Iran, Day 2 - The Museums of Tehran

This morning, we were up and out for a short walk to the Iran Carpet museum. It had rained last night so the weather was nice and fresh and everything looked clean this morning. Once we got to the carpet museum, we learned that it was closed because they had fumigated that morning. We walked back to the hotel and piled into the van for a drive to the National Museum, which is an archaeological museum, housing artifacts dating back to the 5th millennia BCE. It was quite a good museum, and got me excited for visiting Persepolis, since several displays were from that archeological site.

After the National Museum, we headed to a smaller museum that was for ceramics and glass. We spent about twenty minutes here and then headed to the north part of town and up one of the mountains for a delicious and relaxing lunch.

After lunch we visited the palatial complex of the last Shah of Iran. The official name was the Saadabad Cultural and Historical Complex, and was a series of several palaces and residences from the early 1900s. We didn't visit all of them (there were like 18 in all), but did visit the main two, and saw the exhibitions in both of them. It was nice walking in the complex because you felt like you were in the middle of nowhere, even though it was built right in the middle of a city of 15 million.

We were sad we didn't get to see the carpet museum, but had a great day visiting several other museums today! After visiting all the museums, we headed back to the hotel for about an hour of free time before dinner. I watched a thunderstorm, caught up on email and blogs, and then began to get ready for the early morning tomorrow.