Blogs from Yerevan, West, Armenia, Asia - page 10

The Good Life "A toast to our beautiful lives." That's Suesue, the Persian-Berkeley Architect-Archaeologist toasting with David's special cognac. We had just finished a miraculous Persian feast she and some of the other girls had whipped up in honor of my visit to Erebuni House. That's the mansion on the far side of Yerevan where the Erebuni Seven (i.e., the Berkeley team excavating Erebuni) are headquartered. I had been invited to Erebuni House ostensibly to fix Felix's new laptop. He was trying to install Microsoft Office. Each time it prompted him for the product identification number, he typed in the number on the back of his computer instead of the number on the installation disk. That only took me a few seconds to sort out. Getting his computer to be tri-lingual—Russian, Armenian, and English—took an hour ... read more

On the flight to London I have strange melatonin-induced dreams. I dream that I awake to discover that we have all been transferred onto the Chunnel. I didn't remember the transfer, perhaps I slept through it. But it strikes me as a brilliant idea because the train travels at the same speed as the airplane. Teasingly, the train dips into short tunnels that might confirm my Chunnel theory. Beneath the elevated tracks I see the detritus of Britain's WW II effort—old bombers, folded camouflage tarps. Heathrow is its usual gray, timeless haze. Zombies shuffle from one terminal to the next. I couldn't even guess what day it is. It could be yesterday; it could be tomorrow. It's definitely not today. A little shuttle takes a group of us to some obscure runway reserved for obscure airlines ... read more

It’s been three years now since I departed my life from deep behind the Iron Curtain: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan…and over a year since I departed my life in the Balkans….they seem like only distant dreams to me now. But it took roughly three seconds to revert to the behavior necessary to survive in this place. My first sign that I was back was the contingent of soldiers waiting for us at the bottom of the air-stairs which allowed us to de-board the plane—despite the presence of unused jet-bridges just 300 meters from my now parked 737. The deplaning Czech Airlines staff didn’t have the horrified look Lufthansa staff sometimes had at realizing their new temporary existence in Tashkent Airport, but these guys didn’t waste any time site-seeing either. The other usual suspects greeted us below. ... read more

So what is Armenia all about...? Well, there are a lot of old beautiful monasteries and the nature is fantastic... But be warned it is also a country where you are constantly fighting with waiters, taxi drivers, marshrutka drivers and store clerks... Non existing drinks are put on the bills in restaurants, the taxi drivers always grossly overcharge you and nobody seems to be happy with your business... When you enter a shop you get the feeling that you have disturbed them from drinking coffee or the fine art of staring at the wall and that they rather have you leave... You ask for 500 grams of something and you will get 700 grams and when you point it out they insult you and reluctantly take a bit more off... After a while it really tires ... read more

I'm bracing for tomorrow's onslaught. I passed back the midterms on Friday, but told them no grade grubbing until Monday, tomorrow. The students at AUA have taken the art of cajoling the extra point to an extreme that I have never before witnessed. They managed to reduce my TA to tears the night she handed back their homework assignments. I had been warned to take extra precautions against cheating, so I gave the midterm in the Great Auditorium. AUA used to be the commie equivalent of a corporate retreat. Every year faithful party members would pack themselves into the lecture rooms to hear motivational speakers ranting about the party line. The culminating event might have been Khrushchev delivering a rousing closing address in the Great Auditorium: thirty rows of thirty seats on the main floor steeply ... read more