>>465083I don't know if this is a culture shock thing or not, but one thing that surprised me was how few women you see in Afghanistan. It's basically a men-only country, every clerk, every shopkeeper, every soldier, etc, is a dude, BUT: the flight attendants in the domestic airline (Kam Air) were Russian or Ukrainian girls who wore tight skirts and shirts and no headscarf.
Apart from that, I did some reading about Afghan culture and expected it to be very different from the European culture, so I did not really have a huge culture shock, only minor suprises (like the amount of soldiers/security guards, etc).
In Iran, the only culture shock was that it was so modern. Right next to our hotel in Tehran there was a street with lots of shops for musical equipment, and they had the newest stuff from all the famous brands. Iran was maybe even more of a surprise than Afghanistan (in the positive way), in terms of not being how it is often portrayed in Western media.
Picture: in Iran, we stayed one night in a caravanserai, this is like an old hotel en route the Silk Road, built about 400 years ago. It is said that there used to be 999 of those caravanserais, but only a few have survived, and only 2 or 3 have been turned into hotels. Many bazaars were built around those caravanserai, and if you stroll around long enough, you'll find the stables and the well for the horses, etc.
This caravanserai was dozens of km away from the next town and in the middle of nowhere - well, except that there was a highway about 1k next to it. But it has been renovated and decorated and it was very isolated, and the sunset there was just breathtaking!