Saturday was my last morning in Yerevan. I was dreaming that I was about to pull a sword out of a stone at some sort of Renaissance Faire. A bleating sheep made the faire seem more authentic, but when I woke up I could still hear the bleating. It took me a minute to realize I actually was awake and there actually was a bleating sheep three floors below my balcony. Someone had tied a sheep by its hind foot to a tree outside my apartment building. Farm animals aren't a common sight in downtown Yerevan. (They graze on the main [View Full Entry]

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Laying on my cot late at night, unable to sleep, listening to the eerie whaling of a far away dog, I realized it was death I felt around me, emptiness and death. There are thirty thousand ghosts in Nagorno-Karabakh. Everyone has lost sons. In a graveyard I saw a tombstone etched with a picture of a boy holding a machine gun and the dates 1969 -1993. There were hundreds more like it. From '89 to '93 residents of Stepanakert lived in their cellars while Russian missiles rained down on them from nearby Shushi. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the [View Full Entry]

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Like Armenia, Georgia is a blank spot in my mental ethnography. For too long it was swallowed up in that huge amorphous blob called the Soviet Union. But Georgia occupies a very special place in the Russian romantic imagination. Georgian legends filled with mystical knights, slashing tusks, and leaping stags fueled 19th-century Russian poets. Today Georgia is a fragile country. Since independence in 1991 a military coup replaced one president and a popular uprising replaced another. Bandits and kidnappers prowl some areas, Russian troops and Chechen rebels are fighting in the Pankisi Gorge, [View Full Entry]

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Each morning I pull myself out of bed, shuffle into the kitchen, and light a burner. I can usually do this without opening my eyes. This morning the match burned down to my fingers before I realized something was wrong. No gas. I'm good at thinking under stress. It must be from my days working as an orderly in the ER. Even in my half conscious state my mind quickly mapped out plan B: Art Bridge. Every Third World capitol has an Art Bridge. In Colombo it was Deli France, in Harare it was Italian Bakery. This is the cafe where [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Dilapidated minivans called marshrutkas are the preferred mode of travel in the Caucuses. They are cheap and fast and will take you across town, across the country, even across international borders. The downside is that they can get crowded. To make matters worse, Armenians have a strange fear of drafts, believing that a single gust virtually guarantees pneumonia. As a result, all of the windows are closed tight in a marshrutka, which makes it like a rolling sauna. This morning I took a marshrutka an hour out of town to Echmiadzin, the "Vatican" of the Armenian Apostolic Faith. Founded in [View Full Entry]

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The turnstiles in the Yerevan subway work the opposite way that turnstiles normally work. They are open all of the time, unless you try to walk through without depositing a token, then they snap shut. There is a line of turnstiles at the entrance, so it's not clear if the token goes in the right slot or the left. Despite surging crowds behind me, I always hesitate as I approach. I notice the other men in line doing the same. +++++ When I moved into my apartment I commented that the numerous valves and pipes reminded me of the inside of [View Full Entry]

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It's Sunday night and I just returned from the third annual AUA School of Engineering picnic. The students (and some of the faculty) had to be coaxed into going this year because the previous two picnics weren't well organized. That's an understatement. In both cases they simply loaded 80 people into a couple of busses and spent the next few hours aimlessly driving around the countryside looking for a place to spread out. In one instance they set up in a meadow owned by a farmer who became irate when he discovered 80 people trampling down his prime grazing grass. They [View Full Entry]

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When I left for the airport two weeks ago my sister handed me a copy of Elinor Burkett's book "So Many Enemies, So Little Time." It's about the year she spent as a Fulbright Scholar in Kyrgyzstan, which is a few Stans east of here. (In fact the Armenian word for "Armenian" is "Hay," descendants of the legendary archer Hayk, Noah's great-great-grandson, hence the Armenian word for "Armenia" is "Hayastan" or "Place of the Hays.") I finished the book this morning while sipping coffee on my little balcony that overlooks Yerevan, courtesy of William Fulbright. I feel so lucky to get [View Full Entry]

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Even though a meal at a fancy restaurant is only about $8, I managed to spend over $200 this week, so tonight I'm celebrating the end of my first week in Armenia with a home cooked meal. I only have one pot, so it will have to be stew. Unless I buy pans, I guess it will have to be stew every night for the next two months. What I dread the most are solo trips to the grocery store. Armenia is not a service-oriented country. It's the post-Soviet hangover. For example, it's not unusual for customers to stand in a [View Full Entry]

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