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Published: August 8th 2007
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Caro (aka Santa)
Remember this guy from last year's Fourth of July picnic? He's a respectable Iranian scientist... until he's around me. 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 and a half.
June 22, A Movable Feast Tonight felt like a climax, a grand finale. But of course summer is only one day old. It's really just warming up. Tonight it felt like my black spell was broken, if only for an evening.
I organized a night out for a big group of friends, eleven counting myself. Everyone met at
And away we go...
But this time it was Caro's fault. No, really. a restaurant called "Our Village," at least that's the English translation. It features authentic food, decor, and music from rural Armenia circa 1950.
After the feast people assumed the night was over. Wrong! Phase two: Poplovok. Poplovok is an upscale jazz club with tables that spill out onto a patio overlooking a man-made lake with a big fountain in the middle. Some people won't patronize Poplovok because a couple of years ago the president of Armenia was there and got heckled. His body guards took the heckler into a bathroom and worked him over. A little too much, it turns out. The heckler ended up dead.
I have been tracking a jazz band called Katuner ("Cats" in Armenian) for the past month. According to their web site they play avant-garde folk music, much in the style of the Armenian Navy Band, the band that I heard in Yerevan last year and liked so much. In fact, their keyboardist, Vahagan Hayyrapetyan, is also a member of ANB. Last week I received an email from the band's manager saying that they would be playing at Poplovok tonight.
We all sat at a long table and ordered exotic blue drinks.
Movable Feast I
Me and a few friends at Poplovok Katuner was on stage playing routine jazz standards. At the break half of my group decided that it was time to go to bed, but I and several others suspected the best was yet to come. We were right. In the second set Katuner blew the room away. As is the tradition in jazz, each band member took a turn doing a solo. Each musician was more surprising than the last. When it was the bass player's turn, he set down his bass and picked up a cello! He worked that thing until it glowed like a ham radio picking up messages from Neptune. Another musician, who specialized in traditional Persian and Armenian wind instruments, had been sitting quietly in the corner throughout the first set. I felt sorry for him when it was his turn to solo. How hard could ancient wooden flutes rock? They looked like the toy recorders my kids played in elementary school. Turns out ancient wooden flutes can rock pretty damned hard. It felt like he was changing gravity with those things. How many G-forces could I take? And still, Vahagan stole the show.
A guy sitting with veiled women at the table next
Movable Feast II
Me, Jennifer (the new director of Environmental Studies at AUA), Maryam and Bill (2 of the Erebuni 7) and Armen in the distance. to ours couldn't contain himself. He stood up and began to dance. To my drunken horror he grabbed my hand and pulled me up with him. (The night before I dreamed that I embraced a nude man, so today's leitmotif was to have been "Dr. Jon: macho cowboy.") Fortunately, I was saved when a woman at another table stood and started dancing. She was a real pro and stole the attention of the room away from even the band. It looked like she was combining hip-hop with belly dancing. She was joined by a little girl who I often see at Poplovok. Armen was inspired to video the dancing. As an experiment, I've included the video at the top of this blog to give readers a flavor of the place.
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What a week It has been a week of feasting. In addition to the feast at Erebuni House and the feast at Our Village, the president of AUA took the new faculty out to dinner at his favorite Lebanese restaurant. Last night was Armen's last night in Armenia. He and his wife insisted that I join them at Dol Mama, Yerevan's fanciest restaurant. Armen picked up
Cyrus and me
Cyrus posing for a future mug shot at the president's dinner. the tab! Two nights ago it was Russian food with my little dinner club, and tonight I treated my students from last summer to pizza. Tomorrow night it's Thai food with the dinner club, and Saturday night I'm taking another big group thirty minutes out of town to Ashtarik Dzor, a restaurant with a zoo!
In addition to feasting, I have also been working harder than I have worked in years. This is a screen shot of one of my programs-- a simulation of ubiquitous computing.
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Pumping Iron I feel improved already, which is to say that I'm sore and mentally exhausted. Despite a litany of creative excuses from me, Artak finally made good on his promise to turn me into a muscle man. The mental exhaustion is because at the same time I resumed my Russian lessons with Tag. I told her that if I begged for mercy, she should ignore me and keep cramming the Russian into my head. I started begging almost from the start, but she ignored my pleas as instructed. Damn.
In order to go to the gym with Artak, I first needed to buy sneakers. I'm a pro at
Ubiquitous computing in SugarScape
In addition to feasting, I have also been working harder than I have worked in years. This is a screen shot of one of my programs-- a simulation of ubiquitous computing. this. Last year I got roped into tennis and had to buy sneakers. I left that pair in Santa Cruz, and so now I had to buy another pair. I bought camouflaged sneakers this time. I was going to wear them home, but when I looked more closely at my purchase I decided that they might fall apart if I wore them on the street.
Artak took me to his favorite gym, which consisted of a low ceiling "sports hall" about 60 feet by 30 feet, and two tiny locker rooms that could only accommodate two dressers at a time. The gym was equipped with dumbbells and a bunch of sweaty benches tilted at various angles. There's no concept of wiping off benches in Armenia, you just lie yourself down on the perspiration-soaked vinyl and try to appreciate the satisfying squish. The women's aerobics class is going on in the same room, so there's music, shouting, and women jumping up and down right next to the benches.
It took a week after the first session for me to be able to lift my arms. Just in time for session two. Session three is tomorrow. Artak wants us to go twice per week. Fortunately, he's leaving for San Francisco next week.
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... Time to get ill! Squeamish readers might want to skip this last paragraph, those who are disposed to the scatological may read on.
There's something horribly wrong with the design of toilets in Armenia. It's worse in some areas than others. For some reason the bowl is designed so that dookies don't fall into the water with that satisfying depth-charge plop. Instead, they fall onto a little platform where they are available for inspection by their proud parent. This might be handy if one were looking for tape worms, swallowed balloons of cocaine, or messages from God (cf. Running with Scissors). The idea is that the flush sweeps them away, but of course even the strongest torrent only partially sweeps them away, necessitating that a toilet brush be used after every flush. Of course this raises a secondary problem-- keeping the toilet brush feces free. My theory is that Armenian toilets were designed by the French, who proved their general lack of grasp on the whole toilet concept by inventing the bidet.
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Sally
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your friend Caro
Caro reminds me of a wild and crazy Steve Martin -- sure made me laugh to see that face! how fun. Thanks for all the great descriptions along your journey. Sally