Yerevan (and a couple of updates)

As I have written numerous times, Yerevan is like a separate country from the rest of Armenia. Having spent a good part of last weekend there, I had time to reflect on all of the things that make it stand apart.

As with the rest of the country, Yerevan has a complex history and it is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. While it had not been a big city, its location was seen as important by both the Persians and Russians who alternated in controlling what is now Armenia over the centuries.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Yerevan had a population of about 30,000, about the same as Gyumri. When Armenia became part of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, a plan was developed to expand it. Many historical buildings were demolished to carry out the new plan and as a result, much of the architecture has a Soviet flavor to it. But most of the buildings are made of “tufa” and the coloration can be quite interesting, glowing sometimes depending on the light.

Republic Square

Yerevan Police Building and maybe inadvertent inspiration for an Aha video

As I understand it, the Soviets wanted a major city in Armenia (“major” defined as a population above 1 million) and so infrastructure was put in place to permit that. I had heard that doing the same for some of the other cities (Gyumri and Vanadzor) was considered but they never got around to it and the earthquake and collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to the prospect of that. Currently, Yerevan has a population of about 1.3 million – more than one third of the total country.

Yerevan is the seat of the government, home to the more prestigious universities and it has the only true international airport (Gyumri’s is international but only has flights to Russia). It has a botanical garden, a zoo, a water park and - very surprising for the nation that prides itself on being the first to make Christianity the state religion - a mosque. But beyond the obvious things one would expect a capital to have, there are many other differences.

While Gyumri has several Armenian restaurants, a couple of Georgian ones and a nominally Italian one, Yerevan has Chinese, Mexican, Sushi, Italian, French, Indian and the most gourmet of all – Pizza Hut and KFC (I’m still not sure why McDonald’s doesn’t have a presence).

Life tasted great for Chris' birthday celebration

While several cities have cafés that serve as places to socialize, Yerevan also has nightlife – bars, dance clubs and strip clubs (discreetly called “Night Clubs”).

There are cafés with Wi-Fi and one that I have been to that broadcasts BBC news all day. Unlike in Gyumri, there are places that serve breakfast. One bookstore/café that is a favorite of volunteers has bacon, French toast with real syrup and bagels. Virtually all of the staff in the cafés and restaurants speak English.

Almost every village, town and city has grocery stores (“khanuts”) and Yerevan has those but it also has 24-hour supermarkets. The towns and cities have stores that sell clothing and housewares while Yerevan also has Benetton, Swarovski, Guess, Pierre Cardin, Zegna, Bally, Bang & Olufsun and many others.

Gyumri has marshutnis and buses with benzene tanks on the roof for transportation. Yerevan also has marshutnis and some of the old buses but it also has a subway and electric powered buses. And every road that I have been on there has been paved (for the most part).

While most villages, towns and cities have some sort of “culture house”, Yerevan also has theaters with live performances, an opera house and a 5-D movie theater (I haven’t a clue what the fifth dimension is – I only know the one that sang “Age of Aquarius”).

Yerevan Opera House

In the opera house there are ballets, operas, symphonic concerts and pop concerts. The main movie theater has an annual international film festival but you can also see Nicholas Cage train wrecks dubbed into Russian. I am told that they sometimes have movies in English but I haven’t been to one. I have grown content watching things on my computer.

There are wide, tree lined streets that have shops all along them.

Looks better in the summer

There are several parks, including one that arcs around half of the city center. In the main square, there are dancing fountains like the ones in Las Vegas. There is public art all over the city, including works by Botero.

The Cascade, a massive stairway that overlooks the opera house contains a contemporary art museum and, when the weather is nice, concerts and dance performances are held there.

While many places around the country have Peace Corps volunteers, Yerevan has ex-pats. Score one for the regions.

While Yerevan is not a world-class city it is still pretty nice. There are about two dozen museums, including the Matenadaran, which houses thousands of ancient manuscripts. The smallest church in Yerevan (and one of the oldest) sits right in the middle of downtown and there is a more modern cathedral as well.

National Gallery

Matenadaran

Katoghike

Cathedral

The parks and some of the squares have nice cafés that are a great place to pass the time and do some people watching. The people come across somewhat more sophisticated, but the manner of dress that I have seen around the country seems to me a national thing and not a regional one.

At the Vernissage – a large market open every weekend – you can buy anything including Soviet propaganda posters, dental equipment, tacky souvenirs, bad art, nice art, rugs, puppies, Russian pornography, jewelry, antique cameras – you name it. There is a separate market just for art and it ranges from the kinda nice to the downright terrifying.

Like most of the country, the hotels are overpriced relative to the cost of everything else, just more so. In Gyumri, the decent hotels charge about the equivalent of $65 per night and upward for a single room. While some hotels in Yerevan have comparable rates, the Marriott has a rack rate of over $260 per night. [The hostel at which volunteers mostly stay costs the equivalent of about $14 per night.] By comparison, you can get a decent dinner including drinks for less than $20 in Yerevan and there are plenty of places to get food much cheaper. The subway costs the equivalent of 15 cents. A liter of water is less than 50 cents in most stores. Cigarettes are normally less than $1.50 per pack – and much cheaper if you don’t care what brand you get.

While the cost of many things in Yerevan is lower than in other countries, they still seem expensive when you are used to paying prices in the regions and are living on a Peace Corps allowance. A very tasty dessert or a 12 ounce bottle of beer at 1,000 dram (less than $3) compares to an Armenian “gata” pastry at 140 dram or a half liter beer at 500 dram in Gyumri.

And you can pay by credit card, unlike most of the rest of the country. As a matter of fact, it can pay a bonus – at a recent visit to a Mexican restaurant, I paid with my American Express just because I could. The server told me that paying with Amex entitled me to a free additional margarita. Sweet.

Because there are so many amenities, volunteers may be tempted to get away from their sites and spend all their free time there. We have a policy that limits the time in Yerevan to two nights per month which is enough for me. I am only two hours away and, while it is nice to take advantage of what it has to offer, each visit also reinforces how deprived Gyumri is. But while I ask myself how the country can allow such a disparity, I also have to ask myself the same about the US – the distance from Manhattan to Camden NJ is about the same in many respects.

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Update 1

Right after my last post, I went to my weekly English conversation club. Given that it fell two days after International Women’s Day, we had decided to make the topic women that the club members admired and each would make a presentation to the group.

Well, as it turns out, everyone seemed to have forgotten that part of the plan. Nonetheless, the other PC volunteer (also male) and I steered the topic into the role of women in society. All of the participants except two were female, mostly university students, and the women did most of the talking. And what I heard still surprises me. Among the opinions expressed were:

• Men are more intelligent than women. While the women in their classes study all the time and the men don’t, the men get equivalent grades and that must mean that they are smarter. No mention was made of the impact that rampant corruption in the educational system likely plays in that phenomenon, but that is a topic for a future post.

• Men are more trustworthy than women. What started as a sub-discussion about gender-typical jobs led to a consensus that the participants would not patronize a female attorney. “Male attorneys will follow the law. Female attorneys will always look for some sneaky way to get around the law and therefore should not be trusted.” I didn’t get into my view that most attorneys in the US are sought out specifically for this reason.
  

For various reasons, a similar view extended to female doctors and other professions. And while this also included hairdressers (they are reputed to pull their customers hair), that is typically a woman’s job so I am not sure how one gets around that.

• Women are frail and need protection from men. The woman expressing this opinion kept saying that “they” are frail and when we pointed out that she is one of “they” and asked if she is frail, she answered “Yes”. This came from a person pursuing a Masters degree at a business university.

As I said in previous posts, it seems inevitable to me that women will have to take a greater part in the historically male parts of society. But, in the meantime, it seems that a lot of the arguments made to keep a segment of society servile have been internalized to the extent that any such changes may come as much of a shock to the women as it will to the men.

And after saying that I had never seen a woman driver in Gyumri, I saw two this past week. And I had been paying attention before – I swear.

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Update 2

After four weeks without, I finally got my new water heater and have hot water again. While it was a nuisance not having it, I had been well prepared the first six months here when I had no running water at all (with my Solak host family) or cold water only (with my Gyumri host family). Once again, everything took longer – bucket bathing, washing clothes and washing dishes required water to be heated on the stove first – but I managed fine and simply worked around it by doing each less often.

But sometimes one does really want a nice hot shower and I learned about the public baths that we have here. I am told that Gyumri has six of them and I am actually surprised that there are not more since there are quite a few people who have no running water. In my walks around the city, I often see people filling buckets from pipes outside and carrying them back to their houses, some of which are literally around the corner from me. Similarly, many people do not seem to have gas so their heating is provided from wood stoves.

At both of the bath places I visited you can rent a room for 45 minutes. One cost 500 dram (about $1.50) and the other is 800 dram (a little over $2) per person (family members often go together and one charges half price for children under 7). While this may sound cheap, I should point out that the average salary here is about $200 per month and a significant number of people are unemployed. Therefore, what I treated myself to for mental health purposes may actually be a luxury to others.

While neither could be considered a spa, I was quite happy with them and actually preferred the less expensive one. You rent a space with two rooms – one to change in and one with the actual shower. The shower heads were high enough to be above my head (a nice surprise), the water pressure was good and the temperature nice and warm. While I was waiting, I had the opportunity to observe some of the other patrons – a mother and daughter one time and a married couple the other. Despite the circumstances that lead people to need places like this, the people did not look any different from others I see around town all the time. While I do not have the comforts I am used to in the US, my set up here is still pretty nice. And it is good to sometimes see how people really live here, making you question how you define a “necessity”.

The Feminine Mystique

Today is International Women’s Day and it is a national holiday in Armenia. So it seems like a good time for my long planned discussion about gender issues here.

As any of the women volunteers here can testify, the gender roles here are reminiscent of the US in the 50s and 60s. While living in a city like Gyumri is different than living in a village like Solak, even in Yerevan things would shock most Americans.

As I wrote last time, there are very traditional notions about what is appropriate for women to do, how to dress, what should and should not be done before marriage, etc. But the issue goes far deeper than that. Whether it is due to the religious traditions here, the influence over the ages from the surrounding Muslim countries and their traditions or just that Armenia is still catching up with Western countries, I don’t know. But from statistics I read and stories I hear I constantly have to hold in my surprise at what people take in stride. Here are some examples.

In Solak, women were the first ones up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night. Gohar, my host mother, was out tending to the cows and chickens, then fixing breakfast, cleaning the house and getting food for dinner – all before noon since she had a job at the post office every afternoon. When she got home from work, she cooked dinner, milked the cows, cleaned the house, picked fruit from the garden and took care of anything else that needed to be done. The fact that her husband has a job and her son is in the army was not relevant – other families had the same division of labor even if the husband and sons were home and out of work.

I have been to several meals here with large groups of people. In almost every case, the men were at one end of the table and the women at the other. After meals, it is normal for all of the men to walk away from the table and leave their dishes there. When living with my host families, any time I cleared my dishes and brought them to the sink, everyone (men and women) told me to leave them. Some of the large meals I attended were with co-workers (managers of the organization and volunteers) and it went without saying that the women (managers and volunteers) would clean up and the men would stay seated.

Some of the male volunteers insist on cooking occasionally for their host families and that is seen as very odd (the host families have training and are encouraged to accept the cultural differences such as that). The big exception to this is when it comes to khorovats – as in the US, barbecuing is the man’s domain so the women get a break for a while. As I wrote previously, in some host families, male volunteers don’t do their own laundry since that is seen as women’s work although both of my host mothers seemed to feel that my cultural integration was important (or something like that).

I went to a meeting at a local business university with two other volunteers, both women - an English teacher and another with a background similar to mine but with more experience. We went to discuss classes we might teach (which eventually became a Business English class). During the entire meeting, I was the only one that the school director spoke to.

I have yet to see a woman drive in Gyumri. In Yerevan it is a little more common but still unusual. Some of the online news sites I read regularly seem to report every single car accident in the country but one I read two weeks ago stood out – it pointed out that a woman driver ran over a person in Yerevan. I realized at that point that it was the first time an article I had read mentioned the sex of the driver in an accident. In the Business English class I teach with the other volunteer, we had the students read an article about Honda marketing scooters in India to female drivers. We tried to engage the students in a discussion about whether such a campaign would work in Armenia and they said no – women don’t drive.

I visited a monastery a few months back and entered while a mass was in progress. Shortly after I walked in, people approached the altar for communion. Two lines formed - one with men and one with women. The men’s line received communion first.

It is unusual to see women in a café or restaurant drinking alcohol (other than expatriates). If a woman goes somewhere by herself and drinks she will probably be assumed to be a prostitute. A commercial for an Armenian beer (click the link to watch) markets it as a beer for men and jokingly shows women unable to drink it while the bartenders laugh.

Nestle sells a candy bar here called Nestle for Men. Some of the female volunteers tried it with no ill effects so I am not sure what the marketing rationale is.

Kevin is manly enough for this candy

Notice the imprints

As I mentioned previously, there are jobs seen as men’s jobs and those seen as women’s jobs. I discussed in a previous post that many husbands do not want their wives to work and a fair number of women seem fine with that. During training last summer, we had a cross cultural session to discuss gender roles and the featured speaker was a woman from Yerevan who said that Armenia needs to adjust to meet a changing world. The most fascinating part of the discussion was the reaction of our language teachers (all women incidentally) who strenuously objected to what she was saying. When discussion turned to women working, one asked “Who will raise the children?” In a follow up conversation later that night with my language teachers, that question came up again. I pointed out that my brother and both of my brothers-in-law had significant roles in raising their children, all of whom have grown up rather well.

Most of the boys I have seen are allowed by their families to do whatever they want. I have seen a five year old commandeer the remote control while his grandmother was watching TV and change the channel to what he wanted to watch without asking. She made a comment to him but did not make him change it back. He routinely hit his little sister with no consequences. He seemed to be in training for his life in a male dominated society.

This manifests itself in ways that can be both very protective and outright abusive. Often when I am on public transportation, a man traveling with a woman will have her sit next to the window so he can guard her from others (and as I related previously I was once asked to change my seat since a man did not want his daughter sitting next to me). In many cases, women will share seats rather than sit next to men. This is not unfounded since I have heard stories of women being groped by male passengers.

And as I related in my last post, women are expected to be virgins when they marry although men are expected to be experienced. But once married, there can be a very different story. A recent UN report on the topic cites surveys indicating that between ten and 69% of Armenian women were victims of domestic violence. Since a woman traditionally moves in with her husband’s family, the violence may also be carried out by her mother-in-law. [To read this fascinating and disturbing report see here]. The report cites instances of police, doctors and judges blaming the victims or disregarding reports because they are “family matters”.

This may be changing, however, due to a case that brought widespread attention to the issue late last year. Zaruhi Petrosyan a 20 year old mother of two was beaten repeatedly by her husband and mother-in-law and finally died from her injuries. Her complaints to the police were ignored but, following her death, her husband was arrested and charged with murder (his trial is supposed to start this week). In the meantime, the issue and protests related to the case have forced the government to acknowledge that the issue exists. Where this goes will be interesting to watch.

Also, according to news reports, the play The Vagina Monologues is supposed to be performed in Yerevan next month, in a production that has been touring the Caucasus. It is being staged to help raise awareness of women’s rights and the reality of domestic violence. The reaction to this should be interesting.

While all of these matters are very discouraging, it reinforces the importance of one of the Peace Corps aims to promote development of women. Projects have been carried out to showcase the contributions of women to society (see here), to encourage their education, to help them find a market for handicrafts they create and camps to teach girls leadership skills (to donate to this year's camp see here).

As I have said, the trends in the country are likely to accelerate the changes and the educational imbalance will probably make women better prepared for the future of the country. It's just going to be a bit rough to get there.