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Published: August 8th 2007
The sacred and the profane
A sample of the decor in my apartment.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 flying to obscure destinations. Everyone on the shuttle thinks I'm in the wrong place. They are all going home to Armenia.
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Arrival
Everything comes rushing back to me on the late-night drive from the airport to my new apartment. I know that we should turn left at the next light. I know that the road ahead leads to Republic Square. I
Champagne under the solar panels
Rima's (green dress) farewell party on the roof of AUA under the shade of the solar panels. can read the Russian signs. I begin to silently rehearse my limited, long-dormant Russian vocabulary: Factory, Breakfast, Good, Thanks.
I impress myself by not being horrified by the "war-torn" stairwell that leads to my front door. My apartment is big, perhaps nicer than last summer's apartment. The front door opens into a useless sitting room. To the left is my bedroom, which is crowded with large, heavy, dark wardrobes. A narrow balcony affords a view of a thousand windows that look back at me. To the right of the sitting room is a long, narrow kitchen. Another door leads to a large living room with a piano and a TV. Straight ahead is a door that leads to the toilet room. Next to it is a door that leads to the bathroom. It's not clear that a person would be able to sit on the toilet and shut the door.
The apartment is decorated with the usual weird mixture of the precious and the cheesy. There are tapestries on the wall depicting lurid hunt scenes: Wolves chase a sled through the forest at night. One of the horses tumbles. A boy in the sled gets a shot off.
Scaffolding #1
Rima climbs the scaffolding in high heels. A wounded wolf twists in agony. There are ceramic figurines of ballerinas and Russian wolf hounds on the shelf. In the bathroom a stuffed monkey climbs a fake vine. A bouquet of plastic fruit hangs in the kitchen. A clock shaped like a giant gold watch hangs in the sitting room. Perhaps it was stolen from a jewelry shop, I reason. A calling card from some sort of "escort" service is wedged behind the light switch.
In the kitchen I find the standard AUA (American University of Armenia) issue:
· One small flashlight
· One bottle mineral water
· One jar fig jam
· One box cheese wedges
Day One
But what day is it? I still don't know. Is it Saturday, Sunday, or Monday?
I go to the supermarket at the corner to pick up some supplies. I think that working in a fancy supermarket must be the cool job to have for young Armenian girls. They do their nails and talk boyfriends. They are irritated by the tongue-tied American who points and grunts in Russian—a language only their parents would have reason to understand. I point at a loaf of bread.
Scaffolding #2
More monkeys on the solar panel scaffolding. "Bread, please." I say in serviceable Russian. The girl behind the counter shakes her head no. No? Why no? Am I using the right word? Am I asking for Tampons by mistake? I try again, "Bread, please." The girl behind the counter giggles.
That night a big electrical storm comes out of nowhere. Tornadoes of trash swirl in the canyons between the gigantic apartment buildings. Dogs are fighting, car alarms are going off. I hear shouts. Lightening flashes. A thousand neighbors rush to close their windows.
Perhaps I will get married
This is the title of an article I wrote last year for the November issue of Yerevan, a Vanity Fair clone that targets Armenians living in Russia. Next to my article is a photo of me leaning against a wall and smirking. Last summer, during a vodka-induced delirium, I promised the editor of the magazine that I would write a brief article for her about my impressions of Yerevan, both good and bad. In the article I may have said something flattering about Armenian women. The article was heavily edited, and so now it apparently says something like, "I want to marry an Armenian woman
Perhaps I will marry
Article in Yerevan magazine. and here is my picture." The article is being passed around the university. Everyone finds it very amusing. I'm off to another good start.
Wednesday was Rima's last day as the secretary for the College of Engineering. She is going to Germany to do graduate work in international conflict negotiations. She already has a graduate degree in something else. The Armenian employment market is so tight that nearly all of the secretaries have graduate degrees.
Rima is beautiful, and so all of the male faculty members in the College of Engineering have crushes on her, but in true nerd fashion, none of us ever thought to say anything to her, and now she will be gone.
Also in true nerd fashion, Artak, the college expert on alternative energy, insists on having Rima's farewell party on the roof in the shade of his giant solar panels. At one point he makes us climb on the scaffolds that hold the panels. We have to move hand over hand, foot over foot along the narrow beams to reach a higher rooftop to view some additional panels that are part of his experiment. The
women do the perilous climb wearing high
Big Night
Ingredients for my first home-cooked meal. heels!
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A Good Friday
My apartment is one block from one of the largest market areas in Yerevan. Roads from every corner of the city converge in a huge circle. Beneath the circle there are tunnels lined with vendor's stalls. It reminds me of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. One street leading into the circle is a farmer's market. Vendors sell fruit, vegetables, meat, cheese, and spice. I am determined to take advantage of this cornucopia. I decide to cook dinner for Barry and Armen tonight. It's a daring experiment. I can cook in the US, but can I cook in Armenia? Am I forgetting that Barry is the chair of my department and Armen is the dean of my college?
After a morning of shopping I arrive in my office at the leisurely hour of noon. Barry pokes his head in my door to remind me that we are due at the weekly brown bag seminar. I dimly remember getting a memo about this. I dimly remember promising to deliver one of the seminars. I hope today isn't my day.
Thankfully, I am not the speaker. The speaker is from some prestigious business school
Cigarette machine
A cheap way to get cigarettes if you are a skilled crane operator. in Kerela. Perhaps if I look attentive he will invite me to idle on the Malabar Coast in exchange for a few lectures about design patterns.
The lecture is about living well. The speaker contrasts the myth of Sisyphus with a similar tale from India. Only the Indian Sisyphus squeals with delight as the bolder rolls back down the hill. We learn from the contrast that happiness doesn't depend on attaining goals, but depends instead on attitude. Although this lesson isn't a huge revelation for me, it must sound quite blasphemous to the ears of ambitious young business majors.
The lecturer makes two other comments that make me decide to adopt him as my guru. He tells us that there is no such thing as wasted love. Loving another builds us up as humans, even if our love is rejected. Later, he tells us that Psychoanalysis helps us to discover alternative ways of understanding ourselves when our world view collapses catastrophically.
During the question and answer period I tell him that my world view collapsed catastrophically, but that I had decided to live in its ruins rather
than create a new world view that might one day
Aragats
The road to the summit of Mt. Aragats. suffer the same fate as its predecessor. He seemed to think that this was impossible. I asked him if the sadhus who line the streets of India had world views. He said probably not. I won't buy my ticket for Kerela just yet.
After lunch and the talk we were told that we didn’t have to clean up after ourselves. I love my job.
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Dinner was okay. It would have been better if it was cooked in Santa Cruz. One glitch was that Armen wanted to eat salad after the main course. I didn't have the courage to tell him that salad was the main course.
After dinner Armen and I took the subway downtown to Poplova, Armen's favorite cafe. He always seems to know the cigar-smoking big shots at the other tables. He tells me that the man at the head of the table next to us is from Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed territory Armenia wrestled from Azerbaijan in the 1990s (See Graves, Ghosts, War, UXOs, and more Churches). Armen went over to say hello to the men at the table. I imagined they were all grizzled veterans from that terrible war. Perhaps some of
Radio Telescope
The slopes of Aragats are loaded with lots of high tech labs and institutes. them were among the heroes who scaled the cliffs below Shushi at night and captured the Azerbaijani stronghold by surprise.
Later Armen told me that the other men at the table were used car dealers from LA who were in Yerevan to oversee a real estate investment.
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Saturday
I didn't think it would be a problem to arrive at the university by 10:30 to rendezvous with Barry, Cyrus, and Artak, but jetlag plays funny tricks on a person and I managed to oversleep. The others must have overslept, too and we all converge closer to 11:00.
Our plan was to recon the slopes of Mt. Aragats for a site for next week's annual College of Engineering picnic. At 4090 meters, Aragats-- not to be confused with Ararat, the Armenian holy mountain located a few miles inside the Turkish border-- is the highest peak in Armenia.
Our first stop was an Eleventh Century church with a commanding view of the vast planes that spread across Eastern Turkey and Northern Iran. Cyrus and I sat under the shade of a small tree while Barry and Artak searched for a toilet. The church's caretaker
and his wife approached
Lunch #1
Lunch at the caretaker's house. Barry eggs me on to drink more vodka. us and began chattering in Armenian. "No speak Armenian," I managed in Russian. "No problem, they replied, we also speak Russian." "Uh, er, no speak Russian, either." It turned out the caretaker's wife had some German which wasn't beyond my two years of college German. She invited us to her house for lunch and vodka.
The house was very humble, a few plywood boards haphazardly nailed together. They seated the four of us at a table and served us lily stems, sprigs of dill, lavash (flat bread), yogurt, and, of course, vodka.
After lunch we skirted the snow fields near the summit and eventually reached the ruins of the Eleventh Century fort at Ambed. Along the way we stopped on the far side of a bridge that crossed a mountain stream. A circle of rocks warned cars of a deep pothole in the middle of the bridge. Barry wanted me to take a picture of his head sticking out of the pothole. I knew the right thing to do was to forbid him the climb down into the pothole, but I also knew that it would make a good photo, if he survived.
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The Club
Lunch #2
Lunch at the caretaker's house. Note the bowl of lily stems. Armen was waiting for us impatiently on the steps of AUA when we returned in the evening from Aragats. He whisked Barry and me away to The Club, and underground nightclub that features avant-garde music.
We were seated in a small cave-like room among the ultra-cool, ultra-beautiful Yerevan scenesters. A saxophone player sat on a barrel at the front of the room. Across from him a cellist sat on a tall stone ledge. Between them a keyboardist stood in front of a brace of industrial looking devices.
While they played some of the best fusion jazz I have ever heard, a tall beautiful woman in a black cocktail dress gracefully made her way to a table below the cellist. A waitress brought her a cup of coffee. She glanced at magazines, sipped her coffee, and ignored the rest of us. Was she part of the performance or some extra-cool audience member? Ten minutes later she was joined by a second woman wearing a red cocktail dress, equally as beautiful, equally as graceful. At first the second woman seemed happy to see the first woman. She chatted with animated intensity while the first woman sat in elegant, stony silence.
Picnic
Armenians dancing at their picnic. After a while the tone changed. I gathered from the emotions that the first woman had had an affair with the second woman's husband, and the second woman was asking the first to leave her husband alone. The first woman never spoke.
At intermission the keyboardist and cellist joined us. It turns out both of them are members of the Armenian Navy Band. That's the jazz group I raved about last summer (see Pilgrim's Progress.) They specifically remembered the show I attended and said it was one of their great performances. They took our email addresses and told us they would write to us when they performed again in Yerevan.
The second half of the show was an improvisation. While the musicians played the woman who played the jilted wife—now dressed in a black leotard—accompanied the musicians with mime. It was fun to watch her graceful body express playfulness, vulnerability, torment. At one point she was slinky cat walking on all fours toward the back of the room, toward our table. "Please God, not me, not me," I prayed. (Another secret fear of mine: becoming inadvertently involved in a performance.) But it was Armen she wanted. She laid
Jump Rope
In Armenian jump rope the girls at the end hold the rope with their feet! her sweet cat cheek on his open hand as if to ask for forgiveness, but Armen was hard, cold, and distant.
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DJ
non-member comment
Ha ha
Loads of fun so far, thanks for the update and picks. It's cold here in sunny CA. June gloom is here and it's windy too so you are not missing much.