Blogs from Armenia, Asia - page 21

Marian and Tom in Armenia Marian and Tom have been here since August 16 I think. Their journey was one for the books—it took them almost 2.5 days to get here—this included a 12 hour stop in Vienna where they went to a spa and slept on lounge chairs in a city park until tune to head back to the airport for the flight to Yerevan. One of the first activities for us was to attend the presentation of the Armenian Apostolic Church’s highest service award to Dr. Haroutine Armenian (can you believe his last name?), the President of the American University of Armenia. There were only about 8 of us representing the university because August is break time for everyone and all the Deans except a few of us were gone on vacation. The ... read more

Hi all, I thought that this blog should be about the Armenian landscape. Armenia is just a tiny place, about the size of Belgium or Maryland, according to the guidebook Armenia and Karabagh, written by Matthew Karanian and Robert Kurkjian. But it is an incredibly mountainous place so that, like Nevada, the basin and range topography is a bit misleading. It takes a 6 hours of steady driving up and down the mountains to reach the border with Iran, for example. From Yerevan the big and small peaks of Mt. Ararat are in view, but they are actually in modern Turkey. The tallest peaks in Armenia are part of the Mt. Aragats massif (13,435 ft.). Only about 8% of the countryside is forested or planted with woodland trees—during Soviet times many pine groves and other areas ... read more

July 5, 2007 Hi all, I have already spent one month in Yerevan, Armenia, a place I had never heard of until my friend Lisa sent me a job announcement (she sends all the weird ones to me she informs me) for the position of Director of the Environmental Conservation and Research Center (ECRC) of the American University of Armenia. The notice suggested that a working knowledge of Russian or Armenian was a big plus although AUA is an affiliate of the University of California, Berkeley so professors teach classes in English. It turns out that the Provost of the entire UC system is also (by charter) the chair of the board of trustees of AUA. I knew when I arrived at the airport, which is absolutely new and designed to have all arrivals walk through ... read more

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