Home > Notebook > Recommended Daily Dose of Colours Has Not Been Reached

There are about fourteen million people living in Tehran. It is all concrete and full of mad traffic and smog. But it is not worse than, say, Jakarta. Only the fast moving motorcycles on the pavements are special and not seen anywhere else. As elsewhere in Iran the shops selling same stuff are next to each other. So you have quarter where they sell car parts (that's where I stay), in next one it's only cameras, in yet another one you buy man's shoes only. Almost all shops feature red or green neon in the display window, progressive ones have strobe lights and one was luring customers with beeping. And because everything is bigger here, even these quarters are bigger. And that's quite bothersome since restaurants and fastfood joints are usually situated on the fringes of these.

They have three metro lines, red (#1), blue (#2) and green (#5). But they are only two, really, as the green is extension of the blue. Some station remind metro in Paris, others – after covering in marble – could hide on line C in Prague and nobody would notice. Doors close with such power that they would easily break and possibly cut off your fingers – stickers on them tell you so.

Tehran lack colouts. Everything is gray and dirty yellow and only the shop signs provide little colour. Cars as everywhere in Iran appear in only few un-colours: white, black, gray, silver, very dark blue and very dark green.

I admit, quite reluctantly, that the weather is hot here. The air does not move and even if it did it would not help. Locals say it is fourty degrees Celsius so the unlikely breeze would be more like hair dryer. What's more, the air gets heated from the tarmac and concrete, pavements and buildings feel like a furnace radiating heat.

Some of the water dykes along the pavements are monstrously huge and given the chance they could swallow a truck.