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Rememberances of Armenia Pt 3- The North and the Wedding

So we headed back north, and stopped by a church called Noravank (nora-new vank-church) which had some great architecture (again, check out the photo album on the right).

We spent a few days in Vanadzor and met Manet's family and a few other Peace Corps volunteers, all of which were great.

We went North to the church at Kober, which was built in the 12th century on the side of a cliff. Numerous earthquakes at destroyed much of it, but it was still somewhat intact. the colors of the paintings on the walls of the church were brilliant, especially for how old they were and the weather they had to have dealt with.
A picture of Kober

Mark and I spent a day in the town of Spitak (which means "white" in Armenian). Spitak was the epicenter of a huge earthquake in 1988. The town was completely destroyed. It has a large cemetery with thousands and thousands of headstones from all the people who had died in the earthquake. Many gravestones in Armenia have detailed etchings of the people who had died, which usually is a little tacky. But in Spitak, it was deeply moving. It brought a human face to all those who had died and the deep tragedy of the loss so many families had all together. Many of the stones had the time of death, which was all exactly the same for these thousands upon thousands of people.

(in the background) a woman and her four young children died together.

The surviving community erected a sheet-metal church a few days after the earthquake. It seems odd without the backstory, but knowing what had happened, it was a correct monument to the devastation. Here is a news article about the earthquake.

The sheet-metal church at Spitak.

An entire community died together here, it was overwhelming.

Most towns in Armenia had memorials to those that had died in WWII, most of which consisted of two columns. This one from Shake, who trees with no limbs, was particularly moving:

John and Manet's wedding was near the end of my trip. The wedding itself was in a church in the extreme north. The church is a UNESCO site and was lush with vegetation. It was beautiful. The ceremony was mostly liturgical and very moving. One odd thing in Armenian culture, the bride's mother does not go to the wedding, so Manet's mom did not see her until the reception.

The reception was fun with lots of dancing and singing.

Manet and her dad dancing.

The next day I left Armenia, John got me a taxi and I spent two hours with the driver, who know maybe 10 words in English (about the same as my Armenian). We sang along to his music and somehow had friendly banter for the two hours. It was a great trip, I would have been a bit uncomfortable about driving alone with someone I couldn't speak to when I had arrived, but the driver was the perfect example of all of the people I had met in Armenia. Everyone there opened their homes and friendship to me without hesitation, it was a wonderful, wonderful time.

March 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rememberances of Armenia- August 2004 pt 2- goin' on down south

John and I went to his "Mid-service training" over the next few days in a place just outside of Yerevan. It had been a vacation spot of the Soviet elite back in the day, but was pretty much abandoned now. On clearer days, we could have seen mount Ararat from there, but it was so hot the entire time is was in Armenia, I didn't see it too well. You could however see the nuclear power plant (which sits on a fault-line) from the now vacant Soviet summer homes.

So I learned a bit of what to expect from my upcoming Peace Corps experience from the Peace Corps volunteers. The main points: don't expect to get too much done, expect frustration, but enjoy yourself, meet people, live it up.

These guys cooked horovats (shish-kabab type things) for the PC folks at their meeting. We went down and talked to them for a bit and they gave us some right off of the grill.

A few days after John's Mid-Service Training, we picked up our friend Mark at the airport and headed down south. John had spent the first three months in the village of Shake, near the town of Sisian, and we were going to spend a few days with his host family from that time.

On the way down, we stopped at Khor Viarp (spelling?). Kora Viarp is in many ways, with Mount Ararat, the symbol of Armenia. Mt. Ararat can be seen towering over the landscape, a huge lonely mountain. Ironically, the mountain sits in Turkey. This irony is fitting, given Armenia's history and the horrors Armenians faced at the hands of the Turks 90 years ago. Mt. Ararat is the back-drop for the church at Kora Viarp. It is the historic dungeon home of Gregor the Illuminator, who was placed in a dungeon for many years (I think it was 30 years). In the year 301, the king freed Gregor, who in turn converted the king to Christianity, making Armenia the first nation to be officially Christian.

We then traveled south the Sisian and Shake, the land on the way was dry and got more mountainous. Sisian and Shake were green though, with rolling hills and expansive mountains all around.

This ancient chaple overlooks the village of Shake.

We spent a few days with John's host family, they were great.

This is John's host family (and John, Mark, and Manet):

The family was a farming family. Geyvorg and his brother (who I only know as "the cornel") worked together on the farm. They had barley and other grains, honey, and even a number of huge pools for fish farming. Geyvorg lamented that the Soviet era was over, he said his life was much easier then. He said that he has to work twice as much to survive now. It was true, we did not see him most days until around 9 or 10 at night. He still spent a few hours with us and he and his wife were wonderful hosts.
Extracting honey at the family farm.

Mark had a cold while we were there, so he was given many home remendies, including snorting vodka and separately snorting honey (shown here), the honey didn't really help matters much.

We spent a day a little further south at Tatev, which was the only church we saw that had a full living spance for a large number of clergy. It must have been a school. It was beautiful the valley below was amazing. It must have been an inspiring place to be in the priesthood. Check out the pictures labled "Tatev" in the Armenia photo album on the right.

March 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rememberances of Armenia-August 2004 pt1- the land of milk and honey

I know, I know. The title of this weblog is "Chris in Albania", but now we have to read about Armenia? I had such a great time in Armenia that I have to share.

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I got off of the plane in Yerevan (Armenia's capital) at four in the am after an excruciatingly long plane trip which included 10 hours in the Moscow airport, which is not anywhere near as accommodating as you would expect from the airport in the capital of Russia. My friend John and his soon-to-be wife Manet picked me up at the airport and we went in to Yerevan for a few hours until the taxis started running. We had a two hour long trip north to Vanadzor, where they live. (see Armenian map).

This is a picture of an apartment in Yerevan that looks over the area where the taxis going to Vanadzor congregate.

Vanadzor is only about 80 miles from Yerevan, but there are sizable mountains to traverse to get there and 95% of Armenian taxis are Ladas, which don't run very fast. Add to that the grizzly roads and numerous hazards, and you're happy to make it that quickly.

So we left the capital as the sun came up and I was still in my lack-of-sleep stupor. The taxi driver decided to blast his music at full volume, which I think is mandated by the taxi driver's union.

On our drive north, I had the feeling that Armenia is quite literally the land of milk and honey. Green fields flowed from the bottom of the mountainsides. We passed tiny one-room shacks, each with a dozen or so bee houses a few hundred feet off of the road. Each had a stand on the roadside with jars of fresh honey on them to be sold and no one watching them. We were stopped and slowed no less than three times by large herds of goats and cattle. The largest herd of sheep numbered about 500 and slowed us down for quite some time.

Halfway to Vanadzor is the town of Aparan, know for its spring water (which is one of the best selling bottled waters in the country), as well as for being one of the most important towns for holding back the Turks and thus keeping Armenia a sovereign nation.

We were lucky enough on this excursion to not be stopped by the traffic cops. The police stand on the side of the road and occasionally flag down a driver. The driver then walks up to the cop and shakes his hand, slipping him a 500 dram (about a dollar) note (see a picture of a dram note). One time, we got pulled over and our taxi driver was mad because he thought he'd have to pay the bribe, but it turned out that he was only driving too fast so the cop told him to slow down, no big deal. Quite ironic.

We drove down the mountains into the valley where Vanadzor sits. The first impression one gets of Vanadzor is the stark soviet past. There is a large industrial building and countless run down and abandoned soviet era buildings. The main part of the town is not all that bad and the surrounding mountains are beautiful.

John showed me around his town the next few days, and I met Manet's parents and brother Sako, the other Peace Corps people in the town, as well as a number of other characters in the neighborhood. Most notably of which was Rafi, who was a crazy man and very nice. There is no describing him.

Rafi made me drink a shot of his homemade "spirit". After one shot of the (watered-down) stuff, the world started spinning. Seriously. I am not exaggerating.

March 14, 2005 | Permalink

Recent Readings

As I Lay Dying
Of the four books by Faulkner that I have read, this was my least favorite, although it is still better than most of the other books I have read in a long time. There are numerous reasons why I like Faulkner, one of most important of which is the way that most of his stories unfold from the perspectives of the characters and through this, we see how the objective reality which occurs around the characters is secondary to the perspectives of those experiencing it. If you took the entire dialog out of As I Lay Dying, it would be about 10 pages long. I think this is really more of a realistic way of telling a story than the typical method of telling the events with stronger focus on dialog and details of events. Also great about Faulkner is how he has such a great way of distilling the culture of the South, with all of its social structures and ethics. One element which is in most of his writing which is missing in this book is his page-long, intricate sentences which are so difficult to read but are also so rewarding.
Tales of Ordinary Madness
Ah Bukowski. I love reading this guy. But not too often. Maybe once a year or so. Reading any of his books is a catharsis from everything else. This book of short stories is not much different than the other ones of his that I have read, the stories are hit and miss (more often “miss” here than for instance Hot Water Music or Women), he is so brutally (and I do mean brutally) honest about himself and the world around him. A complete selfish, lazy, and often mean drunk with moments of beauty within a world that he usually can’t stand. He is not for the faint-of-heart, but if you can stomach the darker side of him, it is well worth the read.
Toni Morrison: Jazz
The storyline takes a back seat to the raw power of her lyricism. I couldn’t help but think that Kerouac would have loved to have written many of the beautiful passages in this book, but he never could touch them. Partly because he seemed to more often be an outside observer of love, even when it was happening to him, and where Morrison knows so much more about love and its pain and is able to weave so many facets of that experience into the lives of her characters. Enough of my thoughts, here are some excerpts: “…you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core. That when he left Eden, he left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life. The very first to know what it was like. To bite it, bite it down. Hear the crunch and let the red peeling break his heart”.-----“I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure.”-----“It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond way, way down underneath tissue."
Russell Banks: Cloudsplitter : A Novel
A fulfilling read, although drawnout in parts. But the slowness of the book is somewhat of a draw, as this drawn-out-ness really paints a good picture of the slowness of solitary farm life. The book is told from the perspective of Owen Brown, son of the famous abolitionist John Brown. It was great to read a book that talked a bit about my once hometown of Lawrence, KS. There is a thesis that runs through this that American history may have been dramatically different without John Brown, as the Kansas wars may have never happened without him and then it (Kansas) would have gone to the south as a slave state, and then the North would have ceded from the union, which the south would not have minded, as they were the cash cow of the US. Then there would have been no civil war and therefore no solidification of the union. I don't know if it's that simplistic, but it is worth thinking about nonetheless. Also, the depiction of John Brown's personality as a extremely pious and headstrong man is done very well. It's really strange to think that Freestate Brewery in Lawrence named an ale after him, as he was a teatottler.
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
A satisfyingly informative read. Believe it or not, over a hundred pages consisting of 5 chapters covering the comparative history of food consumption and production around the world is a page turner. Who woulda thunk it? The rest of the book ain’t too shabby either. It is a very basic and informative thesis on why certain cultures won out against others in world history, and the answers are surprisingly simple. One shocker is the argument that germs are one of the main reasons for cultural expansion. Although the book gets a little redundant or over-explainy at times, it is a very interesting and informative book.
Tom Robbins: Skinny Legs and All
A very entertaining book. Robbins is a genius. A genius in the way that Robbin Williams is. He sees the world in the same way someone eternally hopped up on coke and ‘shrooms would. His writing constantly bends reality wherever he wants it to, and you can’t help but just gape at with what ease he does it. And he celebrates life-all of life, even it’s heartbreaks. Although this is a very entertaining, funny, raucous, and impious work, it does have substance to it. Robbins usually weaves religion into him books and he certainly does here. His religious ideas are not as revolutionary or enlightening as the other aspects of his work, but it’s nice that it’s there. A very enjoyable and light read.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies
Not a bad book, but not worth winning a Pulitzer either. A bit over sentimental and self-aware that it is being sentimental, a terrible trait for any book. Most of the short stories in this collection look at human relationships and describe the imperfections in these relationships, usually due to the weakness of those within them in appreciating them in a traditional way. In my opinion, with the exception of the story from which the title of the book comes from, the stories fail in their attempt to portray the depth of human emotion and romanticism and rather portray them as a pretty picture.
Nikos Kazantzakes: Report to Greco
Kazantzakis is one of my favorite authors, Zorba the Greek is an amazing novel and I've been hooked ever since. Report to Greco is his autobiography, and shows the how the passion of the author has driven him thoughout his life. This book is infinitly quoteable, but here are a few: "God is being built. I too have applied my tiny red pebble, a drop of blood, to give Him solidity lest He perish-so that He might give me solidity lest I perish". "every religion which promises to fulfill human desires is simply a refuge for the timid, and unworthy of a true man." “Do you know me, old lady?” She glanced at me with amazement. “No, my boy. Do I have to know you to give you something? You’re a human being, aren’t you? So am I. Isn’t that enough?” "If a woman calls you to sleep with her and you do not go, you are damned. God does not forgive this. You’ll be placed with Judas at the very bottom of hell."
William Faulkner: Light in August (Vintage International)
In my opinion, this book isn’t as good as Absalom, Absalom! or as artistic as that book or The Sound and the Fury, but it is still solid Faulkner and a good story to boot. Faulkner has the ability to make the reader taste the dust coming off of wagon wheels and somehow to understand the social structures of the south and Light in August is a strong example of his talent. If you want to wade into Faulkner, this is one book that you can do that with.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote
This was a surprisingly good book. I expected it to be really dry but it was really entertaining. Apparently Voltaire read it over and over again, and you can really see the similarity in humor between the two. It is really long and at times becomes a bit of a serial, but still, it is a classic for a reason. Sancho the trusty albeit sarcastic squire is one of the best characters in literature and is reason enough to read this tome. I suggest the modern translation, it makes a big difference.
Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
This book and it’s author (my his soul rest in peace) can bite my ass. I grok that it sucks. The first half is promising, showing a person having to acclimate to a completely alien (literally) world. Then the second half drops off into a pathetic attempt to titillate. Lame. Lame. Lame. I stopped reading it with only 75 pages to go just out of spite.
William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage International)
I can’t remember having read a better book. Faulkner is astounding. Absalom, Absalom! has a quality to it which I can best describe as “photographic literary psychological cubism”. It’s also the hardest book I’ve ever read that I still felt that I could comprehend. The first two sentences are, together, a page long. I hate in-depth descriptions of houses and things (e.g. Hawthorne), but Faulkner’s in depth look at the psychology and history of small town civil-war and post civil-war Northern Mississippi is wonderful. The story also adds depth to The Sound and the Fury, which deals with the Compson family, and gives a better understanding of Quinton Compson's outlook on life, the south, and himself. Read it!