda, no the best
falloda they say is here
this is like the spaghetti type stuff.
Traveling with someone else, also helps
because you can actually share
those awkward moments with.
- And you have a little back up like
when you're like, confused
and you don't know where,
what to do, where to go.
- Thank you David!
- It's quite interesting
and it's fun country
to travel because it still
feels like real travel in Iran.
It's not like everything's
convenient and stuff you need
to talk with your hands a lot,
and it's not easy to
get around with English.
But that makes it a lot of fun actually.
To round up the video,
you should definitely
visit Iran for the people and the food.
Also for the monuments,
and you should do it as
fast as possible before
this country gets too
touristic because you can
already see a little of
the impact right now.
But for now, it's a great country to visit
and if you have the chance to get a visa
you should definitely do it.
- Now is the time.
- Now is the time.
(soft upbeat music)
