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Iranian hospitality is the best hospitality I have ever experienced traveling. Apart from the randoms picking you off the street and taking you under their wing for three days, feeding you, taking time off work to show you around their city, and bending over backwards to make your stay enjoyable, there are experiences in hospitality which is apart from the norm: Iran is the easiest country I have ever hitch-hiked in. I remember flagging a date truck outside the village of Kharanagh, in Yazd, and it was the second truck that passed by us (the first was going into Kharanagh, and we had just hiked out of there to the highway, so didn't take it, for obvious reasons). When we were loading our backpacks into the cap of the truck, I was taken aback at the fact that there was another truck behind us, honking it's horn. I looked through the windscreen at one of the passengers in the cab eagerly waving for us to join come out of the truck we were loading into their truck instead! I kindly smiled and motioned to them that we were already "taken", and he returned my smile with one even more kind and they took off along their way to who-knows-where. I tell this story often when people here in the western world ask how the Iranians are as people. Inside the cab of the trucks we flagged down were amazing as well: always stopping and giving us tea, fruits, and asking as many questions as they could muster up in my phrase book, often about religion, politics, and other in-depth discussions, which I am still amazed we were able to speak about with such limited linguistic communication methods. Overall, Iran has been recognized by myself as the most comfortable country to travel through when it comes to safety and meeting everyday people. ... I'm going back in Janauary!
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