Outside Tehran’s hulking, grey Azadi national football stadium a riot was fermenting. A mob, 70 strong, with whistles, drums and banners, pushed on the crush barriers and screamed slogans in strangulated Farsi. I hadn’t expected my first taste of Iran to involve a loud and angry protest. Iran, we are led to believe, isn’t a place where dissent is tolerated unless it’s the power to “dissent” against Western cultural imperialism, burn hastily constructed effigies of George W. Bush or protest vigorously in favour of the Iranian government’s right to enrich nuclear fuel.

Equally, I hadn’t expected my first taste of Iran to involve a loud and angry protest exclusively made up of abaya-clad women, faces painted the colour of the Iranian flag and one and all clutching a national football team scarf. They berated the hundred or so riot officers who had constructed a Kevlar wall between themselves and the stadium, as dozens of men—only men—streamed past unmolested towards the stadium’s huge gates and that afternoon’s main event: a World Cup warm-up match between Iran and Costa Rica. No one looked surprised and no one looked back.

The riot police looked on perplexed. You could almost see the dilemma etched into their faces: at riot police school they were taught how to deal with enemies of the state – wade in first and ask questions later. Instead they were frozen, stuck between a conservative culture where women were revered and protected from the wicked mores of the modern world and the demands of the state to crack some skull. Paralysis broke out. They looked impotently on as the women’s angry cries broke on their body armour.

Inside the car, our driver interrupted the silence. “Not the women again,” he rasped as we slalomed past the protest and through the crowd. “Again?” I asked, surprised. “This is normal?” “They come here before every game to protest in their scarves,” sighed Amir, my guide, of the familiar sight. I wanted to go and speak to them, ask them about their protest, but the doors were locked. Amir didn’t think it was a good idea to try and talk to the women with police around. “It’s dangerous,” he said.

I pulled the handle anyway. The doors stayed firmly shut as we glided past. “It’s not a religion thing why they can’t come to a football match,” Amir hastily tried to explain, sensing my disappointment. “They can go to a cinema with a man. But it’s the atmosphere in the ground: the swearing, the bad language. It’s just not suitable.”

Three hours before every home game the female fans of Team Melli – as the Iranian national football team is affectionately known – trudge to the Azadi Stadium in the western suburbs of Tehran. And every game they are denied entry and trudge back to whence they came, past a huge motivational sign that mockingly adorns the entrance. It reads:

"The Most Powerful Person is That That Can Keep Their Hunger."

It’s a hopeless, unrewarding task. But the protests—along with my arrival at Sharjah Airport in the United Arab Emirates—gave me a hint that not everything in Iran was what it seemed.

I didn’t have to travel far to my hotel. The Olympic was Tehran’s finest, the place where visiting football teams would stay, attached as it was to the national stadium like an angular, drab carbuncle. When the ayatollah’s forces took over the country, they did more than occupy the institutions of power. The city’s hotels—the Sheratons, Hyatts and Hiltons—had also been forcibly nationalised, stripped of their insignia and given more Persian names.

Cutting off Western companies also meant isolating Iran from the rest of the financial world – ATMs didn’t work and neither did credit cards. The exchange rate from rial to sterling was so high (£1=IRR18,100) that most Iranians simply dropped the last few zeros to combat inflation. Not surprisingly, Iranian luxury hotels were hard to come by and the Olympic marked the upper class.

My wood-panelled room was sparse but comfortable with little in the way of entertainment. After flicking through the Farsi television channels to see if I’d made it onto the 9 o’clock news—I hadn’t—and making a stab of reading the Koran, I was bored senseless. By 9:15 pm I was climbing the walls. I called Armin, and went to see what Tehran’s nightlife had to offer.

I wasn’t expecting much. Being a dry Islamic country, Iran was always going to be one of the world’s few countries not to have an Irish bar but I wanted to find out what young Iranians did at night. I met Arash, a young French-Iranian journalist, at Vanak Square, the Piccadilly Circus of northern Tehran where handsome twentysomethings with duck-fin haircuts and turned up jeans strolled the streets hand-in-hand with girlfriends sporting hijabs so far back they only stayed on by virtue of a stiff pony tail, making them almost redundant.

Arash provided me with my answer. “The youth are so bored, they don’t have anywhere to go,” he said as we walked down to a local restaurant he had recommended. “Especially the middle class. They have money, but nothing to do. So they sit around and take drugs.” It’s hard to imagine somewhere like Iran having a drug problem, but all the vices that are open to the youth of the west also seem to be prevalent in Tehran. “There are no nightclubs but people have parties at home and drink or take drugs. Tehran has a really big crystal meth problem.”

I was incredulous. “Crystal meth? How the hell do you find that here?” I asked, making it clear I had no interest in scoring a drug better known for making your face cave in after a few hits.

“You have to remember, Iran has some of the best scientists in the world! Last year, the city was full of heroin and everyone would go to 'ex parties'. They would give you ecstasy at the door and let you loose.” Arash didn’t take drugs, and I got the impression he didn’t overly approve. But I thought of my lonely room at the Olympic and secretly wished that an opportunity to attend an impromptu “ex party” would present itself.

We arrived at the restaurant, a small, strip-lit affair that sold Iranian staples like lamb with rice and sultanas and iced vermicelli, where Pegah was waiting for us. She was studying art at Tehran University and wore a brown hijab adorned with intricate stitching at the edges. Again, it hung off the back of her head, as if wearing it was little more than fulfilling a technicality. “Most would probably say they’d rather not,” she admitted when I asked whether Iranian women resented having to cover up all the time. “It’s just the fashion, the way people wear it a little further back every year.”

The incremental inching back of the hijab could be a metaphor for the increasing social freedoms that Iran’s under-30s enjoy. Even under Ahmadinejad and an increasingly conservative political culture, the small gains that make a young person’s life tolerable go on unabated. “They [the police] know that they can’t turn things back,” agreed Arash.

One area where this had been put to the test on a nightly basis was in the field of dating. Although bluetooth technology had helped people to flirt more easily, explained Roxanna, there was an automobile version going on up and down Jordan Street every night. Known as the “Jordan Game,” cars full of single men and women would cruise up and down looking for prospective partners whilst the police sat in their patrol cars and did nothing. We climbed into Pegah’s small battered car to take the short drive to Jordan Street.

“I like this a lot,” she smiled, as she pulled out a well-used tape and jammed it into the dusty car radio. Chris Rea replied back. “Do you like it?” I’ve never been much of a Chris Rea fan but I didn’t have the heart to tell the truth. “I love him.” With ‘Road to Hell’ blaring, we hit Jordan Street and the throng of horny Iranians looking for a date. Dozens of cars inched slowly up the hill full of expectant cargo: groups of men hoping to get lucky for a quick fumble streamed by and shouted bawdy slogans in Farsi.

One group, spotting me, shouted something in unison in their mother tongue before the entire car collapsed in laughter. “What did he say?” I asked Arash. “He said: 'Nuclear energy is our right'. It is supposed to be a joke.” Ahmadinejad’s much-used slogan of nuclear self-determination and defiance might have struck a chord with his devout minority fan base, but to the youth of Tehran, the phrase was something to be mocked, an illogical rant that their elders had bought into but which should be viewed with disdain by their children.

A second car passed by us slowly, this time containing a pair of heavily made up girls smiling ferociously. I smiled back and waved before they laughed and sped off. Finally, a lone patrol car glided up the strip. The cars disappeared down side roads as quickly as they had arrived, like in a scene from The Truman Show. The Jordan Game was over, for tonight at least.

It was time to return to the Olympic. I said my goodbyes, climbed into my taxi and looked out of the back window as it pulled away. Behind me Arash and Pegah flirted openly whilst considering where to go next. Despite being in a country where pre-marital sex can still be punished by the flick of a whip, I got the feeling that out of everyone I’d seen that night, I was one of the few people going to bed alone.