Christmas Break Trip

So a couple of months ago during winter break my mom and I took a trip to Iran. Just to clarify, I was born in Iran and lived there until the beginning of fourth grade when we came to the U.S. I'm actually 3/4 Azerbaijani Iranian and 1/4 Iranian. I have returned to Iran only two times since we came to the U.S.; the last time being when I was ten.
Anyways after years of pleading with my mom, she finally agreed to take me with her. She originally told me during thanksgiving break that she was thinking of going but a couple weeks later she called me saying that she though we didn't have enough time to get our stuff together. But I told her to try anyways because I would prefer going in the winter since it's so hot in the summer. I actually had to walk to the post office of my college town all by myself to get my passport renewed.
We visited four cities. The first one was Tehran where we spent most of our time visiting friends and family. I was actually really lucky because my cousin who is a couple of years older than me came back around the same time as us ( she goes to college in Sydney). So when my mom was away running errands, I had her to keep me company and she's actually pretty nice. I don't have a lot of pictures from Tehran because we didn't really visit anywhere interesting while we were over there.
The first trip we took was to Mashhad. Mashhad is mostly known for holding the site of Imam Reza's grave which is in fact a very big masque where many people go for pilgrimage and prayers. We didn't actually spend that much time in Imam Reza. Instead my mom decided to spend most of her time shopping in the bazaar. That being said this was probably my favorite place to visit because of one reason: SNOW. I know this is probably not that exciting for most people but keep in mind that I live in the south where it barley ever snows and even if it does it's never enough to cover the ground. It snowed for almost 48 hours straight so everything was covered in snow.
note: most of the photos I took in Mashhad were with my iphone so they are not the best quality
  

Our train actually got delayed for 12 hours because of the snow but we did make it in time or our next trip to Esfahan and Shiraz. For this trip we traveled with two of my mom's friends and they were both really friendly and fun ( who knew people in their 50's could be so fun to travel with lol). I definitely liked Esfahan better than Shiraz although Persepolis was really amazing.  

 This is actually a tomb carved on a side of the mountain and it's a lot bigger than it appears in this photo

The animals in the last two photos are all real and they were not even caged. It was at some hotel near Persepolis

 Here is a photo of me just to prove that I existed in all these amazing places =P

Overall, this trip was more than I could ever hope for. I never realized that Iran had so many beautiful places to visit and I was surprised that I saw so many tourists there ( most of them seemed to be European or Chinese).