ants

Yesterday, a nardi demonstration by my landfather showing that even after two years, he can kick my nardi butt.

And this morning, I battled the army of ants living in my door. Ok, fine, my landmom battled them. But she used MY bottle of khandzori katsakh (apple vinegar), and that counts for something, right? She laughed at how I freaked out at their swarming from the door frame, how my feet were dancing all over them, trying to stop their advance into my living room.

“It’s the weather, Brent,” she says. “Give me your broom. We’ll sweep them out.”

“I don’t want them swept. I want them dead.”

Giggles. “Just pour some vinegar on them. They run from the smell.”

She was right, of course. And now, I’m headed to the store to buy a months supply of apple vinegar. Later, there will be lighting of incense to cover the smell of my door frame pickling.

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summer to spring

I thought returning in May I’d be back in Armenia for the summer.  That assumption held true in the capital, where the lowland climate heats up much more quickly than up north.  Upon my return, while waiting to see the doctors, I spent an entire day sitting in a park around a man-made pond near Yerevan’s opera house.  The slopes of grass between the pond and the surrounding cafes is home to three or four trees.  I sat in the shade of one and devoured a few hundred pages of Irving’s The World According to Garp, moving a few times for the sliding shade and once at the spray of the park’s sprinklers. In the instance of the sprinklers, a teenage boy found the gate valve and shut off the water, saving the afternoon for his teenage counterparts and consequently for me. My gratitude waned some when later the same boy sat next to me, forcing me to try on his sunglasses and then pose with him for a picture.

I have no idea why the city decided to water the grass at 3:00pm.  The day had reached a heat that, while pleasant, urged me to loose my jacket and roll my jeans into capris.  It felt like summer, and I laid there all day.

Now, come north to my tiny town, and you get to jump back an entire rain-cloudy season.  Ultimately I’m happy to be here to see every spare space coming up dandelions. Where there aren’t dandelions, the green is broken up by minute pansy like flowers no bigger than a pencil eraser; Armenians call them ‘Snow Drops’.  The apple trees are still blossoming, and the first sound every morning is one of a zillion songbirds.

Makes me as cheery as freaking Snow White. I feel like singing the street dogs into a house-cleaning stupor.

The sun is also setting so much later, and yesterday Serine gave me a cot from inside her house to set out in the garden.  I laid there on a giant feather pillow and called my friend who lives far south in the mountains.  I called her because I had to tell someone I was laying on a bed in the middle of a garden, sun splashing my shoulders, head resting on a giant feather pillow, a book at my side, and song birds twittering around me in the orchard apple trees.

Don’t worry; an hour and a half later a big gray rain cloud doused me and my cot and shut the song birds right up.  It was a pretty swell hour and a half though.

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a summer blip in winter: the landsisters

Word has traveled from Moscow to our sleepy town via emigrated relatives of my Armenian friends: THE BIG FREEZE IS COMING.  Apparently, when Moscow freezes over, the same icy hand reaches out to our town in about three days.

This comes to me as a bit of a surprise.  You know what I was doing a couple of days ago? I was with my landdad, moving the nardi board into the house because the sun was beating down too hard.  (I was wearing a t-shirt.) And then I was hanging out with my landsisters on the terrace.  Meri and I built a car out of blocks my mom brought from the States.  We rolled it down a carpet my landmom left in the sun to air out.

In the game, I took on the roll of simple fool, dropping the car down the carpet and watching it crash and fall to pieces.  Meri took the roll of exasperated mother, skipping the now-is-that-the-smartest-thing-to-do’s and going straight for the this-horrid-child-is-killing-me’s, slapping her palm against her forehead and collapsing to the ground.

She did get over her feigned exasperation eventually.

Her sister Greta found me later while I was reading Timbuktu, lying on a bench under the leafless tree by my cottage.  She proceeded to build a fake barbeque by my head.

I love having landsisters.

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doing some drifting

Some World Vision coworkers and I have been working on a Youth Leader Small Grants project, teaching Armenian village students about project design and management and, through a series of steps, awarding some of these village kids with small grants to do projects in their communities.  In one small village, Yaghdan, the students applied for furniture and supplies for their new youth center.  The first thing they wanted to do with these new supplies was a small weekend camp.  So, after World Vision supplied the furniture, myself and another Peace Corps volunteer went to the village with a couple days of summer camp planned.

The camp was inspired by a project called Little Drifters (check it out at the killer creative blog,  BOOOOOOOM).  The two of us PCV’s expanded the idea to a two day workshop exploring creativity and nature.  The kids made journals, wrote nature poems, and discussed how creating art that explores nature helps protect nature by helping others come to value it.  We made posters out of their poems to hang on their youth center walls, and just before sunset we hiked up to a hill peak above their village.  Most of them, including the Youth Center Director, had never hiked up the hill; they watched the sun go down with the excited chatter of kids discovering.

The next day we discussed litter, wrote more poems and then talked about creating found art using examples of garbage art and the boats pictured at BOOOOOOOM.  Then the kids went out to collect garbage from their village fields and likewise picked up natural refuse to create their own Little Drifters.  We waded out into Yaghdani Get to let the boats go, splashing at the boats and each other and ignoring the blazing sun.

Enjoy the pics below from our Little Drifter creation:

My Armenian friend teaching about volunteering to protect the environment.

Yaghdan’s very supportive mayor, one of the few woman mayor’s I’ve met

Below: Collecting, building, and sending off our Little Drifters.

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in five days

In the last five days I have:

-Hosted an American-Armenian friend whose language skills betray the second part of the title but who’s dinosaur shirt and blue tights screamed the first.

-With said friend*, munched gobs of fresh fruit in the crumbling form of an old bathhouse at the 1000 year-old ruins just outside of town.

-*Commited to hitching back from said ruins.  Surprised at the first takers: a couple bouncing along in their horse and buggy.  The metal shell of the the buggy had clearly held manure not too long ago.  But what’s a little manure between friends?

-*Made incredible beer-batter pizza which became less incredible the next morning after sitting in a freon-spewing fridge.

-*Hauled spewing fridge outside.

-*Took an old bus out to Gyulagarak and hiked the remaining three miles to the famed Dendropark.  Collapsed, after the 90degreeF hike, on a bridge that held us over a stream.  Munched more fruit. Napped.  Awoke to an invitation from a family of Armenian strangers to join in their picnic.  Gabbed in Armenian.  Grabbed at khorovats, homemade sourcream on grilled peppers, homemade-baked clay-oven bread, and vodka shots.

-*Learned after talking with Strange Family, that we’d actually spent the entire afternoon on the bottom of the mountain on which, half a kilometer up, was the real Dendropark.

-*Enjoyed the real Dendropark for all of thirty minutes before it closed.  It was kind of amazing.  An Alice-In-Wonderland-Meets-Jurrasic-Park kind of garden with sections of roses becoming all the sudden a dense, blanket of barely waving ferns under tall, weepy pines.

-After said friend took off for Lake Sevan, met New Sitemates (!!!!!) and their organizations at the river near Agarak.  Swam.  Khorovatsed.  Danced.  Swam some more.  Got a sunburn (first, maybe only, of the summer).  Let sunrays, water, and new-and-year-old friendships wash over me.  Felt damn good.

-Directly after river time, helped landfamily clear the garden.  IE, hacked away at 7 foot weeds for a few hours with a scythe.  A SCYTHE, people.  Grim reaper style, even.

-Next day celebrated landsister’s 5th birthday with more khorovats, more dancing, more new and old friends, more carrying around landsisters on shoulders, etc.

-Discoverd, with New Sitemates, that my town’s park turns into a carnival at night with lights, ferris wheels, cage rides, and lots of the best ice cream ever churned.  Met. More. People.

-Woke up the next day to texted announcement that My Friend Completing His Peace Corps Service and Therefore Leaving in a Week (MFCHPCSTLW) would be coming into town for a visit.

-Finished Season 9 of Friends.  Mourned the fact that you only watch Friends for the first time one time.  Made commitment to treasure the yet unseen 10th Season.  (I know, I know.)

-Welcomed MFCHPCSTLW and made way back to 1000 year-old ruins to hike the gorge peninsula on which they stand (factoid: Lori Berd, in-post known as ‘the 1000 year-old ruins’, stands on the point on which two sides of the gorge form an elbow.  The elbow was chosen by some really old dude as a secure location for the silk-etc merchants to build an outpost on the Silk Road.  The secure location was later conquered by the Turks.  And the Persians.  And the Georgians.  And the Mongols.)

-Munched on fruit again in the 1000 year-old bathhouse, this time with MFCHPCSTLW.

-Hiked down into the gorge to the 1000 year-old bridge.  Felt like I was in Lord of the Rings.  Checked for hobbits.  Found discarded vodka bottles.

-Ran into Armenian friends who pointed out to us an area in Gorge River (actual name of the river) in which stirred warm water.  Investigated.  Swam in ice cold water.  did not believe.  Investigated further.  Found warm water along with warm waterfall.  Hoped it was natural-spring warm and not sewage warm.  Disregarded fears. Enjoyed swim while staring in wonder at the close canyon walls.

-Attempted to hike Gorge Elbow.  Found what seemed like miles of stinging nettles.  Figured that Turks and Persians and Georgians and Mongols probably didn’t have to deal with stinging nettles.  Nettles probably only developed sting in the last 1000 years.  Or maybe I should just never be expected to conquer anything.

-Turned back for home. Walked in the rain.

-Made killer pasta.  Died twice while eating.  Filled tummy to brim.

-Woke the next morning to eyes glued shut by eye-boogers.  Blamed river water.  Thought the gluing-phenomenon was actually kind of cool.  Enjoyed cracking eyelids apart.

All-in-all:

Visitors hosted: 4
Surprises yeilded by my town:  6
Khorovats eaten: 3
Town pride: a lot
Overall happiness: pretty dang high.

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in which a homeless man thinks that i am also a homeless man

So, after you spend time thinking your neighborhood might explode while you stare at beached whales (please see last post), life gives you a little less bitter perspective.

I know I’ve said that my town is fairly cool and all, but it’s startling how cool it is compared to Yerevan which is a mere two hours away.  It tends to be twenty degrees warmer there, and yesterday, at about 3pm the capital had surely surpassed the 100 degree mark.  After searching for the right road for a blistering hour, I, of course, fresh from yesterday’s puke-time, had to hike with my backpack up a 70 degree slope for 700 yards or so to find the vet’s house where in Spring Chicken was waiting with her worms.

I wish she didn’t have her lady parts anymore, but apparently she’s puting up a fight.  I bet she ate some feces on purpose, just to throw me off the ovary-scooping trail.

The two of us sweat our way back down for another hour or so to the center of town where we collapsed under the shade of tree, laying on the grass only a couple yards from a fake pond.

There we were approached by Gago.  Clad in baggy black duds, he offered the last bits from his plastic bag of popcorn to the Chicken who devoured them immediately.  I, barely waking from my nap, rolled over to see the Chicken scarfing and the tall man grinning down at me through a grey, crudely braided beard.

Maybe I threw him off with my groggy shnorakal enk (we’re grateful) because he immediately turned around and went and brought another bag of popcorn which he spread on the grass and from which the three of us ate.

“You’re hungry?” he asked.

“I’m ok, thanks, ” I said, “but I think she loves you now.”

Gago grinned and reclined and brought out a small bottle of vodka which he offered me.  I declined which didn’t stop him from guzzling.  He never directly asked me if I was homeless.

“Drink some vodka?” he asked.

“No, thanks.  I’m waiting on someone who is taking me to my town”

“You live on the grass up there?” he asked.

“No, I live near a family in their small house in their garden.”

Later on, he asked, “In America, you live on the grass?”

“No, no.  I live with my family,” I said.

Whenever my hand was empty, he gathered kernals of popcorn from the grass and dumped them into my palm.  Perhaps it was my I’ve-been-puking-in-a-sweltering-apartment hairdo, or maybe it was my dirty clothes, or my heedless sprawl on the park grass, but this was surely the first time that a homeless man assumed that I was also homeless.

He offered Spring Chicken a palm full of vodka, which to my relief, she seemed to hate.  We talked about his cat, about Yerevan, about the heat, about music.  Grinning, we stumbled through “Hotel California” together, his phonetic rendering all the more marred by his vodka guzzles.    He kissed Spring Chicken on the mouth and wrestled with her.  He seemed very interested in her teeth, opening her mouth to study them while she wagged her tail.

When people passed he sometimes asked them for khmelu pogh, for drinking money.  But when the taxi came, he didn’t ask me for a penny.  He shook my hand and told me what a pleasure it was to meet me.  He hugged my dog.  He waved to me.

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you know those times i’m talking about

You know those times when everything seems to go wrong.  It’s not just a day, but whole weeks at a time.  Those sections of the year where things happen one-after-another, like you miss a flight and pay an of-course-highly-unfair price for a new ticket then you return home to find a mouse has eaten through all your clothes and you go to meet your friends for dinner but your tire is flat so you call them and have a not horrible but mostly inedible meal at a restaurant you wouldn’t have chosen all the while watching as two of your friends (one of whom you were just starting to think liked you) display body language that clearly shows they’re already hooking up so you go home.  The next day you spend thirty minutes looking for your keys only to find that at some point yesterday they slipped through the mouse-chewed hole in your pocket.  You spend another thirty minutes looking for that extra house key which you find in a cardboard box next to a sleeping rattlesnake which takes a dive at you right before you pin it down with your foot.  Heart pumping, you contemplate the sweat which seems to have been released in deluge proportions and think about how you’ll have no time for a shower before work.  Having nothing like shovel or ax handy, and needing to keep all of your body weight on the neck of the rattler, you spy a butter knife on a near shelf and go about a far-to-nasty snake beheading while praying for forgiveness for everything.

Later that day your boss scolds you for being late to work and breathes fire that singes your hair to nubs and sets three weeks of file organization ablaze.  Thinking you’re just about over it, you decide to take a bus home but the bus has been rigged by a terrorist or Dennis Hopper or somebody and has to go above 50 mph or it will explode.  You take the wheel after the driver’s been shot and you figure at least you’ll have a love interest to guide you through the ordeal but it turns out to just be Keanu Reeves who looks at you with the same scowl over and over because apparently someone somewhere told him that was reassuring.

After the bus thing has been resolved you figure you’ll write about it on your blog but the internet is out so there you are alone in your house with nothing to do but sort through your mouse-hole clothes.  You take a box of totally demolished shirts and pants out to the curb and just as you’re setting it down by the trashcans a plane engine crashes into the roof of your house totally demolishing the east side along with your neighbors row of freshly planted lilies and possibly their dog as well which may now be under the dog house which is also under the plane engine.

Your neighbors run out of their house screaming about a broken gas line and the whole neighborhood starts scattering.  A few of you end up running all the way to the beach where you find a row of beached sperm whales each with a small group of children next to it, crying and singing to the ocean beasts.  One of the kids is bald and has leukemia.  The whole scene is suddenly backlit when your neighborhood explodes.

You tell all of this to your friend, who once you’ve finished says, “You live by a beach?!”

___________________

Ok… my weeks haven’t been so bad.  And I won’t bore you with the minutia, but I will say that on the third of July I traveled with my dog to the capital to have her spayed.  I then went to a town by the lake to celebrate the Fourth with friends.  However, I ended up with a stomach flu that kept me in bed while they had their lake times.  And I called the vet who was supposed to scoop out the puppy ovaries who instead told me that no scooping could be done on account of the colony of worms living in the puppy’s abdomen (despite the many worm treatments I’ve given her).  So, plagued with wormy guilt, I now have to take her back home, forget the weekend that went totally wrong and figure out when the heck I can make the multi-day trip back to the capital for puppy scooping, a trip that will inevitably involve me cancelling plans and praying pleasejesus don’t let her go into heat any time soon.

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in full up-swing

If you’re keeping up with my ol’ blog, you may have noticed some roller-coastering.  Well, folks, we are in full upswing now!  Clearly there was the I Can Make Refried Beans Discovery.  And really, there’s so much more.  Observe:

It’s Sunday afternoon. I clip Spring Chicken onto the leash and walk out under a blue sky and a full-on summer sun.  Back in Texas, leaving the house at 2pm on a June day means hopping from one air-conditioned building to the next.  But here in North Armenia, 2pm is perfect, a balmy 76 degrees.

I meet a couple of friends in the center of town, a single woman and her daughter who recently spent her senior year in an American school in Jersey.  She packs her Northface backpack with camera, fruit and water, adding similar contents to my bag, and we head away from the center.

We walk to the very corner of town, a neighborhood where the daughter grew up.  She recalls playing king of the mountain on a small mound on which now rests an old bucket and the skeleton of a gas-powered oven.   We head out to a dilapidated bus that sits rusting at the beginning of a field; we take pictures where the driver’s seat used to be, happy to be headed no where in particular.

We cross a large water pipe, walking along its length.  I fall, sliding off into the mud.  We laugh and then notice a rainbow in a rupture’s spray.

We walk for a half a mile in a field of daisies.  Spring Chicken bounds along causing ripples in the flowers as her blond body bobs among them.  The mother shows me a small growth of thyme hidden on the edge of an old stream bed.

We hit the edge of a ravine which coincides with the forest’s last slide down the mountain.  The sudden height and shade of pine trees signals a crossing over.  The daughter finds a small path, a critter’s run into the undergrowth, and we make our way along it pushing away branches and leaves.  Just when we can hear the quiet rush of stream water, the daughter hits a fork, deciding finally to take a small muddy leap instead of scratching her way through brush.  The mother decides on the thick brush route.  Just as I pack Spring Chicken into my back pack, preparing to climb down over steep mud, both mother and daughter encounter patches of banjar, stinging nettles.  The daughter, sitting mostly in mud, methodically picks away at the nettles before her.  The mother decides to continue on through the brush onomanopoetically.  Her cries reinforce my decision to jump to the mud, and I encounter only a bit of banjar.  The daughter says the stinging is “good for you”.

The girls take a moment to remove their socks and dip their re-shod feet into the stream.  We walk in the water, the girls lauding it for it’s clarity and drinkability.  I remove Spring Chicken from the bag, hoping she’ll enjoy the cool and wet.  She doesn’t, clinging doggedly to the muddy edges before finally falling in and dashing to the other side.

We finally take up a steep grassy incline.  We sit down among flowers and short grass, warming with the sun on our backs.  Spring Chicken disappears to chew on her find, an old bone.  We take out a bag of strawberries and eat until our fingertips and lips are fully red with juice.  I write some in my journal.  We lay in the sun.

We walk home along a dirt road.  The mother teaches me how to spot patches of wild herbs, and we fill a gallon-size ziplock bag with forest mint and thyme.  We’re greeted at the edge of town by sun-thrilled boys running along a stream, half naked and full of summer.  An old man carrying some long branches tells us a story I don’t understand; I laugh anyway.

When we get home, we set out our shoes to dry in the sun and lay out the herbs on tourist maps of our town.  The heat under my skin feels like my whole body smiling.  I eat slowly, a plate of pasta and Lori cheese, a cucumber, herb and tomato salad, some thyme tea.

I sleep so very well at night.

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summer summer summer summer summer!

Summer is really here, y’all.  I know most of you are totally aware of this, but really, it wasn’t until last week that I finally gave up carrying a sweater with me just in case Ol’ Lady Winter was still hanging around to throw a chilly gust my way.  It seems she’s taken leave, and with Summer fully in charge around here, check out what she’s brought my way:

1. Chaco tan! I have one again!  I got my first pair of Chacos as a gift from my parents back in 2007.  I wore them as often as possible, which, when Texas often gives you 70 degree weeks in January, was a lot.  Last fall I retired them earlier than I would have liked, and given their wear after sporting them every day almost all of three years, my parents sent me the newest pair.  And finally, I see the white stripes and tan triangles that mean I am outside, that summer air passes over the tops of my feet, that I’m warm!

2. Bell peppers, tomatoes, baby radishes, strawberries, cherries, green plums, etc! Fruits!  Vegetables!  I’m so happy.  I’ve been chomping bell peppers like apples.  I am mixing some killer salsas.  I’m snacking on coriander, tomato, and house cheese sandwiches.  I can’t eat enough cucumbers.  I saw a friend post on Facebook recently that he and a friend were headed out to a farmer’s market; I couldn’t help but smile, realizing that I live in a farmers market, that my streets are lined with tasty goodness.

3. Porch-sitting! I tend to take Spring Chicken on long walks around town.  Half of the interactions we have are with stray and kept dogs who bark and growl and make to challenge the Chicken.  However, the other half are porch-sitters.  There’s a group of men on a corner who always end up asking me for money, somehow in a charming way.  There’s an older woman who I usually catch during chores, who is always concerned about The Chicken after the disappearance of my Sanity.   There’s a man I’ve run into a few times, a smiler with a hunched back who pushes a tiny girl around the roads by my house.  The girl has down-syndrome; she stares in wonder at the potholes they dodge.
This general outside-ness is a wonderful thing about summer here, one we don’t have nearly as much in so-hot-it-hurts Texas.  I’m in love with sitting outside with the pup and a book; I’m thrilled by the recent move of my landfather’s and my nightly nardi games to the front porch.

4. New Volunteers! Let’s not forget that this summer brings to Armenia a new group of Peace Corps Volunteers.  I’ve seen them all twice now.  They’ve only been here a little over a week, so they’re still well-groomed.  They’re clothes still look fresh.  I saw make-up and hair gel being worn.  Only a few greasy locks.  They’re chipper and excited.  And, maybe, just maybe, one of them may be coming to live in my town.  An American friend.  HERE.  IcanhardlycontainmyselfI’msofreakingexcitedaboutthat!  Of course, I’m not counting my chickens, but I am one of two of three PCV’s here who goes full months at a time before seeing another American.  Could be pretty dang neat to have one living in walking distance.

I’m not adding to this list Summer’s not so wonderful offerings like bugs and allergies I didn’t know I had.  Or the migration of a good friend’s husband indefinitely to Moscow.  It’s not all coming up bell peppers.  But the sun is getting up early every morning to let me know I should enjoy as much of the day as I can.

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