My hotel was in the old part of the city, located adjacent to the mosque shown above. I gave Mehdi the afternoon off and went all over town on my own to get a feel of things. At one point I met up with some more guys that wanted their picture taken and as usual the question of where are you from came up and I answered. This time it turned out that the guys were Iraqi refugees living in Iran due to the problems back in Iraq. They were all very nice to me and it was not an uncomfortable situation. I got back to the hotel and got Mehdi and we went off to witness an Iranian gymnasium ritual. It was a very interesting display where a drummer bangs away on a drum (great drummer) and singing an interesting sounding song and in the center of what sort of looks like a boxing ring but round in shape were 8 men and they were answering the drummer’s calls and doing a performance. I took some short videos of this more because of the drummer and his song than the performance. Afterwards I met up with the Aussie girls and New Zealand guy (they were at the same performance) and told them I was going to try some Iranian ice creams and we ended up going for ice cream then to a sugar factory that takes beet sugar and heats it up a to a molten liquid and pours it into what look like huge frying pans. After the sugar cools it is shipped out as large round disks that are later broken into crystals. Another smaller factory did a similar process with regular sugar but instead made small bollard shaped castings for shipping purposes. The owners of these businesses saw us walking by with our cameras and invited us in to take a look.
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