Emily and I were in Iran about the same time - I'd imagine we had quite different experiences, cos it felt quite segregated between men and women to me, and I met mostly blokes. This does become less pronounced as you go up the rungs of class, education and wealth, mind.
Yeah, you'll need to cover your hair to avoid hassle from The Iranian Man. It really is a thing, and I saw a couple of lasses in Isfahan being taken away by the secret police for showing too much hair. There have been a few recent protests, but nowt's changed AFAIK:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/iran-arrests-29-women-wearing-hijab-protests-180202084416823.htmlIf you do get chance to meet people outside work, I'd bet you'll have a great time. Similar sense of humour to the British - very dry. Don't let them pay for everything. Making tarof means at the third time of offering it's OK to accept (but they'll just laugh if you get it wrong).They can be very very formal with this (and at other times, such as when I gave a lad some Kendal mint cake as a small thank you, and explained the history and its part in the first summit of Everest - he told me that he would save it until the hour of his death) -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd7d9StlueQUtterly lovely people, bastard government. Expect to be treated with a certain degree of official suspicion as a Brit, so don't carry anything dodgy, don't take photos of anything dodgy (important infrastructure and most things TBH apart from standard tourist stuff), and make sure there's nowt suspicious on any electronics you have with you. Your employer will hopefully give you some advice on this.
Cities have a great nightlife - not drinking, obvs, but shopping, coffee and socialising. Everything's open until really late, so you can sit in a cafe and watch the world go by.
This might put you off, but the secret police (different from the marked police, who tend to be really helpful) could keep tabs on anyone you speak to - a tour guide in Tabriz told me only tour guides were allowed to interact with foreigners, outside the usual work and buying-stuff from stalls kind of interactions. Socialising is strictly off limits, and you could get someone into trouble simply by being friendly. But it's a long shot - there aren't that many secret police, and you'd have to do something to catch their attention.
The internet is also heavily choked - Facebook is banned, Twitter is banned (but not yacf when I was there!), but it's the most widely-circumvented law in the country, even more so than the drinking prohibition. Everyone's worked out how to use VPNs to circumvent it, but it will restrict your web access while you're there.
Where are you off to? I rode through a fair bit of Iran, from Tabriz down to the Persian Gulf. Missed Tehran.
Oh, finally, if you have any lung problems, avoid, cos the air qualities in the cities was fucking shit. Cheap oil means everyone runs the cheapest banger they can find - Isfahan has a permanently yellow haze, and I was there three days before the air cleared enough to show the surrounding mountains.