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 sensors.

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.