First, and foremost, to alleviate the concerns of worrying grandparents, I am in fact not getting evicted from my house. The Russians decided not to make the trip to kick little old me out of their house, so I’m here for the long haul. This officially makes thie situation nothing more than a Red Scare.
Bad jokes aside, the past 7 days have been rather interesting. Thursday, the power went out for many hours in the middle of the day. To answer the ‘why?’ question, I only had to walk down the street. Sticking out of a large manhole was the largest bundle of electrical cables I’d ever seen. Of course, nothing goes better with exposed electricity then ZERO workers. Must have been the hourly coffee break. Just wish I had my camera.
Thursday was also my host Mom’s birthday party, so no English club for me this week :/ However, it was a good time, as all Armenian parties are. I especially love my Tatik (grandmother), who loves me to death for some reason and is convinced I am going to marry an Armenian woman. While the bar-b-que was a little ghetto, it all worked out and was a good time. Some pictures for your pleasure:
The birthday girl:
The Bar-B-Que pit (no, not homeless men1):
The infamous host Tatik:
The rest of the weekend was spent in Sissian, which is about the furthest point away from me in Armenia (8 hours in a sweltering marchutni). We left 8am Fri morning – at which I would like to point out the town was COMPLETEY dark. This place doesn’t really get going until about 10am. The weekend was a lot of fun though. We saw a lot of fun things, including a bridge over a small river, where one support was an old car shell (dead serious). Also, Sissian is famous for the “Armenian Stonehenge”. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves (the Stonehence, and tourist information center, respectively):
We also played the annual north vs. south Khash Bowl, where unfortunately the south prevailed, mainly due to the lack of subs for the north (hey, we’re Peace Corps, we’re not expected to excercise). Voching. We had a restaraunt rented out for the rest of the night, and so we partied, and I talked a lot of baseball trash to the 10+ volunteers from Michigan (although no one perticularly likes the Tigers).
The rest of the week has been a good time, and it’s finally getting back to normal. We’re submitting grants this week for the handicap accessibility project at School #2, and wi-fi is slowly but surely coming along. We’ll see. Today Alex and I are hiking to an old castle along the Azeri border, and Sunday we’re making another run to an old area church before the winter hits with full force. I leave you with the following photo, taken in front of the house I stayed in this weekend. Hopefully it encompasses Armenia for you:
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.