Halfway down the Danube

One for sorrow and two for joy

Went back to our old house today.

I walked, which took me across central Yerevan and then up the Cascades.  (That's several hundred feet of climbing stairs, but I needed the exercise.) 

Some things had changed: a new highway running along the old rail line, where I'd walked along the tracks back in the day.  Most things had not: the big, half completed housing development around the corner is still half complete.  The communal garbage bins are still overflowing.  The little vendor where we used to buy chocolate surprise eggs for the boys was still there.

The house was empty: scabs of unshoveled snow in the driveway, drifts of unraked leaves around the courtyard.  I opened the front gate, went up to the windows and looked in.  Someone had been living there -- dishes washed and piled beside the sink, an ironing board glimpsed in the living room -- but not recently.

There were a lot of magpies around. 

Armenia again!

Back to Yerevan for ten days.  It's a short-term assignment (corporate governance of banks) that will keep me there through next weekend.  Take the train to Frankfurt in a few hours, catch a flight to Prague, red-eye to Yerevan (well, pretty much all flights to Yerevan are red-eyes) will get me there at 4:30 am.

Claudia gets to fly solo for the next few days with three little boys and a baby who is still slightly sickish.  (She had bronchitis.  Only slowly recovering.)  Not an ideal time for me to vanish off to the lower Caucasus, but the work is where it is.  So, if you have kind thoughts to spare, send them her way.

On the plus side, we were running out of the good Armenian brandy.  So there's that.

Peaceful protest

The first protest in 20 days was downtown yesterday.  I missed it.

First, the protest.  By all accounts it was pretty impressive. Thousands of people turned out to walk slowly and silently through the center of Yerevan.  No shouting, no chants.  Lots of black armbands, flowers, and pictures of people killed in the March 1 shootings.  Apparently much of the organizing was done on the Internet, especially via Facebook -- about which more anon.

The cops turned out in force, and the Army was around too, though tucked half out of sight by the Vernissage (big flea market).  There were some scuffles when the cops suddenly decided to close a street.  But on the whole it was pretty calm.  If this sort of thing interests you, there are pictures here and a pretty good article over here.

But I can't tell you what it was like firsthand, because I missed it.

Why?

The Genocide Museum

This wasn't so good.

The museum is on the ground of the Memorial, but underground -- set into the side of the hill, so you have to go down a stone staircase to reach it.  Here again there's the tomb reference, and it's rather well done. 

But it's, um, downhill from there.  Longish rant after the cut, so here's the short version: this is not really a place where you go to learn about the Armenian Genocide.

The Genocide Memorial

After two years in Armenia, I finally got up to the Genocide Memorial.

Oh, I'd been up there before.  The Memorial sits on a hill overlooking central Yerevan.  The whole hill is a park, with winding paths going up and down.  And since there's not a lot of park space in Yerevan, anyone who likes running or walking will get up there now and then. 

But this was the first time I'd actually walked around the Memorial.  And, you know, it was something. 

That sounds kind of stupid, but let me explain.  The Memorial was built in 1967, basically because the Armenians made a big fuss about the 50 anniversary of the genocide in 1965.  In retrospect, the 1965 commemorations -- which included massive street demonstrations asking for a memorial -- were a turning point in the history of the USSR: it was the first time the Soviet center responded to nationalist demands with concession instead of suppression.  There's probably a post to be written on how that was the first step on a long, slippery slope... but anyway: I've seen a lot of 1960s-era Soviet public architecture in the last few years.  So my expectations were not high.

But the monument works.  It's simple and it's moving.  There's a big spike, which didn't do much for me, and a garden of scraggly trees planted by celebrities and politicians, which did even less.  But there's also a long wall with the names of the provinces that were lost, which works in sort of the way the Vietnam memorial does in DC.  And the centerpiece is a stone well with an eternal flame at the center, surrounded by tilted stone slabs.  It's dark and tomblike and sad, which is the point. 

If you're in Yerevan, it's well worth a visit.

There's also a museum, which was less good.  But that deserves a post of its own.

Things we neither loved nor hated about Armenia: The Armenian language

There are things you love about a new country, and things you hate.  What doesn't get discussed so much are things that affect your life, maybe a lot, but that you neither love nor hate.  They just are.

The Armenian language.  I posted about this a couple of times.  The Armenian language is hard, and I never got much of a handle on it.  In Serbia I reached the point where I could understand a simple conversation; in Romania I could actually talk, sort of.  In Armenia I never got past the basic expressions and counting to ten.

Why not?  Well, first, it's just a hard language.  It's officially Indo European, but in the way the duck-billed platypus is officially a mammal.  I've managed to get a grip on one non-Indo European language, but Indonesian is a creole with drastically simplified grammar and lots of borrowed words.  Armenian isn't easy in that way.  It isn't easy at all.  The grammar is complicated and the cognates are usually distorted out of recognition. 

Second, the alphabet.  It's hard to grasp a language when you can't read it.  Third, Armenia isn't one of those countries where people light up and get excited when you speak a few simple phrases.  I mean, people don't discourage you from speaking Armenian, but they don't strongly encourage you either.  This made a difference. 

And fourth-fifth-sixth, I wasn't as motivated this time: I had less time on my hands, I knew we'd only be here a couple of years, and Armenian (unlike Serbian or Romanian) doesn't help you pick up other, related languages.

Five things we loved about Armenia

In no particular order.

The climate.  I like a climate that changes, and Armenia's surely does that.  Long, dry, hot summers.  Winters are cold, snowy and nasty, but short -- the ugly part lasts just six or eight weeks.  Springs are gusty and rainy, autumns are just delightful.  And, as a bonus, the country is so varied you can drive an hour and be in a different climate zone.

Ararat.  Looking out the window and seeing Ararat was... just great.  It's just this big, magnificent snow-capped cone.  The only mountain I've ever seen that compares is Japan's Fuji.  But Fuji has suburbs climbing up its sides, and one usually sees it through a haze of pollution.  Ararat stands alone.  (And no photograph conveys it, so after this month it'll be only in our memories.)

Our house.  We really liked our house.  It wasn't big, but it was homey.  It started as a two-room dacha back in the 1950s (not two bedrooms, two rooms) and then gradually grew, a room at a time, into an eccentric but comfortable three-bedroom house.  It had its peculiarities -- some rooms were always cool to chilly, others were warm; the gas tended to go out in the middle of the night; the phone constantly rang with wrong numbers.  But we liked it.

The house was in a nice quiet neighborhood and it had a backyard full of fruit trees and flowers, just big enough for little boys to run around in.  There was a huge old grape vine, decades old, that made an arbor over the front of the house.  In the spring, the cherry trees would explode into blossom for a few days, then the pear trees would do the same a week or two later.  There was an attic where the neighborhood cats could creep in and have kittens.  Evenings were quiet and we could see the stars clearly from our back porch.

We'll miss that house a lot.

Fresh fruits and vegetables.  In season, the quality and price were excellent.  Out of season, less so... but this gave a nice sense of the changing year, and we didn't much mind.  Cherries, raspberries, persimmons, pomegranates: the fruits were just wonderful, and having them abundant and cheap for just one month a year made it better.

Related to this: Armenian cognac really is all that.  I was never much of a cognac drinker, but we could get fantastically good brandies here for about half what they'd cost in Germany or the US.  I got used to having a finger now and then; it'll be a hard habit to give up.  Also, pomegranate wine? Is much better than you'd expect. It makes a very nice light, sweet dessert wine.

Colleagues. This for me more than Claudia.  I had a great group of Armenian colleagues -- smart, savvy, energetic.  I really enjoyed working with them, and closing the project office was surprisingly painful and sad.

Karabakh.  We only visited Karabakh once, for three days, but it made a deep impression.  It's a beautiful country, hills and mountains and forests and a new vista at every turn of the road.  The people are friendly.  It's also a melancholy country: walking around Shusa, formerly a city of 25,000, now inhabited by maybe a quarter that number, was pretty spooky, and reminders of the war are everywhere.  There may be another war, too, and everybody knows it.  Not exactly a happy place.  But a very interesting one; we're glad we went, and sorry we probably won't go again.

A quiet Sunday in Yerevan

Walked into central Yerevan today.

For those of you who haven't been following this story: for the last two weeks, tens of thousands of Armenians have been turning out to protest the results of the recent Presidential election.  The ruling party's candidate supposedly won in a landslide, but there's reason to think the elections were stolen.  Yesterday morning, the government ran out of patience, declared a "state of emergency", and sent a wave hundreds of police into the streets, followed by a second wave of soldiers.  There are reliable reports of eight people dead and perhaps a hundred injured.

But that was yesterday.  Last night Levon Ter-Petrosian, the losing presidential candidate, issued a statement asking his supporters to stand down.  Today...

...well, it's quiet.

Walking around downtown, most of the shops were closed.  There were few cars -- much of the center was closed to traffic -- and maybe 50% of the normal pedestrian traffic, dropping to more like 10% in the big central squares.  But there were people, and while the atmosphere was funny, I didn't get a sense of imminent violence.

Soldiers are everywhere.  Walking down Baghramian avenue, I passed half a dozen armored personnel carriers.  About fifty soldiers were hanging around them, drinking coffee and talking; they seemed pretty relaxed.  Another couple of platoons were deployed in Opera Square, which had  been one of the centers for the daily protests.  Pedestrians were still moving around the square, but the walked by quickly, without lingering, and so did I.  Down in Republic Square, where the National Museum faces the Marriott Hotel, more soldiers, along with a scattering of jeeps and ambulances.  (Oddly, I found the ambulances more worrying than the armored vehicles.)

The general mood of the city is... subdued.  I talked to some friends and colleagues, including a couple who'd been in the demonstrations.  They're bitter; the government is justifying the crackdown by saying the demonstrators (who had bent over backwards to be peaceful) were violent, dangerous, and about to attempt a coup.  The government-controlled TV stations (which is, at the moment, all of them) have been showing the same footage over and over again of guns and grenades allegedly found on protesters.  I don't find it very convincing, but I don't think the government cares.

Speaking of media, the state of emergency gives the government formal control over all of them: by law, nobody can disseminate anything but official or officially approved information for the next 20 days.  It's unclear whether this applies to blogs, but at least one prominent local blogger believes that it does.  In which case I would be breaking the law by hitting "publish" here.

There's not a lot more to add.  Again, I don't get a feeling of simmering rage or imminent violence.  Ter-Petrosian's support was drawn disproportionately from the educated middle class, and I get the vibe that these people are willing to follow his lead and go home.  Ter-Petrosian himself is under house arrest "for his own protection".  (It'll be interesting to see how long that lasts.)

I'd like to give some analysis and put it all in a bigger context, but at the moment I'm too close.  And too bummed; the more I think about this, the more depressing it gets.  Maybe in a day or two.

Comments welcome.

State of Emergency

I didn’t even notice the state of emergency until evening.  I was working in the office.  (Final project report.  60+ pages and still going strong.)  But downtown is now full of soldiers with AK-47s. Levon Ter-Petrosian is under house arrest, “for his own protection”.

The government is claiming that Ter-Petrosian’s supporters were heavily armed and trying to mount a coup, which is obvious nonsense.  This is the excuse they're using for the state of emergency, though, and that gives them all kinds of powers. 

-- Confused?  I blogged about the election over at the Fistful last week.  Short version: the ruling party stole it.  And now they're shooting people for daring to say so. 

I don't really know what to say here. This is... frustrating.    And what happens next?  Hell if I know.  If I had to bet, though, I’d bet they’ll get away with it; Saakashvili did much the same thing last year, over the border in Georgia.  The Armenian military said a few days ago that it wouldn't take sides, but -- as far as I can tell -- the cops are still working for the man. 

Anyway, I’m good here for the moment: 3-4 km away from the center where the shooting was, and the lights (and, obviously, internet) are still on.  Claudia and the boys left for Germany this morning, so that's all right.

Compost pile

There are about six posts I want to write before we leave Armenia.  This isn't one of them.  There are four or five posts I've left uncompleted; this isn't one of those either. 

So we have a compost pile.

Germans do compost piles, even more than Americans.  Germans are enthusiastic gardeners and most are (by American standards) pretty green.  Also, Germany's recycling laws are pretty stringent.  If you're already sorting your garbage four ways, you might as well make it five.

Armenians, on the other hand, not only don't do compost piles but they deeply, profoundly, don't get them.  What they see is making a pile of garbage in the yard.  You can try to explain but, really, it just doesn't click.

Hence the following tiny but telling incident:

Thaw

Heavy snow for a couple of days, then clear and warm today.  By afternoon the snow was turning to slush and all the world was drip, drip, drip beneath a clear blue sky.  Went outside with the boys and threw snowballs for a couple of hours.  Evening now, it's all grey and cold again and looks likely to snow some more... but, you know, we're on the back half now.  That's the great thing about Armenian winters: they're nasty but they're short.

We're getting ready to move.  Claude and the boys will go to Germany around the end of the month.  I'll stay here through March.  We still don't know what happens next, but that's common enough.  At this point I just want to wrap up the project well.  That means I probably won't be posting a lot over the next little while, so thanks again to Noel and Carlos for keeping the blog alive.

Stuff happening: Armenia's Presidential election is on Tuesday.  I've hardly blogged about this, because it's pretty much a done deal -- the ruling party controls all media, has a massive machine in place, and is ready and willing to stuff ballot boxes and juggle numbers if necessary.  My prediction: Serzh, the establishment candidate whose ugly face has been everywhere for the last few weeks, will win in the first round by 55%.   

The ruling party hasn't  done that bad a job running the country, but  IMO they're now letting Armenia drift slowly towards a second Nagorno-Karabakh war.  Well, maybe things will change...

Stuff happening: Kosovo will declare its independence from Serbia tomorrow.  My thoughts on that here and here.

A couple of links and whatnot below.

Campaign season

It's election time in Armenia.

I haven't blogged much about Armenian politics because, frankly, I don't see much point.  In Serbia, the first few years of post-Milosevic politics were wild and unpredictable.  In Romania, EU accession and a flawed but competitive party system made things interesting.  Here in Armenia... well, it's been the same guys running things for a while, and that'll continue to be the case.

This is an oversimplification, but not by much.  The last Parliamentary election was won by the ruling party; it resulted in some modest chair-shuffling among political and business elites, nothing more.  The upcoming Presidential election pits Establishment candidate Serzh Sargsyan -- current Prime Minister and close associate of current President Robert Kocharian -- against former President Levon Ter-Petrosian.  Sargsyan is pretty clearly going to win.  The only question is whether the government will allow the elections to proceed to a second round, or whether Sargsyan will "win" with 50% in the first.

The Wounded Lake, Part 2

Thought I'd forgotten?

Part 1 can be found here.  Short version: Armenia has an enormous mountain lake, Lake Sevan, which was severely damaged by misguided Soviet engineering.

I wanted to drive up to the lake again this weekend, but Claudia hasn't been feeling well.  So today was a quiet day at home.  The boys and I watched a lot of cartoons (current favorite: Teen Titans), then went outside for a couple of hours, then came back in, ate popcorn, and watched some more cartoons.  Maybe next weekend. 

Why do I want to go to Sevan, you ask?  Well, one, because we're leaving Armenia soon and this may be our last chance to see it.  And two, because Sevan in January will be really freaking cold.  Like, Siberian cold.  2000 meters up in the Caucasus: daytime temperatures run around -15 Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit), and at night it drops to -30.  Although I'm no fan of cold weather, I find this sort of intriguing.  Also, seeing a lake that huge frozen solid enough to drive trucks over sounds interesting.

But anyway.  At the end of the last post, I left a question: how's Lake Sevan doing?

Clear and cold

A week of it.  Days are sunny but it never gets close to freezing.  Nights drop down around minus 15-20 Celsius: single or negative single digits Fahrenheit. 

The sky is pale blue, clear but a little hazy -- we can't see Ararat.  The house is cool even with the heat on full blast.  Claudia curls up on the couch, blanket wrapped around her, whimpering: she can't get warm.  I don't mind the cool so much but damn do I hate it when the car doesn't work.  We got it started and out the driveway yesterday, but it was an hour of work: spinning wheels, chipping ice, finally bringing dirt to splash all over the slipperiest bits.  The car lacks winter tires; it's okay on the main roads, which are mostly clean, but on the ice-covered side streets it handles like a... well, it doesn't really "handle".  You sort of aim it and pray.

The boys complain that it's too cold, too cold to go outside, but in fact once you get them out and running around they like it pretty well.  On Saturday we walked a couple of kilometers, down the street to the little general store and back.  David got unhappy towards the end because he kept getting snow inside his boots, but otherwise they did very well... Jacob, in particular, managed to walk almost the whole way.  Which I think is pretty good for two-and-a-quarter, walking on snow and ice.

No snowballs or snowmen, though.  The snow is too powdery.  Maybe if it warms a bit.

Anyway.  I mind all this less than I would in, say, Chicago, because I know it'll be over in a few weeks.  Winters here are cold but not long.  It'll be getting damp and mild by early March, and by April the garden will be exploding in bloom.

Of course, we won't be here to see that.  C'est la vie du consultant.

Earthquake Day

Friday was Earthquake Day.

The 1988 "Spitak" earthquake may have killed as many as 40,000 people.  This is not because it was such a powerful earthquake -- it wasn't -- but because it hit in a bad place (a densely populated region full of shoddy Brezhnev-era Soviet construction), and at a bad time (a bitterly cold day in December, late in the morning when almost everyone was at work or school).

Friday Photo Blogging

Some pictures from today.  Cold, clear day in the morning.

The view from our bedroom window, looking south:

And looking northwest:

And the view from, I kid you not, our trash dump:

I know. There were smudges on the lens.  Little fingers...

Out of all the countries in Europe...

Here's a question: what do Armenia, Turkey, Estonia, Belgium, Bosnia and Spain have in common?

Think about it for a moment.  Six countries, all in Europe... what does that suggest?

"No, wait! Monday we've got the world waterboarding finals."

Just spotted this recent Doonesbury.  (Keep cliicking on "next" to read the whole sequence.  It's mildly amusing.)

Now, "Berzerkistan" is obviously inspired by Turkmenistan, which does indeed share a land boundary with Iran and which was indeed, until recently, run by a maniac.  However, the country on the map -- with mountains, lakes, and a 19-mile boundary with Iran -- resembles Armenia.  (Well, insofar as it resembles anyplace, which it doesn't much).

Apropos of nothing, I've been reading Doonesbury for over thirty years now.  Dang.

Meeting a Minister (1)

It snowed today.  Basically we had seven weeks of October, three days of November and now we're in December.  This is, by Armenian standards, not unusual.

in other big news, I visited a Minister this morning, on business.  And therein lies a story!  Pull up a chair and light up a smoke, because I have to go back a little ways.

Don't know what to say about this one

A little background: we're having an election here in February.  It's for the office of President, which has a moderate amount of power and a lot of symbolic importance.

In this corner, there's establishment candidate Serge Sarkisian.  Sarkisian is the long-time lieutenant of current President Robert Kocharian; he was Defense Minister for many years, and is currently serving as Prime Minister.  Sarkisian, like Kocharian, is from Nagorno-Karabakh, and the two men have been close for many years.

In the other corner, there used to be a bunch of squabbling and not very effective opposition candidates.  However, in the last few weeks a real rival has emerged: Levon Ter-Petrosian, President from 1991-1998, who was forced to resign by Kocharian and Sarkisian almost a decade ago.  Armenia has a two-step Presidential election -- if nobody gets 50% in the first round, the two leading candidates go to another round two weeks later -- and right now Ter-Petrosian looks good to reach the second round.  Already one opposition party has announced that it will back him.

I hate the Armenian Alphabet

Man, I hate the Armenian alphabet.  It's a big part of why I'm not picking up much Armenian.

I read Cyrillic, no problem.  But Cyrillic is easy-peasy.  I picked up Cyrillic in a day or two.  Armenian... doesn't look like anything.  The letters don't look like letters to me.  They look like symbols for World of Warcraft tribes, or something.  And when you put them all together, the visual processing center of my brain says "bar code!" and shuts down. 

I can't read.  I have to spell.  I have to spell everything. 

Before this, I hadn't realized how much of my language acquisition had been through reading... street signs, billboards, newspaper headlines.  Cut off from that, the language comes much more slowly.

(Another thing that bugs me: the alphabet is used, exclusively, for pretty much all monuments and memorials.  Isn't this missing the point?  If you have a statue of a famous general, or a plaque on a house saying "this great writer lived here", wouldn't you want the whole world to know about it?)

I can understand why the Armenians are proud of their alphabet.  It's been their thing, uniquely theirs, for half of their long history.  But it doesn't exactly invite the stranger in.

Anyway.  Here are some random facts about the Armenian alphabet.

Armenian: the verb of being

We did the numbers last week, and we found they were a mixture of familiar, sort-of familiar, and what the hell.  What about the verb of being?  Let's give it a whirl.

Armenian is an Indo-European language, so it has a standard structure for the verb of being: three persons, me you him, times two numbers, singular or plural, equals six verbs.  Just like French or Spanish, right?

First person singular "I am": yes em.  Okay, that's not so bad.  Obviously related to the Latin ego sum, the Italian io sono, and -- most closely -- the Russian ya sam.  No problem there.

Second person singular, "you are": du es.  Ho!  How easy is that?  The pronoun is German, the verb is French!  Yeah!

For Simon

I thought Simon might find this interesting (and somewhat melancholic) :  The mulberry tree in front of the house changing its leaves, and the house entrance (a part of the house that is least changed, from what I understand.) 

Arabkir

We live in a neighborhood called Arabkir.  It's named after the town of Arabkir, on Lake Van, in Turkey.  There aren't any more Armenians around Lake Van anymore; our neighborhood was settled by refugees from the genocide.

When Arabkir was founded, back in the 1920s, Yerevan was a small city of maybe 60,000 people.  Our neighborhood was originally a satellite village.  Over the decades, the city grew and sort of digested Arabkir, and today it's mostly just another district.  There are some little neighborhoods that still don't feel like a city, though, and we're fortunate enough to live in one of them.

Our neighborhood was laid out in the 1950s, and you can tell.  The streets are on a peculiarly inconvenient not-quite-grid pattern with lots of dead ends.  They don't have names, just numbers -- "Arabkir Forty-One", and such.  There are no sidewalks, no parks, and no playgrounds.  Just down the street from our house, someone put a junkyard, right in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood.  And now it's gone from Soviet to post-Soviet: the roads are crumbling, while at the same time hideous new McMansions are sprouting like mushrooms.

In the office

Here's a brief sketch of where I spend my days.

I'm Chief of Party (COP) of a USAID project.  What the project does is a story for another post.  The project office is not inside the Embassy, but in an office building on the edge of downtown. 

The project employs about twenty-five people.  There are two Americans: me, and Bill the telecoms guy.  Everyone else is Armenian.  All the Armenians are fluent in English, though, so my Armenian hasn't improved much.

I've been here about twenty months.  The project is about four years old -- I took over from the first COP a year ago March. 

The project will last about six more months.  It was originally supposed to last for five years, which would have kept it going until October 2008.  But the dram-dollar exchange rate is just killing us.  When the project opened its doors, back in 2003, the Armenian dram was around 550 to the dollar.  Today it's 325 to the dollar.  Everything we buy in Armenia -- rent, office supplies, payroll -- has become about 60% more expensive.  Part of this is because the dollar has fallen generally, but part is because the dram has strengthened.  Why the currency of a small country with a big trade deficit should have appreciated so much is, again, a story for another post.  Key point: the five-year project has become a four-year-and-seven month project.

Smudge

Saw comet Holmes last night.

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but we get pretty good stars around our house.  First, we're high up -- it's not the Andes, but our house is about 1200 meters (4,000 feet) above sea level.  Second, while downtown Yerevan can get pretty smoggy, there's not a lot of pollution in our neighborhood.  And third, there aren't a lot of bright lights around.  So on a clear night, we can step into the back yard and see stars and more stars.

Lately the nights have been clear.  Gorgeous fall weather, cool and dry.  I walk outside after putting Jacob to bed and the Pleiades are just rising, a delicate bit of lacework against the purple sky.  Orion comes up over the neighbor's house just around bedtime, Mars blazing orange in Gemini.  It's nice.

The comet: it's not anything spectacular.  Not a blazing thing streaking across the sky.  The comet looks like a tiny little smudge.  It's "third magnitude", which means about as bright as a medium-bright star: bright enough that you could see it in a city or town, but just barely.  You have to stare a moment to see that it's a smudge instead of a star. 

On the other hand, it's pretty cool.  Comet Holmes is a short-period comet, orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  Most of the time it minds its own business, making an orbit every seven years and never getting bright enough to see.  But a couple of weeks ago it suddenly got around a million times brighter, and became visible to the naked eye.

Some things about Nagorno-Karabakh

I want to do some proper posts about this sometime, but it's Saturday and I'm blogging for a few minutes while the boys play outside.  So, some rather disjointed points about Nagorno.  You might see these again if I get more organized.

1)  Nagorno is beautiful.  Though it's only about the size of Delaware, Nagorno contains tremendous variety.  There's a piece that looks just like northern Italy.  Another chunk that looks like one of the cooler, greener bits of New Mexico.  The south is a flat fertile river valley; the east is rolling hills.  Drive half an hour and you're in a new microclimate, but you can always see mountains and trees.  It's nice.

Also, since Nagorno only has about 150,000 people, it's pretty empty.  (By way of comparison, Delaware has around 800,000.)  So, despite its size, there's an impression of spaciousness

Also-also, since Nagorno has almost no industry -- it all collapsed during the war -- the air is clean, there's not a lot of traffic on the roads, and the wildlife has come back in a big way.  Maybe not so great if you live there, but makes it nice to visit.

Why no Armenian history posts?

   Long time readers of this blog may remember that I used to post a lot of stuff about Romanian and Serbian history.  But I haven't posted nearly as much about Armenia.  Why?

Well, there are three limiting factors. One, there's noticeably less material in English. (My French is now so rusty that it can probably be ignored at this point.) I've seen some really interesting-looking books, but they all seem to be in Armenian or in Russian.

Two, Armenian historiography is even more screwed up than Romanian or Serbian historiography.  (Which is saying something.)  Armenian historians tend to be pretty nationalistic, outsiders often have axes to grind, and the fact that Armenia wasn't a country until 1991 means that a lot of their history pops up as chapters in someone else's book.

A third factor that limits posting about Armenia: the biggest event in modern Armenian history is pretty depressing.  Claudia and I have been here a year and a half, and we still haven't visited the Genocide Museum.  Even though it's just a few kilometers away.  (We joke that we're waiting until some day when we're feeling too cheerful and positive about life.)

That said, I have done a couple of posts about Armenian history, and I vaguely feel I ought to do more.  Does anyone have a particular interest?

Visiting Sevan, again

    [Cross posting from Expatria]   We spent the weekend at Lake Sevan.  We have visited Lake Sevan multiple time before, we have toured the peninsula and visited the Monastery, and the lake is one of our favorites.  Sevan is high up in the mountains, so always quite a bit cooler than Yerevan, and a popular destination during the summer heat.  This weekend, we decided to drive to the far end of the lake (which means, the East coast), and hike almost into Azerbaijan.  Btw, it was not to escape the summer heat - this August is weirdly cool and rainy. For Armenian standards, that is.

Anyway, we stayed at the Tufenkian Hotel which is very nice but very pricey (we paid almost $200 for a suite). It has stunning views of the lake and is located in one of the nicest villages I've seen in Armenia so far.  The Tufenkians, btw, are very busy and engaged Diasporans/Repatriates.  The best guide to hiking in Armenia was co-written by one of them, Jeffrey Tufenkian.  (The other author is our landlady - that's Armenia in a nutshell for you.)  Despite the price and the fact that the restaurant is located a 10 minute walk from the hotel, we liked it quite a bit.  We had a bed for Alan and David downstairs, a double bed and a little seating area and another sofa upstairs.  It was roomy enough for us, something that is important when you have five people in a room, nice and modern, which I personally like very much (Doug less so).

View of the hotel from the restaurant.


The hotel room (with the boys chilling out with Ben 10 in the background there.)

    [Cross posting from Expatria]   We spent the weekend at Lake Sevan.  We have visited Lake Sevan multiple time before, we have toured the peninsula and visited the Monastery, and the lake is one of our favorites.  Sevan is high up in the mountains, so always quite a bit cooler than Yerevan, and a popular destination during the summer heat.  This weekend, we decided to drive to the far end of the lake (which means, the East coast), and hike almost into Azerbaijan.  Btw, it was not to escape the summer heat - this August is weirdly cool and rainy. For Armenian standards, that is.

Anyway, we stayed at the Tufenkian Hotel which is very nice but very pricey (we paid almost $200 for a suite). It has stunning views of the lake and is located in one of the nicest villages I've seen in Armenia so far.  The Tufenkians, btw, are very busy and engaged Diasporans/Repatriates.  The best guide to hiking in Armenia was co-written by one of them, Jeffrey Tufenkian.  (The other author is our landlady - that's Armenia in a nutshell for you.)  Despite the price and the fact that the restaurant is located a 10 minute walk from the hotel, we liked it quite a bit.  We had a bed for Alan and David downstairs, a double bed and a little seating area and another sofa upstairs.  It was roomy enough for us, something that is important when you have five people in a room, nice and modern, which I personally like very much (Doug less so).

Outward Bound

I'm going to Jordan for two weeks. I'm not sure how much time I'll have there, but I'll try to post at least occasionally.

Following up on a couple of earlier posts: elections here ended with -- I know you will be shocked to hear this -- victory for the ruling party. President Kocharian's Republic Party gained just over half the seats in Parliament, meaning that they can form any government they like. Four other parties split the rest of the seats. Two of those four are pro-government parties anyway, so the actual opposition has less than a quarter of the votes in Parliament, and no political power at all.

The international community's reaction was one of mild approval. OSCE, the State Department and the Europeans all agreed there were some irregularities, but they also agreed that this was the cleanest and fairest election in recent Armenian history. (N.B., this is not setting the bar very high.)

The conclusion of the Isfahan-Moscow story will have to wait until I get back.

Elections, travel, Jordan (I know very little about Jordan): consider this an open thread.

Outward Bound

I'm going to Jordan for two weeks. I'm not sure how much time I'll have there, but I'll try to post at least occasionally. Following up on a couple of earlier posts: elections here ended with -- I know you will be shocked to hear this -- victory for the ruling party. President Kocharian's Republic Party gained just over half the seats in Parliament, meaning that they can form any government they like. Four other parties split the rest of the seats. Two of those four are pro-government parties anyway, so the actual opposition has less than a quarter of the votes in Parliament, and no political power at all. The international community's reaction was one of mild approval. OSCE, the State Department and the Europeans all agreed there were some irregularities, but they also agreed that this was the cleanest and fairest election in recent Armenian history. (N.B., this is not setting the bar very high.) The conclusion of the Isfahan-Moscow story will have to wait until I get back. Elections, travel, Jordan (I know very little about Jordan): consider this an open thread.

Election Day

Today is Election Day here in Armenia.

I haven't blogged much about the elections... no, that's not true. I haven't blogged at all about the elections. That's because I find it a depressing topic.

There's not much doubt who will win, you see. The only questions are how and by how much. And also -- this is about to become of pressing interest -- how much post-election violence there will be when opposition supporters protest, and are suppressed. The last time around, the protests and suppression got pretty savage; there were casualties. This time, well, we'll know tomorrow.

And that's all I have to say about Armenia's elections right now.

Election Day

Today is Election Day here in Armenia. I haven't blogged much about the elections... no, that's not true. I haven't blogged at all about the elections. That's because I find it a depressing topic. There's not much doubt who will win, you see. The only questions are how and by how much. And also -- this is about to become of pressing interest -- how much post-election violence there will be when opposition supporters protest, and are suppressed. The last time around, the protests and suppression got pretty savage; there were casualties. This time, well, we'll know tomorrow. And that's all I have to say about Armenia's elections right now.

Eight who died

A couple of weeks ago, Jacob and I drove out through Echmiadzin to Metsamor. No reason -- we just wanted to take a Sunday drive.

Echmiadzin is the home of the Catholikos, the patriarch of the Armenian Church. It's like a mini-Vatican in the lower Caucasus. Deserves a post of its own.

Metsamor is the home of the Soviet-era nuclear power plant plus a major archeological site, a large Bronze Age town. That deserves a separate post too.

And then there was the memorial to the Yugoslav fliers.

Eight who died

A couple of weeks ago, Jacob and I drove out through Echmiadzin to Metsamor. No reason -- we just wanted to take a Sunday drive. Echmiadzin is the home of the Catholikos, the patriarch of the Armenian Church. It's like a mini-Vatican in the lower Caucasus. Deserves a post of its own. Metsamor is the home of the Soviet-era nuclear power plant plus a major archeological site, a large Bronze Age town. That deserves a separate post too. And then there was the memorial to the Yugoslav fliers.

The Mountain of Moses (2)

Musa Dagh is an interesting story.

Short version: During the Armenian Genocide, several Armenian villages in southeastern Turkey retired up a mountain and dug in for a siege. The Turks sent a large force after them; the Armenians held them off. The siege lasted for 53 days. Then Allied warships evacuated most of the Armenians except for a rear guard.

In the face of the complete decimation of the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire, Musa Dagh became a symbol of the Armenian will to survive. Of the three other sites where Armenians defied the deportation orders, Shabin Karahissar, Urfa, and Van, only the Armenians of Van were rescued when the siege of their city was lifted by an advancing Russian army. The Armenians of Urfa and Shabin Karahissar were either massacred or deported. Musa Dagh stood as the sole instance where the Western Allies at war with the Ottomans averted the death of a community during the Armenian Genocide.

Eighteen years later, an Austrian author named Franz Werfel wrote a book about it: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. The book was a bestseller, and has been in print ever since.

It's a hell of a story, and the Armenians are understandably proud of it. But it does raise some questions...

The Mountain of Moses (2)

Musa Dagh is an interesting story. Short version: During the Armenian Genocide, several Armenian villages in southeastern Turkey retired up a mountain and dug in for a siege. The Turks sent a large force after them; the Armenians held them off. The siege lasted for 53 days. Then Allied warships evacuated most of the Armenians except for a rear guard.

In the face of the complete decimation of the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire, Musa Dagh became a symbol of the Armenian will to survive. Of the three other sites where Armenians defied the deportation orders, Shabin Karahissar, Urfa, and Van, only the Armenians of Van were rescued when the siege of their city was lifted by an advancing Russian army. The Armenians of Urfa and Shabin Karahissar were either massacred or deported. Musa Dagh stood as the sole instance where the Western Allies at war with the Ottomans averted the death of a community during the Armenian Genocide.

Eighteen years later, an Austrian author named Franz Werfel wrote a book about it: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. The book was a bestseller, and has been in print ever since. It's a hell of a story, and the Armenians are understandably proud of it. But it does raise some questions...

The Mountain of Moses

So we went for a drive today, Jacob and me.

We weren't going anywhere in particular. Drove out past the airport, in the direction of Echmiadzin.

Leaving Yerevan that way? The first thing you pass is the US Embassy, which is a mile or so outside of town. It's huge -- three large buildings set on several acres of green campus, all surrounded by a wall. It's much bigger than the US Embassy in Romania.

Why do we need such a big embassy? Well, one, the influence of the Armenian diaspora, and two, the fact that Armenia's a friendly country that borders Iran. It's a bit depressing that it's a walled compound, but that's SOP for US embassies these days.

Anyway. A few miles past the Embassy is the turnoff to the airport (after first passing through a village full of garish casinos, the peculiar welcome for everyone flying into Armenia). And a mile or so past the airport is the village of Musa Ler.

Musa Ler was originally the name of an Armenian region in Turkey, far to the south and west of here. It means "Mountain of Moses". It's much more widely known by its Turkish name: Musa Dagh.

The Mountain of Moses

So we went for a drive today, Jacob and me. We weren't going anywhere in particular. Drove out past the airport, in the direction of Echmiadzin. Leaving Yerevan that way? The first thing you pass is the US Embassy, which is a mile or so outside of town. It's huge -- three large buildings set on several acres of green campus, all surrounded by a wall. It's much bigger than the US Embassy in Romania. Why do we need such a big embassy? Well, one, the influence of the Armenian diaspora, and two, the fact that Armenia's a friendly country that borders Iran. It's a bit depressing that it's a walled compound, but that's SOP for US embassies these days. Anyway. A few miles past the Embassy is the turnoff to the airport (after first passing through a village full of garish casinos, the peculiar welcome for everyone flying into Armenia). And a mile or so past the airport is the village of Musa Ler. Musa Ler was originally the name of an Armenian region in Turkey, far to the south and west of here. It means "Mountain of Moses". It's much more widely known by its Turkish name: Musa Dagh.

Kittens

img alt="fpi_glasses.jpg" src="http://www.bookcase.com/~claudia/mt/archives/fpi_glasses.jpg" width="50" height="50" border="0" /> We got 'em.

Lot of cats in our neighborhood. They range from someone's pet to purely feral, with most sort of in between. Last year we found a couple of young kittens in our yard. We took them in and tried to keep them alive, but it didn't work out.

So. But there are still plenty of cats around. Our neighborhood is really designed for them... lots of trees, lots of walls and fences, lots of low houses that are close together. Invisible cat highways crisscross our yard and our roof.

Kittens

img alt="fpi_glasses.jpg" src="http://www.bookcase.com/~claudia/mt/archives/fpi_glasses.jpg" width="50" height="50" border="0" /> We got 'em. Lot of cats in our neighborhood. They range from someone's pet to purely feral, with most sort of in between. Last year we found a couple of young kittens in our yard. We took them in and tried to keep them alive, but it didn't work out. So. But there are still plenty of cats around. Our neighborhood is really designed for them... lots of trees, lots of walls and fences, lots of low houses that are close together. Invisible cat highways crisscross our yard and our roof.

The shores of the island

This is one of those random stories.

The other day I was looking for something online, typed too fast, and entered the capital letter "S" into the search engine. After a moment's thought, it directed me to the Wikipedia page for Sulfur: chemical symbol S.

I was about to navigate away, but the pretty periodic table caught my eye. (Yes, I am easily distracted.) So I clicked on it for a closer look.

The shores of the island

This is one of those random stories. The other day I was looking for something online, typed too fast, and entered the capital letter "S" into the search engine. After a moment's thought, it directed me to the Wikipedia page for Sulfur: chemical symbol S. I was about to navigate away, but the pretty periodic table caught my eye. (Yes, I am easily distracted.) So I clicked on it for a closer look.

The Road to Ptghni

Really, its the road through Ptghni. Sorry.

Ptghni is a village on the road that goes north from Yerevan to Lake Sevan. It has nothing to do with anything except, come on... "Ptghni"? How can you not love that?

I was driving north with Jacob because I wanted to go hiking. We have a book of hiking trails, and it showed one in the village of Fantan -- right, I should make a list -- Fantan, about 30 km north of here. I have one of those baby-backpack carrier things, and Jacob still fits in it. So I thought, hey, Sunday hike.

The Road to Ptghni

Really, its the road through Ptghni. Sorry. Ptghni is a village on the road that goes north from Yerevan to Lake Sevan. It has nothing to do with anything except, come on... "Ptghni"? How can you not love that? I was driving north with Jacob because I wanted to go hiking. We have a book of hiking trails, and it showed one in the village of Fantan -- right, I should make a list -- Fantan, about 30 km north of here. I have one of those baby-backpack carrier things, and Jacob still fits in it. So I thought, hey, Sunday hike.

Buzz

It's International Women's Day today. Some countries take this seriously, some don't. The US does not. Armenia does. It's a no-kidding holiday: shops closed, no school. Men are supposed to turn up with small gifts -- chocolate, flowers. So yesterday the streets were full of flower sellers. Don't know where they came from, but there were daffodils and cut roses everywhere. And I saw my first bees of the season, buzzing sleepily, still dopy with the cold, over the bouquets. I'd forgotten about the bees. April is a month of blossoms here, and the bees go wild. A few more weeks, and all the trees in our back yard will be bent down under masses of blossoms, and each will be surrounded by a humming halo of busy bees. I'm looking forward to that. But also: today, after lunch, I took the boys out for a long walk. I wanted to get them out the door quickly, so Claudia could take a nap while the baby slept. So I didn't clear lunch off the table. And when I got back, a single, solitary fly was buzzing slow circles in the air above the dirty plates. The flies are a curse here in summer. I'd forgotten that. By August there'll be hundreds of the filthy things in the house -- more coming in every time the door opens -- and the kitchen a perpetual battlefield. Still: spring. I can't feel bad about it.

Talking about the weather

Okay, posts about the weather are boring. Still, there is a point in there. Two points. One, Armenia is weird. You have long, furnace-like summers; mellow pleasant autumns; short but brutal winters; and stormy, rainy springs. There's no close American equivalent to this. There's no part of the United States where you'd have two feet of snow on the ground for weeks at a time, but also have a growing season that allows brandy grapes and good tobacco. It's a Mediterranean climate, but pushed inland and several thousand feet up a mountain side. (And, you know, it's not bad. I don't much love winter, but climates without it seem... a little lacking. So a winter that is serious but short is a decent compromise.) Two, when you live in the former Soviet Union, weather is a little more in your face.

Drip, drip, drip

It's been a warm week. "Warm" is a relative term, of course. But most days it gets up to 5 degrees, or 40 Fahrenheit. So the snow is melting. But since there is a lot of snow, it's taking a long time to melt. Mud and slush everywhere. Then after dark it all freezes again -- mornings are slippery. Sunday afternoon, I took the boys on a stroll through the Vernissage. (That's the big Yerevan flea market.) They enjoyed it very much, in part because the heavy foot traffic had turned it into a frozen swamp, with puddles of icy water and slush everywhere. Splash, slosh, splash. -- Is this the end of winter? Or just a warm spell before the Caucasus turns on us? How would I know? But after a month of heavy snow and bitter cold, I'm not complaining. There are worse things than a little slush.

The Ten Richest Men in Armenia

Okay, enough about me.

Apparently Forbes is about to publish a list of the Ten Richest Men in Armenia. The Armenian blogosphere (oh yes, there is one) has already picked up on this, so I'm coming a couple of days late.

But anyhow, you don't have to know a thing about Armenia to find this list interesting. Check it out:

The Ten Richest Men in Armenia

Okay, enough about me. Apparently Forbes is about to publish a list of the Ten Richest Men in Armenia. The Armenian blogosphere (oh yes, there is one) has already picked up on this, so I'm coming a couple of days late. But anyhow, you don't have to know a thing about Armenia to find this list interesting. Check it out: