Arriving in Iran from Pakistan is like arriving in a totally different world. All of a sudden there is more tar than potholes on the roads, there is electricity a luxurious 24 hours, there is shops selling more than one type of ice-cream. The abrupt onslaught of modernity makes you almost feel like you have arrived in super-consumerist America.
Albeit in the guise of phantoms all draped in black, there is groups of women on the streets everywhere here (after Quetta, the super-conservative last Pakistani town before the border this almost comes as a surprise!), women go to work or even keep their own shops, while some of their young husbands help do the dishes. And –believe it or not- as long as I have most (/some) of my hair covered as the state wants, no one finds much reason to be shocked or perv about the fact that the outline of my breasts through a long-sleeved shirt can be seen.

(Given the fact that I have blogged already three times until now about the tits-in-shirts issue, this seems to be to me the point that, no matter how negligeable in practical significance, epitomizes just how repressed and in consequence crookedly mysoginist Pakistani society really is…)