Happy Mothers Day, Connie and Sabine!

This was the spontaneous bonus day we added to our stay in Esfahan. For one, Nina can do with some more recovery time. Plus, with today, we have at least caught up with the blog till yesterday. I had called my mum last night, Nina had planned it for today. And so the day went by, until well into the afternoon.

Nina had one more sightseeing goal for Esfahan, to see the mosque from the cover of the lonely planet. Yesterday, we went to the Shah’s Mosque, which was not it. So we forced ourselves out of bed and back to the city one more time. It was a decent walk to today’s destination, Masjid-e Jameh. Our mood was low, but we pushed it.

Well, it turned out that this was not the one either. Apart from the hefty 400.000 rial admission fee, it was still pretty cool. It is the largest mosque in Iran and very different from the ones on Naqsh-e Jahan. Here, there were almost no mosaics, but instead the decorations were fashioned in brickwork instead. It is also much older than Masjid-e Shah, at least in parts. Nina was a bit bummed that we still did not find the “cover mosque”, but this was a great consolation price.

We left the mosque at about 4 pm and made our way to the final stop: a recommended ice cream shop at the other end of the bazaar. The idea was to find food along the way. Unfortunately, we failed a bit at reading the map and made it almost all the way to the sweet treats before realising that the restaurant we were looking for was … somewhere else. Sweets before lunch / dinner it was, then.

Because we had skipped lunch and have not had a “treat” meal in a while, we decided to go to one of the fancy and a bit touristy restaurants afterwards. This one was really pretty, located in one corner of the massive Jahan square (which allegedly is the second largest square in the world after Tianamen). The food was good but not overwhelming. At least a lot better than our usual fast food joint roadside snacks. I had a lovely piece of mutton and Nina got an aubergine stew.

During dinner, we finally found the image description on the Lonely Planet to find out that the mosque on the cover was of course the last of the big three – the one we had snubbed yesterday. It would be closed for the day once we were done with our dinner, so it got put on the “maybe tomorrow morning” list in the end.

Happy and full, we slouched back to our hostel. It could have been nice to finish off the day at the riverfront, but we could not muster the energy for the 45 minute walk anymore.