Kyle’s Journey in Armenia

After a year of eating cabbage soup, freezing myself to sleep, and still failing to pronounce all three Armenian R’s correctly, it was time for a vacation. A lovely lady from America, Sara, came to visit me from the 9th-22nd here in Armenia. Our trip included a tour of my life in Armenia (Yerevan, my summer village Bazum, and Noyemberyan), Dubai, and a week in Istanbul. The trip was full of adventures, many more mis-adventures, but overall I had a great time. Once Sara has time to digest everything from our trip], I’ll have her write an outsider’s impressions of Armenia. Until then, I broke up stories from our vacation into two sections: today will be about Armenia and Dubai, and when I am less tired, a second report on Istanbul (not Constantinople). If you just want the visual tour and to skip my rambling narrative, you can view our trip photos instead.

Armenia

Unfortunately we did not spend much time in Armenia, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. Sara arrived on Wednesday the 9th, which is also the Armenian “Victory Day” holiday (they celebrate war victories, if you hadn’t guessed). There was a large concert that night with a lot of fireworks, which I planned to play off as my doing for Sara’s grand arrival to Armenia, but after 23 hours of flying through 4 airports, sleep comes first. We heard them set off some car alarms by our hotel, which is kind of the same, right? So aside from a small bloody-nose incident (sorry!), it was an uneventful night, but I was so happy to see a familiar face. We spent the next day trying some deliciously over-sized Georgian food, and then brought 4 new computers, a laptop, and a projector back from Yerevan for my NGO (sorry again about your back!) and meeting everyone at my office. I’m not sure if they were happy to meet Sara or happy they were getting new computers, but I’m sure it was the former… After meeting my host family and taking a brief tour of the town (“notice the pigs to your left… Soviet block housing to your right…”), we headed back to Yerevan for our flight to

Dubai

The best way to described Dubai is a culture-less, mega-resort metropolis in the middle of the desert with some really, really cool buildings. Basically, the town grew out of nothing in the 1950s with the discovery of oil and a lot of foreign investment, and it is now a playground for the super-rich. After barely making it out of the Yerevan airport (is it bad when the security did not think our boarding passes were real?), we touched town in the middle of the desert and immediately entered a new reality. Everything in Dubai is over sized, ridiculously designed, and simply quite a site. They are currently trying to build the tallest building in the world, and are constructing an island chain to look like the countries of the world, for instance. After arriving at our hotel (which had the biggest bed I’ve ever seen in my life) we set out to walk around the Creek, which is the water-way through town. There are many little boats which travel up and down, and we took a ride the next day, but only one thing was on my mind that night: SEAFOOD!

After a little Google-ing, we found a well-rated restaurant in the Regent Palace hotel. We asked our hotel, who graciously gave us directions to the Royal Palace hotel, on the other side of town from the Regent. After asking their bell-hop for a second recommendation, we settled on the Aquarium, which lived up to its name. We entered the Dubai Creek Golf Club (ooo…) to find a highly-priced restaurant with waiters in suits, and expected my Birkenstock-clad feet to be turned back at the door. Surprisingly, they let us pass and we had a very good dinner, albeit a little out of place with the rest of the crowd. However, we had a great time, some great food, and we eventually won over the wait staff as we were the only customers who ordered a round of beer and smiled the entire time we were there.

The next day was free until 10pm, when we would leave for Turkey, so we decided to play tourist and see the sites of Dubai. Our first stop was the Mall of the Emirates, or so we thought. Our taxi driver, who actually drove a large van and spoke no English, offered to show us all the sites, including the Burj Al Arab (the sailboat hotel) and the Palm Islands all for a low low price (because he’s my friend). After a little bargaining, we began our overpriced tour of the sites. As it turned out-and go figure-our driver had no connections at any of the places we visited, so instead we played paparazzi 🙂 As you can see from our pictures below (outside the guard gate at Burj Al Arab, inside a beautiful hotel we infiltrated, and on the highway out to the Palm Islands, respectively), it wasn’t exactly the full tourist experience, but it was a heck of a lot of fun avoiding being arrested!!

We spent the afternoon at the Mall of the Emirates, which is one of the largest malls I’ve been to outside of Bangkok or the Mall of America. While the latter two may be large, the Mall of the Emirates is the only one with an INDOOR SKI RESORT:

Amazing. But that’s Dubai for you. Just seeing all of the Western stores was enough of a shock for me already, but was perfect for a Peace Corps Volunteer’s vacation! I ate at Cinnabun, and then had a hot Hawaiian Papa John’s pizza. It was amazing to have just a little taste of home. After we got our fill of Borders and Gap and overpriced European clothing, we headed to the Dubai Museum. It was very interesting to learn about the history of the area and how quickly Dubai truly evolved out of nothing. We finished our trip with a ride up the creek on a dhow boat, and hopped on our flight to Istanbul.

Dubai is truly one of those places you must see to believe. One day we will go back, stay in the $2000/night sailboat-shaped hotel and do it right, but for a student and a PC volunteer, it was a pretty good trip. Plus, you can never go wrong when there are camels 😉

(All of our pictures from the trip are available in the Photo Album)

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