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Arriving in Iran to cover the elections, I expected to find a country whose hardcore Muslim rules could not possibly withstand the reality of a globalized new century. After all, heretical talk of sexual pleasure is only a mouse-click away on the Internet. Instead, despite the scene at Shemshak's slopes, a walk through Tehran shows that the revolution is far more set in place than all the talk of change might suggest.

"I have only one thing to say to you," says Marjam Mahmoudi, outside a food stand at Shemshak ski slope, an hour's drive north of Tehran. "Iran is bad. Bad," she says in a low voice. She adds, "Personally, I haven't felt very many limitations from the Islamic government." But that statement belies experiences that have pushed her to seek a life elsewhere.

While the Muslim call to prayer wails over the loudspeakers, Marjam, 25, then recounts the afternoon two years ago, when she was walking home from an English class through Tehran's streets, and passed a small van loaded with police. "They shouted at me for having makeup on. They told me to get inside and wipe it off," she says. The moment the van door closed, the driver sped off to the police station, where Marjam was arrested for indecency, along with other women who had been picked off the streets that afternoon. Her lipstick removed, she spent the night in a cell. The next morning, a judge declared her innocent and sent her home.

Not long after, her fondness for lipstick led to a second arrest on the street. And right after that, her father hired a lawyer to get her a green card for the United States, where her aunts and uncles have lived for decades. "I leave for Los Angeles in April," she says.

This is ski season in Iran. And for a taste of how much -- and how little -- has changed after two decades of Islamic rule, there are few better places to go than the slopes of Shemshak. Here, the rich kids of Tehran -- children of Tehran's engineers, shipping brokers, company managers and doctors -- trudge up the snow-packed paths from their cars in their North Face jackets and Salomon ski gear, their snowboards and skis tucked under their arms.

On a billboard at the gate, a larger-than-life President Muhammad Khatami declares that sport is good for the mind and body, and that "I support it." Inside, the lines for the ski lifts are segregated, and the one for men dwarfs the women's line, where some of their girlfriends stand. It is not perfect, says Marjam. But there are no police. Rather unique in Iran, it is a place where you can almost forget you live in the Islamic revolution.

The city's streets are still thick with lusciously colorful murals depicting the revolution's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Their faces hover under slogans about the virtues of the revolution and celebrating the 100th birthday of "the Imam," as Iranians call the adored Khomeini.

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