Being a newly-designated travel snob, I'm reluctant to say that we discovered anything about Armenian culture by staying in the capital for six days, and with only token interaction with Armenian citizens... who don't, as it turns out, speak Georgian. Nonetheless, we did manage to pick up on some things:
1) In this video clip, Heidi describes the biggest cultural difficulty we had in Armenia (not the snow). This was a colossal error in planning on my part, and if not for the extra forced day in Yerevan, we wouldn't even have seen the Ararat cognac factory. But we did, and now I can pretentiously swirl a glass around with the best of them. To pass the time, we made friends at the hostel; highlights include a UN vs. Peace Corps game of Trivial Pursuit. There's a joke in there somewhere.
2) The Armenian diaspora is a force to be reckoned with. Outward manifestations of this include the powerful Armenian lobby in the US and the considerable Armenian enclaves outside San Francisco, but you really get a sense of it in Yerevan, especially if you've lived in Georgia for 18 months. For example, the stores are well-stocked with unlocal favorites, like broccoli and Corona. Sure, there are places in Georgia to find both, but in Armenia they're inexpensive and labeled in Armenian because there's an actual market other than for aid workers. They also have the EuroNews channel in Armenian-- the Georgians have to watch in Russian-- and the channel CNN Armenia. Needless to say, there is no CNN Georgia.
3) Armenian churches are more laid back than Georgian churches. We waltzed in to a few on Christmas Day, wearing jeans and no headscarves and generally prepared to be turned away at the door, but the Armenians were wearing more of the same. My host sister tells me this is because Georgians are orthodox and Armenians are Gregorian; I'll leave that there as a fact, but attribute it to her if you decide to complain to the New York Times about my chronic inaccuracy. This relaxed church atmosphere does not apply to the confused reception we received at a small chapel in Echmiadzin as we barged in on a private wedding. Awkward.
4) Wikitravel.org said that Republic Square in Yerevan boasts one of the two greatest examples of Soviet architecture in the world, after Tashkent, Uzbekistan. To me, Soviet architecture meant concrete apartment blocks, but it turns out that they were referring to the blocky, modernist look as shown in the museum in the picture. The most unusual thing about the Soviet architecture was that, unlike in Tbilisi, the Yerevan planners seem to be using the city's Soviet architectural history as a central theme for development. We saw new buildings, with cranes and scaffolding, whose facades resembled those modernist ones of the town square, right down to the orange and red stones. There's something to be said for planned design; it might restrict architectural innovation, but it also prevents the construction of glass-domed presidential palaces that look like reflective pickles. Ahem, Misha.
5) Being unable to read or recognize the characters of the Armenian language was like arriving in Georgia for the first time again. To me, all the Armenian letters look the same. To the Armenian Peace Corps volunteers, the Georgian letters look like squiggle. It's been said that the same man, Saint Mashtots, created both languages. I'm unable to verify this with Encarta, but if it's true, this guy is on my hit list. Why-- oh why-- would you create two esoteric alphabets for two geographically and linguistically isolated languages, unless you really disliked the Caucasus? Thanks, man.
Two last unrelated comments:
- Ararat's brandy tastes best to me when aged by 10 years.
- If you lose a contest, you can't concede defeat to a candidate that didn't win. If you really wanted that other candidate to win, you would have voted for him instead of campaigning for your ego and racking up your own coalition-splintering 1% of the vote.
That is all.
4 comments:
Glad you enjoyed Armenia and always interested in hearing Georgia-Armenia comparisons. One friend did the reverse of you, lived in Armenia and visited Georgia, and found a lot of things in Georgia they liked better. And yes all of Georgia's letters look like spaghetti thrown at the wall but I can understand thinking that all Armenia's letters look the same because all the signs tend to be capitals. I hate the capitals as there are quite a few letters which are relatively similar and just differ by being tilted to one side with an extra flourish here or there. Meanwhile the flourishes get somewhat lost when being translated into sign bubble letters so it's even harder. I assure you the lower case is much nicer and either to differentiate. Another problem with the alphabet (Georgian too?) is that when it was written they sounds had more differentiation to them. Example- Armenia has two "ch" letters while of course English has zero. Apparently back when it was written there was actually a difference but now it's pretty negligiable and you just end up with one letter two many. There are other letters which could be condensed too without too much of a loss.
Oh yeah and forgot to say what the hell is wrong with that presidential palace? Glass pickle indeed. My friend who visited Georgia raved about Georgia's architecture via Armenia's (since Yerevan was never a huge city like Tbilsi until the Soviet era so it got built up with blocky crap apartment buildings instead of that beautiful architecture) but that vegitable crap must be quite a scar on the landscape.
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Just for Info: You have no chance to find about Mesrop Mashtots created also Georgian alphabet, unless it's Armenian source or Armenian influenced source. Because it's just imagination of some Armenian historians.
There are two versions of creating Georgian alphabet: 1. by Parnavaz (3-4 century b.c.) and 2. to be modification of Sumerian alphabet.
Armenian version is know only in Armenia and nobody else agrees, unless they have info only from Armenian people :)
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