August | 2009 | Epeolatry and well-below-zero ice-cream

Westerlies

Armenia: St. Hripsime Cathedral (628): site of virgin sacrifices

Armenia: Echmiadzin

Armenian is much older than you and me put together. That first letter is "a"

Armenia: Barely visible Mt. Ararat. You can almost see the border with Turkey

After several requests for some pictures and words on my trip to Armenia and Georgia, I added it to my list of things to do before I leave for Calgary on Tuesday (no, I won’t be working in Calgary, but I have two weeks of training there).

After I left Tomsk to go to Ulan-Ude, and from there to two Buryat villages close to the border of Mongolia, where together with a team of volunteers led classes for the locals; participation turned out to be kids only. It was a learning experience for everyone all round, as these things usually are, and we were given the title of “brave volunteers” for us being the first-timers for this project, set up by a friend of mine in Moscow. So I’ll include some images from there to (NB I didn’t take the better ones).

Back to Ulan-Ude a bit earlier than planned, I then headed to Moscow by train, and slept, sweated (poor ventilation on those old Soviet trains, of course) and read Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward for fours days. My neighbour, an English teacher/translator at the Buryat Institute of Sciences, also kept me thinking. Keep in mind that this was an express train- still four days. Russia- her cloaks are infinite.

I would love to go back to Georgia, really really love to. I keep describing it to people as antiquity wrapped in abundance, which now sounds a little cliche to my ears, but there is great soul in Tbilisi, and the hospitality that you encounter when you venture into the countryside is overwhelming. In that sense, Armenia is on the same page, but Yerevan is not so charming, at least on first impression- too commercial and modern.

This blog is being taken to the beach- I’ll have too many priorities with my new job and I won’t be able to do even semi-regular updates, so bye bye. You can always contact me through the media