And the Multicolored Leaves are Falling from the Trees

I saw a really bad concert the other night. It was an Australian born, German residing singer who draws inspiration from cheesy early 70s German films and performs solo with an electronic drum and a video screen. He sang in German, wore a red jumpsuit and looked from a distance like Crispin Glover. It reminded me of skits from Saturday Night Live. As with the other concert I attended here a few weeks back, the audience was all over the map demographically and was probably drawn more by the novelty and the free admission. The uptick in performances in Gyumri is one sign that fall is here. That and the temperature.

Fall has come to Armenia and how sharply the arrival can be felt is quite a shock. The last day of September, I was wearing a short sleeve shirt during the day and it was pretty hot in the afternoon. A couple of days later, the rains had arrived and it was significantly colder. The nights had already been cool during September, but now the lack of insulation in the house makes itself apparent. My nose is literally cold by the time I go to bed. While I still don’t mind bucket bathing, it is a little tougher when the bathroom is about 55 degrees. And I am again extremely thankful that I am not dealing with outdoor plumbing anymore - I have heard from some of the other volunteers that do have outdoor plumbing that their host families use the “chamber pot” approach when the weather gets cold. Glad not to face that decision.

It is also time to rotate my clothing stock. Luckily, my winter clothes had arrived before the end of September and the wool socks that Mom sent have come in handy much earlier than I had expected. It is time to store the shorts that I brought, although I never wore them despite the heat during the first few months here. [Regardless of heat, it is very unusual to see anyone wear shorts here and we are advised to dress like the locals. As a matter of fact, the usual Armenian male uniform of head-to-toe black knows no season – I saw it all summer long although I did not adopt the look myself – there is only so far that I’ll go to try to fit in.]

The Uniform of the Young Armenian Male

Since the beginning of October, the weather has even been changing drastically within the course of a day – driving rainstorms alternate with beautiful clear skies. The temperature can drop by what I estimate to be 10 degrees when clouds roll in and the sun is still strong enough for it to feel hot when the storm passes. You can have a thunderstorm with hail while seeing a clearer sky across town. The rain adds challenges to walking since the unpaved roads are now muddy minefields – although not as much dust gets kicked up, which is a plus.

Mid-Road Lake

And this is nothing yet. The temperatures have only gotten down to the 30s at night and this is one of the regions that are supposed to have the coldest winters in Armenia. The Peace Corps provides us with space heaters but mine won’t arrive until the first week of November. Until then, I have a nice warm comforter, a sleeping bag and lots of wool socks. I have started getting into bed earlier at night just for the sake of keeping warm. I am starting to understand the wisdom of the Snuggie (but that is NOT a hint).

Fall also means it is time to store up food for the winter. Many of the delicious vegetables that I have gotten used to will soon be unavailable, so most families can them and store them in their basements. It can be a social process, and Emma’s sister spent a few days here helping with the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and onions that Emma was preserving. Potatoes are a staple here and we are all told to expect to eat them more often than we already have been - I helped to load about 100 pounds of potatoes into the cellar the other day so I know that the mashed potatoes I sometimes have with breakfast will continue.

Albert and Emma - my host parents

Emma is a great cook and she loves to make soups. While they were delicious a few weeks ago they are even better now. She and Albert also like spicy peppers and they are amazed that I can eat them without choking. In comparison to the vodka shots that Albert and I have with dinner every night (some of which could be paint thinner) the peppers are nothing. And now the grapes are ripe, so now the wine and vodka can be home made. Albert spent a few afternoons this week cutting the vines, squeezing the grapes (by hand, not by foot) and setting the juice to ferment. It is gonna be rough sledding when this stuff is ready to drink, but I’m up for the challenge.

Fermenting wine with a wee bit of sediment

All of the winter preparations are taken in stride by the people here, even if we complain about the cold, the pending monotony of food during the winter, the lack of plumbing and the electricity shutting off intermittently. When I think about how things used to be here, I realize that I have it easy (after the earthquake, a nuclear power plant was shut and conflicts with Turkey and Azerbeijan meant that most Armenians went the first few winters after independence without electricity or heat). The first three groups of Peace Corps volunteers were in Armenia then, so I bet they wouldn’t want to hear our complaining either.

Armenia has lasted for thousands of years, surviving occupations, genocide, earthquakes, wars and economic collapse. One thing that you notice when talking to an Armenian is the pride they take in their traditions and their survival – they are not happy about what they have been through (who would be?) but they are proud that they are still around to talk about it.

And one of the qualities that I admire about the Armenians is being resourceful, probably stemming from many years of doing without. By that I mean that alternate uses can be found for many things, rendering other expenditures unnecessary. Why buy a mop when you can take clothes you don’t need and attach them to a stick?


If not that, you can use them as a doormat. A bed that you no longer need can become a comfortable seating area in your back yard, covered with coats you no longer wear. While living in Solak, I loved walking around and seeing what people had used to create the fences around their properties. I saw the front ends of cars, headboards, refrigerator coils and (my favorite) an entire bus.

And, recently, the lock on my bedroom door (which had apparently been problematic for years) finally broke. Albert went into his workshop and emerged with a box full of locks and replaced the faulty one with another he had been saving just in case. Considering that he had built the house himself on the site of where his old house had collapsed during the earthquake, I should not be surprised that he had spare parts lying around.

All this is not to imply that recycling is an ingrained part of the culture here. Although a lot of properties have car, truck and bus carcasses on them (presumably for spare parts), there are many littering the landscape (presumably since the usable parts had all been taken).

The garbage situation is atrocious, and in many villages, people simply throw it in the nearest stream or ravine. One of the other volunteers here in Gyumri is in the Environmental Education program and I recently helped her organization in cleaning up a street to clear it of garbage. While many people seemed happy with what we were doing, others asked why we bothered since it would all replaced with new garbage in short order. In Solak, we joked about a tourism slogan of “Look Up!” because if you can ignore what’s on the ground, the scenery is really gorgeous.

Creekside in Solak

But the best example of the indomitable spirit I have seen here is the kid next door. Our street is not paved and has ruts and holes all over and the sidewalks are a mixture of concrete, asphalt and paving stones, much of which has been made even more uneven by tree roots. But that doesn’t stop the kid from trying out his rollerblades. He’ll be damned if you tell him he can’t do it.

Technology and Entertainment

As I said in an earlier post, learning the language here is one of the most difficult parts of adjusting. The Armenian language has its own branch in the family of Indo-European languages and it relies on very fine distinctions between certain sounds (for example, there are two separate letters to represent “TS” – one that is aspirated and one that isn’t, with similar distinctions for the two “T” letters and the two “P” letters). While the language itself is somewhat simpler than others I’ve studied (for example, there are no masculine or feminine words, adjectives are singular only) there are also exceptions to the rules and some words that have no connection to one another (three, child and yesterday for instance) sound almost exactly alike.

To make matters more difficult, it is barely spoken outside of Armenia, with its population of 3 million, where the official language is Eastern Armenian. Outside of the country, most of the diaspora (estimated at about 7 or 8 million) speak Western Armenian which is similar but has differences including a slightly different alphabet. Therefore, unlike English, which people around the world are exposed to through television and movies, there are virtually no sources to hear the language before you get here.

The Peace Corps approach of immersion, then, makes a lot of sense. We spend the first 6 ½ months with host families who are instructed not to speak English even if they can. Many of us live in villages where no one speaks English so that everyday routines such as going to the grocery store and traveling on a bus require speaking Armenian.

Technology, however, has changed the experience, though. As pointed out in a recent article, unlike in years past, we have constant access to the English language. I alone have a PC with internet access, a disk drive with which I can watch the dozens of DVDs I brought with me, a cel phone with which I can call other volunteers or the US for pennies per minute, a Skype account (although I still don’t know how to use it) and a Kindle that I use to read English language books. I am glad to have them all, and I will admit that studying the language makes my head hurt after a while and I retreat to my native language instead of putting myself out there as much as I could. As a result, I am not learning the language at the speed I might otherwise but I think the benefits to my mental health are well worth the frustration I feel by not learning faster.

On the flip side, the technology also allows me to accomplish things at work almost instantaneously while my predecessors a few years back would have had to spend days on the same task if the information was even available (a recent history of Santa Claus traditions that I printed from Wikipedia recently would have been impossible not long ago). Most people when first told I was joining the Peace Corps expected me to be digging wells in Guatemala – this experience is indicative of how it is changing with the times also (there are still volunteers working on irrigation in Latin America but you need to have an engineering or agriculture background for one of those slots).

A friend from New York who works in the entertainment field asked me recently about entertainment here, so here is what I have observed so far. This all excludes Yerevan, which I again maintain may as well be a separate country and I haven’t had enough time to observe.

Technology also allows people here to spend a lot of time watching TV. Most houses (even in poor villages) seem to have satellite TV and my personal observations and those I hear from my colleagues indicate that this is a TV loving nation. My host family has the TV on most of the day and night, watching a variety of soap operas, news broadcasts and music programs – sometimes all at the same time, bouncing back and forth between shows so as to not watch the commercials before a show starts (see below). Music videos are very big (most from Russia, as is a lot of the other programming).

One thing I find odd (and which leads to a lot of channel surfing) is that things don’t seem to be on at the same time every night. “Anna,” the soap opera I have been following for a few months now, is allegedly on from 9:30 PM until 10:30 PM with a re-run the next day about 6:00 or so. The starting time is rarely at 9:30, even when there is a commercial around 9:00 saying “Tonight at 9:30!!” Most times the opening credits run about five to 10 minutes late, but sometimes it’s a few minutes before 9:30 (I guess if it’s a slow news day and that program runs short). The opening credits are then followed by 10 – 15 minutes of commercials, there are none during the program and there is another block after it ends. All told, the show is only about half an hour but you never know which 30 it will be. Typical for a soap opera, the music can tend toward the melodramatic but here it gets familiar also. Some of the others here have noticed music from “The Lord of the Rings” score and I can here selections from “Twin Peaks” from time to time. I guess I should mention that the concept of copyright doesn’t mean much here.

The music programs are interesting in that people come out to perform, they are interviewed by a host and then get commentary from a panel sitting in the audience. One program seems to be only for people playing the duduk, a clarinet type instrument that is traditional here. While this sounds like Armenian Idol, all of the commentary appears to be praise and there seems to be no contest (its kind of like school where everyone gets a medal). These programs are on all day every day so people must love them.

News programs also seem popular which may account for the virtual absence of newspapers. While I see some for sale in stores and on newsstands, I honestly can’t recall ever seeing anyone read one except for someone today reading “Futbol”. Some have big Sudoku-like puzzles on the front page and I have seen people reading TV listings, but it is nothing like the good old New York Post screaming headline approach that draws people in (but then maybe they don’t find headless bodies in topless bars here either).

This also does not seem to be a nation of book readers. I have seen no bookstores in Gyumri or any of the other places I’ve been to, instead sometimes finding books in stationery stores. I don’t remember seeing any people carrying books around or reading in public spaces as I do sometimes in the park. Various volunteers here are working on library projects as they are in sorry shape and badly in need of improvement – keeping circulation records on index cards, maintaining tons of Soviet era technical books, etc. I hope that the reading I don’t see is a result of the state of the libraries that can be reversed with improvements – if instead the state of the libraries is a symptom of lack of interest that can’t be reversed that would be very unfortunate.

And, as I have said before, there aren’t many movie theaters either. There are a fair number of DVD stores (all of which I am certain sell only legitimate copies of the movies….) but there seems to be no interest in seeing something on a big screen. From what I can see, the theater here screens only big Hollywood movies (Prince of Persia, Sex and the City 2, Shrek, Sorcerer’s Apprentice), all in Russian. There are special programs such as an out-of-the-blue 50^th Anniversary screenings of West Side Story, but I have not noticed any Armenian films per se. A Wikipedia search of Armenian films list fewer than 10 dramas in the last decade.

As to music, I am very surprised at the virtual absence of American pop music. As I said previously, a lot of socializing involves walking around the town square or other popular areas, and it is common to hear people carrying cel phones that play music pretty loudly. The music you hear people carrying (and what is blasting from car radios) all seems to be local pop stars and, like in the US, you hear the same stuff all the time. Likewise, someone once asked me what I have on my iPod and when I named a few artists, I was asked “No Armenian music?” Despite this, there was a recent concert by Brazzaville, a California band that I had never heard of. They played three dates in Armenia, all free, including a stop in Gyumri. I went to see it and noted a crowd from the very young (maybe five years old) to people in their 70s. A lot of the teenagers seemed to know the music (and it sounded familiar to me also, probably through appropriation of other artists as opposed to having heard it before). Since it was a free concert, people may have attended for the novelty of something to do (I know I did).

I understand that the theater where the concert was also has live performances of various typed but I am not aware of any in the two months I’ve been here, other than a classical music concert performed in honor of Russian President Medvedev’s visit a few weeks back. That took place at 3PM on a weekday.

So that leaves the question – what do people do for entertainment? And the answer seems to be that they hang out together, since socializing and being with your family is a very important part of Armenian culture. They go to cafes and talk. They go to each other’s houses and talk. They walk around together and talk. And they love watching soap operas and music videos on TV.

I did spend last weekend in Yerevan and saw some of the culture there. Yerevan has live theater, and I am sorry to say that I was unable to catch a local version of Boeing-Boeing since I was only there one night (it was called something like Don Juan of the Air). There are a couple of movie theaters and some of the movies are shown in English. There is an opera house there, and reportedly people talk on cel phones, talk to each other, take pictures and walk in and out during the performances as is done everywhere else – except when it is a performance of an Armenian opera. A lot of international music acts perform at the opera house, and I missed Orchestral Jethro Tull by one day. Otherwise, I saw a lot of people gathering in cafes and walking around the main square, eating sunflower seeds, just like in Gyumri.

As to what I have been up to lately, it’s been a bit of a monastery tour. Beside the one at Lake Sevan that I wrote about in my last post, I went to another (Marmashen) outside of Gyumri and the next day to another (Maharavank) in the northeast corner of the country, within sight of the Georgia and Azerbeijan borders. There are plenty more around the country and I hope to see a lot of them while I am here. Most are in bad shape and unused since religion was suppressed during the 70 years of Soviet rule, but some (like Maharavank) are operational and visiting them offers an opportunity to see how religion, which never went away here, is reestablishing itself.

Marmashen

Maharavank

Choir during a service at Maharavank

And for those of you following along, I have been taking a lot of pictures. The most recent have been added to the Snapfish photo albums linked at the right side of this page.

So long for now.