The Iran the news never showed me

Everything I thought I knew about Iran, I had learned from the news, and the news only ever shows you one Iran. There is another one, the one people actually live in, and you only find it once you are there and somebody decides to let you in.

For me it started in a queue. Waiting to get into a palace, I fell into conversation with the people ahead of me, and within a few minutes the gap between the country I had been shown and the country standing in front of me was impossible to miss. They were relaxed, funny, curious and completely at ease, and nothing like the picture I had absorbed.

We ended up sharing lunch, talking about how life really works there compared with home, what is for show and what is for real. Later that day they invited us along to something I had not expected to exist: the quiet opening of a small art space, the kind that operates outside official approval. Nobody there seemed anxious. People had simply made their own room to breathe.

That is the Iran the headlines never reach. Behind the public face there is a private life that is cultured, warm and far freer in spirit than you are led to believe. It has to be handled with care, and I will leave it there, but it is real, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

I arrived with a picture painted entirely by people who had never set foot in the place. Within a day, the country itself had quietly torn it up. That is the best thing travel does, and nowhere has done it to me faster.

The country on the news was not the country I met.