For this year's spring break, the two of us, as well as fellow freshmen Adrienne Chang, Prashant Sharma, Andrei Stoica and senior Alberto Manca, were set on spending ten days touring Iran.

We had already booked our tickets, but throughout March, every time we told someone about our spring break plans, we were met with incredulous looks and comments that ranged from, “That’s so cool, I’ve always wanted to go there!” to “Are you guys sure about that?” to the following post-it left by a worried roommate:

Driving into the capital through a grey and cold highway – though not before passing a military tank on display near the airport – we were surprised by the abundance of vegetation around us. “It’s not a desert, after all,” someone from our group commented. Many of us only had the UAE as a comparison model for the region, so we had few ideas about what to expect. Later on we would experience many different climate changes as we traveled around the country. From snow to sand dunes, we experienced it all.

Walking in search of a cheaper hotel, we bumped into dead-end highways, saw rats swimming in sewage systems and glimpsed a man shooting up in a deserted alley. We smelled roasting chickens by the sidewalks and glanced at Persian carpet shops that we couldn’t afford. “This almost looks postapocalyptic,” one of us commented, while another one of us else was reminded of her travels through Southeastern Europe.

Returning to the city after finally finding a hotel, we found that the dynamics had completely changed. Night-time city life became more visible, and local vendors laid out their merchandise across the paved roads, attracting bustling crowds with Farsi slogans. By the time we entered a supermarket nearby, we were truly aware that Iran, unlike Abu Dhabi, is not designed for a strong immigrant community.

Even prices were listed in Perso-Arabic script, which none of us could decipher that first day. We gathered some cheap-looking items and went back to curl up in a cluster of beds that counted fewer than the number of our group.

Although the hotel had wireless internet, it worked very slowly as we spent about an hour trying to contact our family back home. When we tried to use our phones, an automated response told us each time that the numbers we were dialing were wrong, and that we should not try to call again.

But the technical difficulties, on second thought, gave us a chance to focus on what was right in front of us. It was also a wake-up call that spoke to our reliance on the internet and how useless our fancy phones had become; they could not even make calls.

Despite having been advised by the officer at the airport visa desk to stay longer in Teheran, as most touristy cities would be fully booked because of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, the following morning we boarded our first bus towards Hamedan.

The bus was surprisingly clean and comfortable given that it only cost around $7 per person. From the Hamedan bus station, we took a couple of taxis towards Ali Sadr, the world’s largest water cave. Though a large group, we surprisingly managed to stick together and were only separated once.

Because there were six of us, as well as a considerable amount of luggage, we had taken two taxis to Ali Sadr. When Prashant and the two of us arrived at Ali Sadr, the rest of our group was nowhere to be found. We decided that they would probably arrive in several minutes, but half an hour passed without any sign of them. In the end, we finally managed to find each other after spending an hour desperately searching around the Ali Sadr complex.

Ali Sadr, the biggest water cave in the world, is something truly indescribable.

After our visit to the cave, we took a couple of taxis back towards the city. Indeed, the hotels were mostly booked, and those that weren’t were out of our price range.

This was when we first came into contact with the Iranians’ incredible brand of hospitality. One of the taxi drivers, a guy who seemed to be barely 20 years old, dropped us off at the home of one of his colleagues for our first carpet-surfing experience. After a night on the floor, we were offered traditional breakfast in the morning, made of flat bread with feta cheese and jam, as well as tea.

We then got on a bus towards Kermanshah. At one point during the ride, a woman in front of us offered us some cucumbers. We started talking, and it turned out that she was traveling back home to Kermanshah together with her three-year-old daughter and her two younger sisters.

Although the youngest and oldest sisters hardly spoke any English, the middle sister was able to facilitate our conversation, translating from English to Farsi and back. Proving Iran’s hospitality yet again, the sisters asked us if we would like to eat lunch at the older sister’s home.

Not only did the sisters host us for lunch, a traditional meal of rice with vegetables and beef and a lovely dessert consisting of a popular Iranian sweet, sohan, but we were also asked to stay for dinner and celebrate the elder sister’s daughter’s birthday.

We were surprised by how open the girls were with us. By dinner time, all of the sisters had taken off their hijabs, even though half of us could have been classified as strange men. The middle sister told us about the alarming numbers of Iranian women who went through rhinoplasty and lip augmentation procedures, and claimed that the practice was extremely harmful, especially since many of these cheap operations later cause respiratory issues and other physical problems. Indeed, throughout our time in Iran, we noticed quite a lot of plaster-covered noses.

The sister revealed her dreams of continuing her English studies at university, and then learning German soon after. She told us she wanted to leave the country because she did not feel free, a term she used loosely. She had only ever visited Germany in the past, and said it was a country that she would like to move to.

During the afternoon we visited Taq-e Bostan, a series of well-preserved rock reliefs.

We then spent our second night sleeping on more carpets, in the main room of our new friends. The following morning, after yet another traditional breakfast, we decided to leave Kermanshah.

Leaving Kermanshah wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. We boarded a beat-up minivan after negotiating a reasonable price, only to be left on the sidewalk approaching a highway. We tried to make sense of our driver’s mumblings, who pointed toward two other cab drivers, who had also stopped and wanted to take us for exorbitant costs. We were already far away from the bus stop we had wanted to depart from. Taking two cabs would have been too expensive, so we tried to keep the same deal and let the drivers know how cheated we had felt. When our original driver offered to call up the police, we called his bluff and accepted.

“Police impersonation is frequent,” someone in our group had read. We waited nervously, not knowing what to expect. Real officers soon showed up, and local men and young boys gathered around to see what was happening. Our driver explained his side of the story while we stood by, nervously looking at one of the officials fiddling with his shotgun.

Andrei and Alberto then explained what had happened. The policeman, who fortunately spoke English, sympathized with us and even offered to pay for the ride.

He later asked us to take his routine investigation picture. It was only when he guided us back to the bus station that we realized how odd our cheerful group photo had been. At the waiting area, the policeman showed the other pictures he had on him. He showed us drug users, had been executed shortly after the photos were taken, as well as a man that had been hanged — scenes of murder and robbery that were in striking contrast to our grinning faces.

After our short delay, we finally boarded en route to Shiraz, with 18 hours ahead of us and a promise among our group not to talk to people on the bus or accept gifts. While waiting at the bus station, we had also met the police officer’s brother and sister-in-law, who helped us buy the bus tickets as well as food for our trip.

Halfway through our trip, one of the passengers across from our seats tried to sell us weed. Remembering the recent mug shot of a person who had been executed for drug consumption, we avoided the man for the rest of the trip.

As soon as we woke up, we headed towards the tour agency and boarded a minivan towards Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire that has ruins dating back to the 5th century BCE.

After returning to Shiraz, we visited the Shah-e-Cheragh shrine. At the entrance we were stopped by women handing out burqas. After sitting in confusion for around five minutes, we were approached by a smiling woman who introduced herself as a volunteer at the shrine’s office of International Relations.

As we had noticed throughout the past days, the Iranians seemed really interested in getting to know us and our cultural backgrounds. A question we were almost always asked was how we had perceived the Iranian people before coming to Iran and how we perceived them now. They seemed very adamant to change the stereotypes that people had of them.

From Shiraz we departed for Yazd, where we got the chance to explore a 200-year-old home, currently the Tourism Office Center of the city.

Yazd was also where we first visited a Zoroastrian Fire Temple.

We then visited the ruins of a disused Zoroastrian settlement.

Before returning to Tehran, we made one more stop in Esfahan, where we roamed the bazaar and visited the bridges that the city is famous for.

We arrived in Tehran with six hours to spare before our flight back to Sharjah — just enough time to visit the Golestan Palace.

Our last stop before hailing a taxi to the airport was the former American embassy. Its fences were covered with anti-US graffiti, which was in stark contrast to the hospitable nature of the Iranian people that we had met throughout our travels. Although we had mentioned that we attended a US American university, we had never heard of any hatred towards the USA. The only country that the Iranians had expressed some level of dislike towards was Israel.

As we whizzed past Dubai’s skyscrapers during our taxi drive from the Sharjah airport to our campus, it almost felt as though we had come back not from another country, but a completely different world. When the taxi driver was able to have a conversation with us in English, we felt both relief as well as a pang of nostalgia.

Thinking about our trip, we realized there were a couple tidbits of knowledge had been helpful for us, and might be of use for anyone else traveling to Iran soon. If you ever plan on seeing the country, check out our suggestions below:

Tip 1: If you’re a girl traveling without a close male relative or spouse, skip the trip to the embassy. In order to receive our visas, Adrienne and the two of us required a special permission that could take up a month to receive. Yet when we got the the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran, we were easily able to get our visas on arrival.

Tip 2: Make sure that you have enough cash with you in an easily exchangeable currency, such as USD or EUR, as the ATMs in Iran do not accept foreign credit cards.

Tip 3: Research hotels in each of the cities that you plan on visiting. Although we had several hotel names, because we arrived during Nowruz, many of the hotels were fully booked and we were left to search for low-cost options on our own.

Tip 4: Make sure that you set an automated out-of-office email response before you leave. Internet access in Iran is severely restricted, with almost 50% of the top 500 visited websites in the world being banned, and even if you do manage to access a website, the connection speed is also reduced by the government.

Tip 5: If you’re a penny-pinching student and traveling to Iran without any Iranians in your group, choose the member of your group that best passes as a local. Teach them the Farsi word for the number of people in your group and send them to the ticket office, where they'll have to give your group number with the word tar. Tourist tickets can be up to fifteen times more expensive than tickets for locals, and although this tactic didn't work every single time, it helped us save quite a bit of money.