At a Glance
Locations:
Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz
Duration:
10 days, 9 nights
Date:
February 2027
Abbie Chatfield has built a living out of the conversations most people step around. Eight hundred thousand downloads a month, eighteen thousand seats sold, rooms full of strangers who turn up to talk about the things they usually keep quiet. A few years ago she took that same instinct somewhere it was not meant to go. She flew to Iran expecting the country she had read about, and found one the headlines had never mentioned: women who waved her in for dinner, talked for hours, and laughed between the hard parts.
She kept their numbers. Sara, a teacher in Isfahan, still messages her about her sister's wedding. Leila, who works in art and culture, knows the owner of a teahouse behind the souq that sits on no map and no feed. This journey is the table Abbie was pulled up to, opened to twelve people who would rather listen than look.
Ten days move from Tehran to Isfahan to Shiraz, but the journey is built around evenings, not landmarks. In Isfahan you settle into the teahouses around Naqsh-e Jahan as the light goes, where Sara and Leila's circle gather to drink tea and argue about poetry and their week. One night Leila walks you through a narrow doorway behind the souq, into a room of low cushions and old photographs where a man plays the kamancha and nobody is performing for anyone. Another night Sara cooks, and the table runs long. There are bazaars and bridges and the tomb of Hafez in between, but it is the conversations you carry home. Come ready to have your mind changed.
Impossible Moments
Dinner in Sara's home
The unmarked teahouse behind the souq
An evening in the teahouses of Naqsh-e Jahan
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