I just feel sick.

I just watched a 37 second video of a girl dying. Shot through the chest. Right there in front of my eyes.

It happened today in broad daylight.

I can't the the look on her face out of my head, and the screaming just wont stop.

I support the movement, I'm just so fucking sad that it costs innocent lives.

I'm done for tonight.

Things seem to be quieter out there now - haven't heard shots for a while, chopper is gone, sirens have stopped and not a voice to be heard.

Who knows?

Take care, see you tomorrow.

Scrap that. I heard shots fired about 5 minutes ago. A couple of single shots that made me curious, followed by a few 3 round bursts.

Not near enough to make me duck, but near enough to make me sit up and listen.

Reports are coming in about shots being fired in Azadi Square.

Tweets are saying that 4 people are dead, and that the crowd turned on the shooter and beat him to death.

This isn't cool at all. I'm well away from it, but it seems the honking of cars has picked up again.

Twitter gone

Twitter is now blocked - I thought I'd been on a lucky streak regarding access.

Seeing as I know as much about proxies as I do about the breeding habits of Mongolian geese (that is to say, nothing), I won't be tweeting anymore.

Hooray for the widget on nomadlife.

*The march has started - I can hear massive noise and car horns coming from Enghlab Square.

Female domestic students in dorms are heading home, out of Tehran. Majority of students left are the foreigners with nowhere else to go.

**Edit: Lost in translation - the girls are leaving because the university has closed and delayed exams until August.

f**king rumour mill

It's so hard to sort the wheat from the chaff on twitter right now.

There's a rumour now saying Mousavi's called off the march today because the government has threatened to use live rounds.

But there's an equal number of tweets decrying it as exactly that - rumour.

I don't know what to believe. I think it's too late to call off the rally. But I hope that the people that do march are aware of the risk.

Latest news is Mousavi's application for permission for this march was denied. Which means every basij and his baton will be there too.

Update

Peaceful march today from Enghaleb Square to Azadi at 4pm.

There are calls for a national strike tomorrow - I wonder how that will turn out.

Also pleased for once that I'm not a bloke - 300 students arrested last night in the boy's dorm down the road.

I'm alive and well

Ok, so there were reports of mass violence in the dorms last night, but it must have been at the men's dorms further down the street, because I heard nothing like that all night, and everything is calm here this morning. The only thing I did hear was heralded by Twitter. RTs were flying left right and centre, telling everyone to shout "Allahu Akbar" from their rooves or windows at 9pm. I walked outside just after 9 to hear it echoing between the buildings. I could also hear it in men's voices, so it must have taken affect further afield than the dorms.

The clean up crews much have been up much earlier than yesterday. I went to see what the street looked like this morning around 8am, but everything was fine out there. The only thing out of place was that the road was wet, but it hasn't rained.

The maintenence man in the dorms was shovelling the remains of some more debris fires into a bin this morning too.

I don't know anymore at this stage, I'm not leaving the dorm for a few hours (I have work to do!)

Thank you to everyone who's asked about my safety. Rest assured I sleep in a brick building surrounded by a brick wall with those spiky things on top.

lots of love xoxo

The University is closing early. We’ve all been asked to leave.

The reason?

The street we are on has been closed to traffic, and there will soon be a march. Again, I’ve been told to stay in my room tonight, as my dorm is also on this street. It is widely expected that the protests will be worse than yesterday.

Ahmadinejad is also going to hold a victory rally tonight at Valiasr Square. The police will do their best to keep the crowds separated, but there are no guarantees. Be prepared for casualties. As someone just explained to me, “Of course it’s bad for the people. But when you want to fight for something, there has to be a price”.

Holy crap I’m living in a movie set.

I woke up this morning to find piles of burning rubbish spaced out between the dormitory buildings. I thought “woah, the girls must have been angry last night”. Then I walked through the guard room and onto the street.

There is the smell of burning still hanging in the air. There are giant, dumpster-sized piles of rubbish now smouldering in the street. There is broken glass everywhere, probably from the smashed in bus stop. There are gates lying all over the road. I start to walk to work.

I walk past a charity box standing on it’s head. I wonder if the money is still inside. What’s that over there? Oh, a public telephone box on the street. How they ripped that up is beyond me.

I prepare to cross the street. More debris, cars trying to negotiate a T junction with junk in the middle of it, traffic lights shattered and lying in the gutter. It’s surprisingly easy to cross this morning. I get over, to see the ATM completely ruined. I’ve never seen the inside of an ATM before.

I get inside the university and everything is quiet. Turns out all the universities are closed today. Exams have been cancelled or delayed.

Should I call someone? Turns out I cannot – not only are SMS blocked, but calls now too. TV? Don’t bother. All satellites are off. We are lucky that we have access to internet, if you can call it access. The speeds have been slowed to a crawl, to prevent people uploading video and pictures to the outside world (I’m trying to download a 9.4mb file, at 650b/second). Facebook has again joined BBC on the ‘blocked’ list.

Thank God for gmail. It seems innocuous enough to be let through by the censors.

The first questions everyone asks are ‘are you ok? Were you involved? Are X and Y ok? Have you heard from anyone?’. Of course, no one has, because the phones are down. We just have to hope that sanity has prevailed in some cases at least.

Now there’s a strange feeling over the place. Tehranis appear to be taking in their stride. Myself and the Dutch intern (I haven’t seen the Germans yet) are wandering around, wondering what the hell must have happened.

This is what happens when you don’t play fair with 30 million young people. They get mad.

Really mad.

And rightly so.

If you read anything interesting or relevant in the news today about Tehran, Iran or the elections, can you please copy the text of the article into an email and send it to me? Please don’t put it in a word file, it’ll never download.

Much love, from your SAFE but sooty friend.

copy/paste from my 'family and friends/for public consumption blog'
kylie-travel.blogspot.com

This is what came next...

Post Election

Everyone here is shocked, but not surprised. It's like we all knew that no matter how we voted, it would end this way.

There is heated discussion in the office, rapid Farsi that I don't understand but don't have to.

There are whispers of a 'green revoution'.

Yesterday, all SMS services were blocked here. Today, BBC website among others is also blocked. God forbid Iranians actually know what's going on in their own country.

It's hard to tell what will happen next.

Things that make you go 'hmmm'

I saw something the other day that I never, ever expected I'd see. Anywhere!

As we were driving along, I saw two male soldiers cross the road holding hands.

Now, I support loving whomever you love. But I know that homosexuality is an offence punishable by lashings and/or death. So you can imagine that I was totally spun out to see these two lads quite happily walking hand in hand, dressed in the requisite scary-ass camoflage.

Turns out, men have a very different physical relationship with their peers when compared to Australia. Back home, a handshake or a backslap will do. A manly looking hug sometimes makes an apperance. But holding hands? Easily resting an arm around the shoulders of your mate? Leaning on his leg? You'd be chased out of the pub with words not fit to repeat in writing.

So maybe the underground gay community isn't underground at all. They're happily walking down the street, holding hands as a disguise.