where cars come to die

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When I woke up and left Neka, it was already noon. But I didn’t have to walk very far today. Maybe twenty or twenty-five kilometers, I figured. So I was going to take it easy.

Especially since I still hated the highway.

I was somewhat happy when I passed a place where a few cars lay ruined and demolished on the ground:

And there was more.

The obligatory little blue trucks of Iran?

This was the place where they came to die:

I loved it.

Walking on the highway means trying to ignore the highway (while paying attention to it regarding your own safety).

So I mostly looked at things that were next to the road, like this white stuff someone was selling:

Or these curtains:

This propaganda poster seemed to warn of the dangers of bearded men:

While this advertisement poster featured a bearded man who was happily smoking the hookah:

There were a few men holding up signs with advertisements as well:

I didn’t know what they were for, but when I asked them if it was for a restaurant or a hotel, they said yes, yes, yes:

There were quite a few car stores on my way, too, and a few of them were foreign:

What was going to happen to them with the sanctions in place? All Iranians I talked to hated Chinese cars.

Oh, and one time I ran into a friend of mine from Razaviye near Mashhad:

The last time I had seen him was six months before.

When I entered the city of Sari, it seemed to be mostly abandoned buildings at first:

Then there was an unfinished building of Akbar Joojeh, a grilled chicken franchise that had originally come out of Behshar to take the whole of Iran by storm:

There were no international fast food restaurants. None. Sometimes there were building fronts that looked a bit familiar:

But this one, for example, was a clothing store.

I crossed a river into Sari:

And then I was on proper city streets:

It was eight in the evening, and people were lining up outside of the bakeries in order to buy bread with which to break their fast:

I was hungry.

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