yerevan sun

Aaaaaaah, yes. There it is, a blazing sun slapping my shoulders. I’m in central Armenia for sure.

After sweatering up in cool Goris, the capital brought on some heat exhaustion and a massive headache which wiped me right out for a few hours. But after a cold shower and some gellato, CURED! I was then able to enjoy dusk by the cascade with the my best fulbright scholar (and otherwise) friends, Claire and Imogen, guzzling some sweet Laimon Fresh (a Claire and Brent discovery). Imogen had seized a couple donuts off a pile at the US Embassy’s Independence Day party, and after removing them from their crumpled napkins, we had a vertible street rat feast (re: beginning scenes from Aladdin, late night, scraps of food, feeling poor but free!). Then we went to check out my friend’s new bar, D.I.Y., which had such a creative vibe I immediately felt the need to write a poem, get a tattoo and splatter paint on the walls.

This morning, after a greeting from Tim’s cats,  came a moment I’ve been waiting for since last September: breakfast at Gemini Cafe. The place serves crepes and coffee from a corner shop window, and patrons choose from some smart looking small tables sitting under trees up and down the sidewalk. Cool morning air, ham and cheese crepe, my friend Zoe, and a neighborhood feeling worthy of a scene in You’ve Got Mail.  This is me taking it in.

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goris grey

This southern town, Goris, has been hiding the sun from me for days. I can hardly stand another day of all clouds. It’s a good thing I’m here with a best friend, or I’d shrivel right up. Still, I have loved late nights watching The West Wing with Zoe, and yesterday sitting with her at a cemetery up in the craggy hills of Old Goris, musing, talking to cows and watching lizards.

Honestly, maybe it’s the missing vitamin D, but I need to go north, get to some sun, get back to my North Armenia home. For the next few days I’ll have to settle for the capital, where I’ve got close-of-service meetings with PC staff. It’s not home, but I am looking forward to wearing tank tops, munching a veg burrito at Taco Maco, slurping limetta at the new gellato place off Northern Avenue, munching lebanachos at Lagonid, and enjoying a mojito my friend’s new bar, D.I.Y.

Zoe and I will take the switchbacks to Yerevan and stay with our friend, Tim, who is temporarily fostering two cats for a departing PCV who recently and suddenly been evicted.

Ah, yes, that’s what I need. Sun, good food, good friends, and some cats to cuddle when I get home at night.

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opera swoll’

So it turns out Plácido Domingo is a big deal.

I had such a great time with Sima Cunningham at Calumet that I started looking back over the month, and I realized that the past month or so has been a feast of Yerevan musical offerings.

At our All Volunteer Conference a few weeks ago, I was sitting next to a friend of mine, Kath, who was interupted mid-knit by another volunteer with ticket news.  They’d be buying all the seats that afternoon.  My ears tend to prick up any time I feel like I might be missing something.  I blame this on Rizzo the Rat in A Muppet Christmas Carol munching a gala apple and explaining to his co-apple-vendor, “I’m creatin’ scarcity.”

I asked what they’re buying tickets for.  “Placido Domingo,” Kath says.  “He’s one of the world’s three great tenors. There’s Pavarotti and Carreras, and–”

“And this guy!”  I was getting it. “Yeah, I’d like to go,” I said, as if I’d been invited.

After committing, I ended up with a very expensive ticket, one that cost almost a fifth of my monthly income.

“It’s worth it,” Kath explained.  “In the States a ticket like this could run you $200 if you could even get one.”

After the concert of course, after I was able to get to Wikipedia, the picture would become clear.  Apparently he’s not just one of the three great tenors, he’s one of what the world calls ‘The Three Tenors’.  He’s had a ton of parts the sheer number of which bowled me over.  But let’s get real.  He’s been knighted by Queen Liz II.  He’s received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the US and gotten similar awards from Spain, France, Portugal, Austria, Lebanon and even Malta (Hey Malta!).  He’s got 9 Grammy’s including one for some Mariachi work (Ay ay ay!).  Dude is opera-swoll’.

On the days preceding the concert, I turned down invites to other activities and when asked, I couldn’t remember the guy’s name.  He was known in my conversations as ‘Pablo Pirhana’ right up to the taxi ride to Yerevan’s Sport Complex Concert Hall.

Despite an incredibly impressive marble on marble on marble foyer, the hall itself creaked underfoot; uneven stairs were not-so-masked by dusty carpet.  When the lights went down and Domingo came out, after he had already started singing, not one, not two, not even three, but four sets of Armenian concert-goers climbed over my lap to get to their seats.  Ushers, not in uniforms but in typical Rabiz wear, answered their phones and even called out to each other over the trying-to-be-rapt audience.

But they couldn’t keep it up for long.  The guy flexed his vocal chords too damn hard for anyone not to pay attention.  And in between his three minute triumphs, soprano Ana Maria Martinez trilled and frilled herself right into my musical dark places and lit up some of those unclaimed rooms, filling them with some kind of new affection for music.

There’s something about opera, it seems, that transcends.  I didn’t know this before.  When I’d go see some well-liked artist play, say Sufjan Stevens or Eisley or more intimate shows like Final Fantasy or whatever, those players made me want to go home and grab my guitar and belt out a few in my room.

But this.  This I can never do.  Those movements, those swings and dips and warbles and leaps and flights I will never hear coming from my own throat.  Here these souls were, waddling out onto stage like any old sally or jim in fancy clothes, but then they sing.  They sing; I melt.

At one point I turned to my friend Pat, “My toes are curling.”  And after every song, I found myself clapping uncontrolably.  That actually happens.  It’s not just done by characters in Looney Tunes or in some movie like August Rush.  It happens in real life.  You’re with them, carried somewhere, and when you land you are thankful and in awe.

It’s like this: Last winter I was considering adopting a dog.  On my walk to work I noticed a few black and white puppies living under a rusty container serving as a construction site’s office.  Seeing my interest, one of the workers asked if I’d like to hold one.  I said, “Yes, the black one.”

He then dove under the container up to his waist, grabbed the hind leg of that puppy and dragged it screaming to the ground in front of me.

“No!” I yelped and reached down to cradle it.  I took the thing into my hands and puppy-whispered her.  I rubbed the back of her neck, her ears.  I scratched her belly, holding her away from mine when I noticed the hundreds of fleas scurrying across her skin.  She went still, limp in my hands.  She looked at me, motionless while I rubbed her fur and whispered a still sound to her.

When I put her down she didn’t move.  She just crouched for a few seconds as if she’d had an out of body experience.  Some being had lifted her miles into the air, made her feel wonderful sensations unlike anything she’d known before, and then placed her back where she was as if it might never have happened at all.

Opera… opera is something like that.

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a night in yerevan with miss cunningham

The other day I was in Yerevan and met some friends at the city’s bohemian bar, Calumet (“It’s cal-oo-may!” I was told.  Excuse me).  The floor near the stage was covered in foot high wooden tables and multi-colored bean bag chairs flat and dusty from heavy butt traffic.  I found my way onto half a bean bag, pulled my legs up to my chest to keep them out of a stranger’s lap, and listened to Sima Cunningham blast.

She fits the big-voice-in-a-little-body cliché, but that big voice is so much full of soul I almost cried while she was singing about an alien coming to earth and falling in love.  I have no idea what she actually said in that song; I just felt lucky to be seeing someone commit to sound like that while I was sitting right there.  Perhaps it was the wall created by people standing behind our bean bag collective that made me feel like it was just a few of us and that voice.  When she wasn’t belting herself, she was backing up her multi-instrumental compadre who’s most impressive work was certainly a harmonica solo which wailed over his own electric guitar work.  He made me want to study harmonica.  Really.

Her voice is somewhere around Brandi Carlile and Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and a lot of Asthmatic Kitty projects, but her 21-year-old voice made me feel younger.  Ok, I’m 25, but I’ll restate: I felt at taken back a few years, like things were more sunrise and new leaves and gentle.  Whether she was wailing on her cover of “Jolene” or poppin’ around on her own “Them Apples”, I could have listened to her all night.

Unfortunately some drunk guy with a euro-fro got hold of the electric guitar, and despite efforts to interrupt his chordless noise-strumming and uncomfortable mic-wailing, he kept going and going.  I got going myself, walking out onto cold, late-night Yerevan singing “Hey Jude” and remembering how just a little while ago a whole room full of us sang the song together, led by a sweet, sweet voice.

Good news for you/me/us all: she’s giving her second album, Time Is Never Your Friend, for FREE on her website.  FREE.  So her tender “Last Christmas”, a folksy trip through the last holiday in her childhood home, will get me good an teared-up while I mourn the loss of my youth/pine for holiday tradition back home, etc.  The album itself in no way measures up to the sheer pleasure of listening to the young soul set a room on fire, but seeing as how she left Armenia the morning after her show, she’s not likely to be playing around here again any time soon.

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i been around

A couple of posts ago I wrote about a time here in Armenia when I didn’t even have a flashlight-wielding friend to stare down into my sickly gullet.

Times have changed.  I have said a good number of times how wonderful are the Armenian compadres that surround me, my nkerutsyun, my akhberutsyun, my harevanutsyun.

However, the last couple of weeks have cemented some expat friendships of mine through the All Volunteer Conference in the capital and multiple visits to Casa Fulbright and multiple visits from My Favorite Europeans (ere known as The Europeans much to their amusement).

So, I haven’t been around the blogosphere all that much.  I’ve been doing stuff like brushing my teeth in Yerevan:

Or playing Settlers in the cottage:

Of course, right before the mentioned conference, Thanksgiving passed.  I woke up why-god-why early to meet these incredible gems for a game of pilgrim dice over Skype:

And in answer to my I’m-a-late-bird sentiment, I was rewarded with an entirely pink town, all of which for about twenty minutes looked like this:

So, you know, sorry for not being around.  But I got things, you know.  So, forgive the lapse.  In the weeks long gap I hope you’ve read something else really wonderful like maybe the 2011 Celebrity Death Watch, or the tub lady’s cat hiding bit (sorry… can’t resist calling someone ‘the tub lady’), or watched the most charming I’m-Back-to-Blog video, or read back entries of the girl in the literal glass house, or used one eye to look at Armenia and the other to look at Austin over there.

I know I haven’t written, but I still read!  We all got needs, people.

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my texan mother in armenia

My mom is going to hate me for putting up a picture of her without her hair done. But besides just being joyful, this picture is proof of love, that she would give up a multi-decade, never-missed hairdryer habit for me. You're beautiful, Mom.

Most of the past week I think I’ll save for my novel/memoir/perpetually-put-off-piece-of-literature.  That is both a artistic decision, and a way of avoiding the impossibility of putting into words this past week with me, Mom, and Armenia. But, despite the length, consider this a taste.

I saw her at first down the hallway, behind the glass partition, my mother looking much skinnier, a little lost, and washed over with anticipation.  She saw me jumping up above the crowd, waving one arm and holding a bouquet of flowers in the other, this little collection of green, white and lavender, a message to my mom that despite the craziness of her first trip abroad, there is beauty, simplicity, joy and calm ahead.

Of course, directly after the bouquet presentation and tearful hugs came a walk through a dark, cement parking garage guided by a less-than-polished, self-proclaimed taxi driver.  In between waves of joy and disbelief that she was actually here, our hands holding each others hands, my mother said, “This doesn’t feel safe.  Are you sure we’re going to a taxi?”

“Yes, Mom, don’t worry.  I’ve got you.”  I was not 100% sure that this man was legitimate, but I was sure that I was so full of love right then that I would have crushed this little man into crumpled nothingness should he even try to threaten the joy.  Plus my friend Chris was recording her arrival, walking behind us with a HD camcorder.  If the taxi driver took us out, my mother and I would be recorded as innocents, full of life and love, and the taxi driver would be immortalized as a love-killing, evil monster.

We did however end up at the prearranged hostel room, both of us too excited not to walk around Yerevan, taking in the joy which the city wind whisked around us.  We ate falafel at Habibi then walked to the Cafe Rich and drank cafe glazses.  Our conversations circled around a few subjects but always came back to this:

Me: “Mom, I just can’t believe you’re right here.  Right here.  Flesh. Bones. Smile even.  My mom!”

Mom:  “I know.  I know!”

There were, of course, updates on everyone from my sister’s boyfriend to a high school friend’s mom.  I can still see her sitting right there in the outdoor cafe, across the table from me, holding a swirl of coffee and ice cream, framed on one side by a tv playing Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and on the other side by the artificial Swan Pond reflecting the street lights with Armenian lovers and families and friends circling it.  I imagined their conversations, unique and mundane, all of us sharing the same air while my mom and I sat and enjoyed a dream of mine coming true.

I know this may feel dramatic.  It’s a mom; it’s a visit.  I can try to explain.  Growing up, I thought everyone had the same life I had, going to little brick elementary schools, escaping to the toy aisle in Wal-Mart while my parents shopped, carrying cartoon-inspired lunchboxes, watching flat highways roll by through minivan windows on the way to our grandparents’ house.  High school mission trips to Mexico broke the bubble, and all the sudden the world opened.

The young traveler’s epiphany: for every unique fingerprint there comes an entire unique life with as many variations to it as there are drops of water in the sea.

I told my mother I’d like to spend my first college summer abroad.  She told me, “If you can find the money, go ahead.”  She would later confide that she didn’t think I’d be able to, and was surprised and even a bit worried when I told her I’d spend my summer working for a church in Auckland, New Zealand.

I spent a collective year of my four in college living and traveling through other countries, full of wonder and joy at each new life I got to know and love.  I changed; I saw the world.

It didn’t stop after college, with 5 months in Kolkata, 3 in Panama, and a year working in refugee resettlement in West Texas.  And now I have lived 16 months in Armenia.  What has changed, or what has intensified I should say, is my desire to share these experiences with family.  Let’s bypass for now my hope to find someone who wants to build a family around this kind of world-chasing life.  Since those first trips to Mexico I have wanted to visit these places with my mom, my dad, my sisters, and with my brother’s family.

It has torn at my soul, this feeling of being in love with people all over the world, being pulled to La Laguna, Mexico, missing my Indian family, and being so far away from my Texas loves.  After a short collection of months, I’ll be a mess of collected memories, current tears, and full full full of joy and love for my Armenian home and the friends I cherish here.

And so, here for just this brief, bright week, my mother did what I’ve dreamed someone in my family would one day want to do and make it happen.  My mother visited a distant country I love, experienced every place I love, met souls I’ve fallen in love with and fell in love with them herself.

We traveled by rickety marshutka to my old host family, that summer home of mine.  Within the first five minutes, sitting in my family’s general store, neighbors gifted us with a plastic bag full of live crawfish.  Later my mom cried giving a toast at the feast they set out for us, already full to the brim with the love they showed us.  I watched her during our morning hike, wondering at the dry yellows and silvers and light blues rolling through the valley.  I named the surrounding villages, speaking for her the unfamiliar sounds of a language she’d never heard.

She spent five days in my valley town.  We feasted on khorovats, danced at her birthday party, hiked to my favorite spot in town.  Every morning she’d shower and then head over to my land mom’s porch for a cup of Armenian coffee.  She couldn’t use her low-voltage hair dryer here which led to the blessing of my land mom doing her hair.   She fell in love with my friends at work, visiting their homes for so many cups of coffee and tastes of Armenian life.  At night she came home to more coffee with the landfamily and finally, long talks with me in my little cottage, with cups of tea and desperate attempts to stay awake to treasure the fact that here we sat in Armenia together.

She even tried to learn some of the language, finally mastering shnorakalutsyun but leaving without mastering the french ‘r’ in deghts.  I translated for her, feeling the blossom of new friendship open through me as she sat and talked with the clooker, with my coworkers, with my tiny little landsisters.

She brought a smorgasbord of gifts for me: Rosita’s refried beans, 80 ounces of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, 9 pounds of brown suger, and my loving Aunt’s hand-tossed Puppy Chow.  She filled my spice cabinet to overflowing and brought more Hanes socks and underwear to try to outlast the wear-and-tear of handwashing.  And she brought so many gifts for my Armenian friends that she was wrapping the last handmade bit of jewelery around my friend Gayane’s wrist while we walked to our marshutka on the way out of town.  A volunteer from our office had accompanied us and without a pre-planned gift, my mom dug into her make-up bag and pulled out eye-shadow, telling her that with such beautiful eyes she should could easily pull of some wild blue and shocking pink.  Gayane, one of the Armenians who fell in love back, waved to my mom and me through the marshutka window as we rolled out of the parking lot and back to Yerevan.

The last two days were a mix of stress and the coming departure.  My mom recalled a Kolkata story of mine, quoting my little Indian brother, who upon seeing the white curb lines that signaled the coming airport entrance, sat back in the bus seat next to me, sighed and said, “Oh, no.”

“What is it, Martin?” I asked, confused as to the change in mood right after a series of goofy-face pictures we’d taken.

He looked out the window again. “This is where the missing starts.”

We stressed each other out shopping in the Vernassage, her wanting to bring back some worthy gifts to our family in Texas, and me at the end of my ability to calmly translate Armenian to English and dollars to dram.  But the moments I’ll remember most about that last day in Yerevan are my mom insisting that we sit with Zeena, our homestay host, while she told us about growing up in Soviet Armenia, about running from Turkey in 1915, about her life hosting Americans with her sister in their home, about her sister’s recent passing, about her brilliant father, about her own career working with the early, room-filling super computers.

And there my mother sat, soaking up all the good, radiating compassion, looking at that old, amazing soul with love and wonder.

At the airport we put off goodbye with two cups of coffee and an apple crumble.  We sat on uncomfortable chairs, holding hands and talking about simple things like my sister’s percussion lessons and her making Armenian coffee for my dad.  We hugged each other some twenty times before she finally walked through through to security.  I watched her through the crack in the glass partition, and when she turned around to catch a glimpse of me, I jumped up above the glass and waved.

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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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birthday in armenia

A couple of days ago I started a new year of life.  My friend emailed me, said she was excited to be celebrating my 30th birthday with me.  Had I known she was joking, I’m not sure it would have made a difference in my flipping out on her.  Turns out that I’ve been around long enough that my proximity to 30 bothers me.  Or perhaps the idea that my twenties are progessively slipping away is just giving me the willies.  But many people have sad many more interesting things about growing older, and to be honest, barring catastrophe I’ll have many more years to consider them.  Moving on.

I started celebrating last Friday, making my way by N’Sync blaring taxi-van to Yerevan in hopes of a festive dinner with PCV friends.  The friends delivered on joy and celebratory atmosphere, filling a room at our favorite Indian food place, Karma, and toasting me to my hearts content.  The birthday wishes kept coming all weekend while we walked around in the sun through the Vernisagge, ate ice cream in the park, and attended some not very impressive IIHF hockey games between N.Korea and South Africa and then Mongolia and Armenia.  I compared experiences with some new friends volunteering in Peace Corps Georgia.  I shared hookah and cinnamon tea with more new friends, these from Iran, and made a lot of jokes about my Taco Maco induced food baby and the differences between conservative and liberal approaches to spin-the-bottle (they were quite interested that while in their version the spinner delivers dares to the pointed, we don’t waste time and get people lip-smacking ASAP).

Monday, back in my little town, I got some major loving from my Armenian friends.
The clooker, I should say, was the number one celebrator of my birthday.  She burst into the office, set down the cake she’d made me, and grabbed me in a big ol’ hug and with a kiss on the cheek wished all the best things for my life. Her cake was an Ant House cake; she knew it’s one of my favorite Armenian foods.  She called me her third son.
I was kissed by everyone in the office.  Some friends from a neighboring NGO came in singing and waving balloons and bearing gifts!
In Armenia, on your birthday, you make dinner for all your friends.  The clooker made me write down a shopping list and took me around town gathering things for tacos.  We chopped and diced.  A couple of the guys came in and wanted to hear “Texas music”, so I put on Dixie Chicks.  I taught the clooker the Two Step in between stirring the simmering ground beef.
15 or so Armenians gathered to celebrate me and eat my tacos.  They swigged vodka in my honor, toasting me, my family, my friends, and my journey to Armenia.  They presented me with a beautiful (if slightly off) crucifix that I’m now scrounging a necklace for.  And they presented me with what you see pictured here, a card from each person from the office with their birthday wishes and thoughts about how awesome I am (their words, not mine).   They strung them up on a ribbon and made me wear them throughout the party.
Serine brought out the she’d made me and I blew out the candle.  Liana then asked, “What did you wish for?”, but as cheesy as it sounds, I was so much enjoying the singing voices and the smiles from everyone and the overwhelming feeling of making such unlikely friends, I forgot to wish for something.

But really, after love pouring in from around the globe via emails and Facebook wall posts and phone calls and texts and 3 cakes and a million toasts and hugs and kisses and so many tables shared by so many souls, what more could I wish for, really?

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iranian, mexican, tegan and sara in the city

I’ve written before about how much I love Yerevan sometimes.  I was just in Yerevan again and experienced some old and new favorite things:

Old:
1.  Even though it has only been open a couple of months, and even though I don’t even live in this city, the fact that I’ve eaten at Yerevan’s Taco Maco 9 times in a collective 7 days means this is already an old favorite.  And they’ve updated the menu to include a Grande Nacho.  GRANDE. NACHO. Six years ago, my first major travel experience (to New Zealand for two months) ended when I finally landed in Dallas and saw my family run at me at the airpot.  They took me immediately to Taco Bell.  When we arrived they went to the bathroom and left me standing at that little zig-zaggy queue maze looking up at the menu.  I cried.
If you have been in a simalar situation, you know what it means for me to look up at a sign here in Armenia that says GRANDE NACHO, order it, and then taste exactly what you were hoping to taste.

2. The Vernissage. I’ve travelled quite a bit, been in many places famous for their open air markets (all over Central America, Rome, Italy, India, Thailand).  But this market, right here in Armenia is by far the best market I’ve ever been to.  It you pop out of the metro on Nalbadyan Street, you’re right there at the tip of it.  There it starts with men who have spread out blankets before them, placed all their wares out in the sun.  You start there with bits and pieces of machines, old tools, parts of blenders and hair combs.  Then there are men selling cassete tapes and pirated DVDs.  Then your in the thick of it with book sellers and tourist trapping stalls with trinkets and clothes sporting Armenian flag colors.  There are traditional knit-wear sellers and skeins and skeins of handspun yarn.  You spin around in this places moving from finely woven metal works to intricatally carved nardi boards.  There is room for everything, binoculars, telescopes, stethoscopes and surgical clamps.  You can find fake teeth, antique dishes, and old fur coats.  There’s a section for medicine by the kilo and an aisle where you’ll find short poodles and rough looking puppies with, per Armenian vogue, amputated ears.   I am in love with this place and spent the sunny afternoon walking down hallways made by hanging rugs and then through a seemingly endless art gallery stretching along the outside sidewalk.

The New:

1. I have listened to Tegan and Sara’s “Call It Off” at every opportunity.  I played it for friends in Yerevan as soon as we were near computers.  And when far from iPod or Mac, it played in my head.  Since I have very limited access to new music, I have been exploring the far corners of my own collection.  This is the latest additions in the playlist called, “I Didn’t Know I Had It So Good.”

2. Persian New Year!! Edetun mobarak (or something Farsi-sounding like that)!  Armenian universities have a good number of Iranian students looking for a cheaper education and a chance to experience another country.  This weekend was Persian New Year and I met two incredibly warm and jovial groups of Iranians.  Saturday night I went to a small gathering at a friend of a friend’s.  Shortly after I introduced myself,  a small woman in a black dress and heels spread her arms out with a loud, “Ssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”  Everyone paused long enough to hear the faint Iranian tunes playing on an iPhone.  Almost silently the group of about ten people silently shook their booties and nodded their heads.  Silent dancing was then later recommenced multiple times by an older, clearly vodka loving man, who would say, “Don’t! Say!… Anymore!”  Everyone would laugh and then silently dance to the iPhone.  Later they gave up on the iPhone and sang themselves and snapped in a way I previously didn’t know was possible.  The other group included an English speaking guy who very modestly admitted that he was studying English because he wanted to see the world.  He had driven in a van with his friends a full day from Tehran, making his first hopeful journey of many more to come.

I am more and more loving Yerevan.  The outdoor cafes are starting to open.  The Vernissage vendors are packing those few blocks with fresh wonders.  And Taco Maco helps me survive.

I’m now reminded of our World Vision retreat which ended in grand finale with a song.  When I asked what the song was about, I we beffuddled to find that they weren’t singing about God but about how wonderful Yerevan is.  It’s not heaven, sure, but it is pretty nice.

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really gross and really upset and really glad that i can kiss and make-up in armenian

You will not see any pictures in this post, and once you read on, you will know that pictures are NOT something you want right now.  But first:

I had one of those moments today. I’m walking home on a road I’d never walked before.  Raindrops are finding their way through my jeans.  The broken part of my umbrella is slapping me in the face with irregular rhythm.  And as I reached a long, wet stretch of road, I thought, “I really love my life.”  Because despite the weather (which hasn’t outrained it’s Spring Rain charm), I had the most amazing afternoon at a coworker’s house making ganachov hats (herb bread) and hanging out with her incredibly warm and kind family.  The whole family, Armenian males included (BELIEVE IT!), was gathered around the table slicing handfuls of aromatic herbs.  I joined in the ganach-chopping just so that hours later I would still be carrying that smell on my hands.

Really, I feel it shows great personal progress (with communal credit humbly given), that I can say “I really love my life,” after yesterday:

Yesterday starts as my days now do: with The Unnamed (puppy).  I take her out of the well-built hovel she lives in (remember, landfamily will not allow her inside but built her this nice little shack outside), and give her the morning bowl of soggy cat food (my Sanity’s leftovers).  She then proceeds to do her morning void, and I notice some irregularities.  I call my animal-loving PC Volunteer friend, aka substitute for a veterinarian, who says the dripping is probably a result of the deworming pills.  No worries.

We walk to work in the snow.  I try to tell The Weather that we should really be progressing forward with offerings of precipitation and scoop up The Unnamed as we hit the main road.

At the office, I give the The Unnamed another chance to void while I stomp around the cement to knock off the mud that lies deep in the crevices of my hiking boots.  This mud is a source of one very sore spot for both myself and the Armenian cleaner/cook/clooker.  For all these muddy months The Clooker has chewed heavily on my esteem, breaking into hysterics when I leave behind dirt clods on her shiny tile.  Fair enough, but during those same months I have spent a lot of time and effort perfecting my stomps and my doormat scrubs with some minor success.  I am now performing those morning duties while The Unnamed performs hers.  We go to the door.

After walking in The Clooker follows me, and upon seeing a dirt clod exclaims something along the lines of, “How can I live?! You are killing me!!”.  I have little patience for this in the 10th month of my service, and I exclaim back, “Really?!  What can I do?!” to which she says “Go! Go!  You’re killing me.”

I huff off to the morning coffee/meeting with the staff and afterward find my way to my desk to set things up.  If you do not want to read something horribly disgusting skip the following section.  Skip straight to the second line.

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On this morning I decide that The Unnamed cannot spend the entire day in my lap.  I lay out her towel under my desk and drop her to the floor.  She considers the towel but decides to traipse back towards the doormat.  I sense a potty-time and speed to her just in time to catch her in mid-aim.  Recalling her irregular, and I will now say yellow and slimy attempt at poop this morning, I swing her up and push open the door slinging The Unnamed’s butt mucus onto the glass.

Making a mental note to clean that before anyone sees it, I drop her into the grass and see the most horrifying sight of my life: round worms exiting the body.  It is the most foul mess of butt mucus and writhing white spindles.  It’s like play-dough coming out a squeeze machine but the play-dough is live spaghetti with burnt ends and the squeeze machine is a dog anus. I will never fully recover from this.  It’s the new eggs-out-a-frog-back.

I am then naesous for the rest of the day.

I tie-up The Unnamed outside realizing that the day after she takes deworming pills should not be the second day she spends under your office desk.  I type her up outside; she commences a days worth of screeching.

I then try to clean the glass door with toilet paper (no paper towels in this country) and fake Windex.  The Clooker catches me and says, “You are being shameful.  What are you doing?  You can’t do that.  This is TOILET PAPER!”

“I’m just trying to help.  I made this mess.”

“Shame on you.  You can’t clean.  Shame on you.”

Fine.  Butt mucus all yours.

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(The easily, or even hardly ever grossed-out, can rejoin us here.)

Later, when my computer dies I realize I have forgotten my computer cord at home and make the long walk back to get it.  Upon returning I check the tethered Unnamed’s circumference to see if she’s voided any of her “problem” where she might be able to sniff/eat it (I know you would think she wouldn’t do that, but after what I saw, I realized how little I know about what the biological world can accomplish).  No “problem”, but I’ve awoken the screecher which gets me some sideways glances from coworkers.

I proceed again with the demudding ritual, having walked there and back over the muddy road to my house.  Into the second minute of scrubbing, The Clooker sees the fresh mud on the doormat and exclaims, “What are you doing? Oh, you’re killing me?  What will I do?!”  Boiling point reached.

“Seriously, what can I do?,” I screech back, “I’ve asked you a million times. I don’t have any other shoes with flat soles.  I don’t have any other place to walk.  I try and try.  I want to be clean for you, but what do I need to do for you if I can’t use [the doormat]” (I don’t actually know the Armenian word for doormat; I just pointed and said “this”).  She huffs and gesticulates and waves me off continuing the, “You’re killing me,” exclamations.  It is such a scene that the break-room full of people turns to look and even the accountant comes out to see what is happening.

Having gone through this almost every day for the last 4 months, I realize talking to her isn’t working, so I take off my boots (thank god I was wearing nice wool socks (thanks mom and dad)) and storm to the bathroom to wash the possible worm-eggs from the The Unnamed off my hands.

A co-worker comes out from the break room and says, “Brent, you need to put your shoes on.  This is shameful.”

“But what can I do?  I have no shoes that don’t have crevices in the soles.  I clean them every morning, but I just can’t clean them enough.”

“I know, but there are people from [our national office in] Yerevan here.  You could (he imitates cleaning off mud with a stick). This is shameful.  You should put on your shoes.”

I nod.  Take some deep breaths and cross the now revealed Yervanians’ line of vision to put on my boots.  Outside I slip them on and walk across the road finding a twig along the way.  I sit brooding and proceed to dig out every last possible fleck of mud.  The Clooker comes out banging the doormat against the steps.  I am brooding and digging out mud from my shoes; she is brooding and hand-scrubbing the doormat.

Despite the anger, the rational, peace-loving part of my mind, the one that knows The Clooker is from a very different culture defined by both geography and time, propels me to make a kind gesture.  Dropping the twig, I walk to her, give her a hug.  I say,  “I love you, but I don’t want you to talk to me like this.”

She says, “Keep your dog at your house.”

“What?”

“Keep your dog at your house!”

“Why are you talking about my dog?  The problem is with my shoes.”

“You went to see the dog and you brought back mud,” she says.

“I walked to my house!  THAT’s where the mud is from.”

“Well you need to walk on the dry parts of the road.”

“I’ve told you this a million times.  There IS no dry part of my road.”

“On one side there is dry, and one side there is wet.”

“I know MY ROAD.  It’s my road; I walk it every day.”  I am starting to seethe.

“I am going to walk home with you,” she says, “I am going to show you where the dry part is and where the wet part is.”

“Are you calling me stupid?!  Do you think I don’t know what is dry road and what is wet road?”

“I didn’t say you are stupid.”

“You said I can’t tell dry road from wet road.  You are saying I’m stupid.”  I’m done at this point.  I walk inside and try not to break everything I see.

I sit down and try to read something on my computer.  I am boiling.

A Yerevanian I have met before comes up to my desk.  He has been to our office many many times.  He is balding and wears sunglasses inside.  His head is large.  I know he is about to say something aggravating.  It’s his way.

“Ay Brent jan, is that you’re dog outside?”

“Ayo,” I confirm.

“Don’t you want a big dog?  Why did you get such a little dog?”

I am trying desperately to gather the popping tethers of my temper.  “She’s fine.”

“But she’s so falkjwelkj.” ‘Falkjwelj’ is a russian word that I don’t know and forget immediately. I limit my reply to, “What?”

“She’s so,” and he whimpers and pouts his lip and droops his eyes and tries to mimic a little weakling.

In earlier times this man has chosen to make similar comments during times when he could rely on my foreigner’s ingratiating patience.  I suppose he assumes that such patience abounds.  It does not.

I look at him squarely, “Why do you want to come to my desk and say mean things about my dog?”

“It’s not mean.  She’s just so,” and he again makes the weakling face and accompanying whimpers.

“That is mean.  Why do you want to say mean things about my dog?”

“It’s not mean.”  He laughs.

“She’s just right for me.  She’s a good dog.”  He leaves, seeing he is getting nowhere.

Later at lunch, I eat with another coworker of mine.  We have boiled potatoes with salt, red pepper and onions.  I am still angry, but she actually helps me work my brooding face into a smiling one.  The Clooker, having seen how unhappy she made me, is now all smiles and helpfulness in the genuine way of a person who is trying to make-up but is not gifted in the art of Talking Through It, Especially With Someone Who Speaks a Different Language Despite Having Someone In The Seat Next To You Who Can Interpret.   The Clooker and I, outside of all things shoe, actually get along very well.  She was the one who gave me The Unnamed.  And here, as we have before, we make up; we actually bond over the ridiculous comments of the whimpering Yerevanian.

And right on cue, the sun comes up and the snow melts, and it’s ice cream weather again.

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