Day 1 in Armenia: Flea Markets and Food

My first day in Yerevan, Armenia was a bit of a lazy day. Slept late and didn’t make my way out of the house until around 2 o’clock. We decided to take the subway downtown so I could get a feel for the metro. Yerevan’s Metro has no English signage, but it’s not hard to figure out since there are only 10 stations and one line. The fare is 100 drams for one trip ($0.30), which is the same price as the metro in Tbilisi, Georgia (0.50 Lari). The architecture within the stations is what I’m learning to recognize as typical Soviet style. Photos aren’t allowed down here, but that’s only if they catch you!

 Soviet style metro

We headed first to the weekend flea market, called Vernissage. Perhaps my readers have noticed that I love markets. I had no money to buy anything here, but it was fun to walk around and watch my couch surfing hosts do some shopping. 

We spent a good 3 hours or so here wandering around and shopping. After that we had worked up an appetite for dinner and my hosts took me over to the Caucus Tavern. It’s a place popular with tourists and locals for traditional food from the Caucasus, from both Georgia and Armenia. My hosts love Georgian food and they filled their bellies with Khinkali and Khajapuri, two things I eat more than enough of at home, while I tried my hardest to sample as wide a selection of Armenian food as possible in one meal. 

 

Thin Armenian bread called lavash

First we split a plate of dolma, minced meat wrapped in grape leaves. Here we had a yogurt and garlic sauce to drizzle on top. 

 Dolma

I of course had to sample the local beer. Nothing special here, but still better than Cass. 

 Kilikia, Armenian beer

This drink is called Tan. It is a fermented milk drink. It basically tastes like yogurt, salty yogurt, but without the thickness of yogurt. The first few sips were a bit of a turn off because of the seriously salty taste. But I think this is a drink I could grow to love if I were living in Armenia. 

 

Tan

My main course was this wheat and chicken dish called Harisa. This was nothing special, but good to try. 

For dessert we each tried a different dish. I got this sweet bread called Gata, which was good, but I was so full I had to bring most of it home (Which made for breakfast for the next two days). My couchsurfers got this plate of honey and something I don't remember the name of.... 

 Dessert

After dinner we walked around looking for a store that they never found. But this was fine for me as I got to know the city a little better and tried to take some night photos.

The center of Yerevan is developed a lot and feels like any modern city that you might see in any developed country. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the city and the rest of the country (from what I could see from my few day stay) which is still a developing country on the best of days.

Anaklia Disaster

We usually try to go somewhere every weekend, but this weekend, another weekend of rain and nastiness, we were stumped as for what to do. My friend came up to my city and spent Friday night at my house. We slept in late on Saturday morning, something we can never do since we’re usually traveling on the weekends, and leisurely ate our breakfast around noontime. We discussed various ideas of what to do but there were no good options. The best thing I could come up with was going to Anaklia, a beach town near by. Sure the weather was bad, but we’d just go for an hour, see the black sea one more time and then come back.

We asked around to a few people we knew and the consensus was that marshutkas run on the hour, every hour, from the train station. We walked all the way down there and asked a few drivers standing around. Yes, the marshutka would leave at 1:00. Where is the marshutka? Oh, over there, and they’d point in some general direction. We’d head over there and ask someone else. Where is the marshutka? Oh over there, pointing in another direction. We headed over there and asked someone else. No, there’s no marshutka from here. You have to go to another station! Come quickly! And this man led us away from the station and down the street 10 minutes away to another station. Upon arrival he asked where the marshutka was and it wasn’t a marshutka, but a bus. And it wasn’t leaving until 2:30.

We were quite angry now. If there was a 1:00 marshutka like so many people had told us, we were now never going to catch it. We walked back to the train station and waited until 2:00 in hopes of catching a marshutka. When 2:00 came around and we asked again, we were informed there was no marshutka here, go back to the other station. We walked dejectedly back to the other station and waited around until 2:30 to catch the bus.

View out the window of the bus in the rain

There’s a reason why people take marshutkas, and I think that reason is because they are fast. Buses in this country are old. And they fit a lot of people, which means they need to stop and go a lot. Crazy marshutka drivers can drive as fast as they like, and fewer passengers means fewer stops. It took an hour to arrive at the beach by bus. We walked along the beach, took some photos picked up some nice sea shells but after an hour we were ready to go home. We hoped to get a 5:00 marshutka, but upon arriving at the bus stop, we were told that no marshutka would come until 6:00.

Last view of the Georgian coast

Amazing shells on the beach

 

The time was only 4:30 and that gave us an hour and a half to kill. We went into the only restaurant that was open in the whole town. It was quite deserted except for one group of men sitting around eating and drinking Russian vodka. They didn’t really look like restaurant patrons as much as friends of the owners or something.

We were of course invited into the restaurant but it was a bit eerie. There were refrigerators that were probably full of ice cream and soda in the summer, but now in the winter there was nothing. There was no menu. We ordered tea, the only thing we could think to order and sat around waiting until 6:00. We double checked with the waitress, there will be a marshutka at 6:00? Yes, yes, it will come. We were invited to drink and eat with the men there. I refused to touch the alcohol, and I wish I hadn’t touched the food because it tasted like marinated chalk. I couldn’t get the coating of whatever it was out of my mouth until I brushed my teeth that night.

Finally at 5:55 we went out to wait for the marshutka. Around 6:10 an unlabeled marshutka drove by and we flagged it down. We asked if they were going to my city, but they shook their heads, no, no.

We went back to the bus stop and asked where the marshutka was. There’s no marshutka. Just a bus at 7:00. What??? We went back to the restaurant and asked the waitress. Yes, the marshutka is coming, just wait 5 minutes. 10 minutes later we asked again. Where is the marshutka. Well, wait until 7:00, there will be a bus.

Now we’re freaking out a bit. They said there’d be a marshutka at 6, but there wasn’t. What are the chances of being a bus at 7:00? And we’ve learned that in this country intercity transport tends to end around sunset. Maybe we caused too much of a stink in the restaurant because they brought us over to the police station across the street, telling us that maybe they could give us a ride home. That seemed a bit of a strech considering how far we were from home, but I’ve heard of stranger stories in this country. We were brought over and we got to sit with the chief of police. He made some phone calls and concurred that there would be a bus at 7:00. Do you want a taxi instead? Uh, no thanks, that would probably be about two days pay just to get us back home.

We waited patiently in the police office until 6:55 and we went to go wait outside. Where are you going? We’ll tell you when the bus is coming. Just wait. Finally at 7:20 they told us to go wait outside. Another 5 minutes later the same bus that we had taken there pulled up and we hopped on.

All this wouldn’t have been so terrible if I hadn’t told my host mother that I’d be home by 6 because we had plans to go to the grandmother’s house to learn to make yogurt and milk the cows and get fresh milk. I was really excited by this prospect, but getting home at 8:30 meant no yogurt making and no cow milking. All I got to do was take a photo of the cows.

Grandmother's Cows

It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter…

The first week I spent in my city it felt like summer, but just a week later the weather changed and it started to feel chillier and chillier and since the beginning of November it’s been downright cold all the time.

No, wait, I take that back. I lived in Vermont for 5 years. I know what the cold is. 0˚F for weeks on end, snow storms where you loose your car in a parking lot and never a snow day because Vermonters are well prepared for dealing with ridiculous amounts of snow and are completely fearless in the face snow and ice. Here we just had our first frost this week, and this city still hasn’t seen snow yet this year (one of the only places in Georgia).

But, the one key difference between here and there is a little something called heating. In America, even a cold house is still probably tolerably warm if you put on a sweater and warm slippers. Here, well, it’s normal for the temperature inside the house to be the same as outside the house. I was a little worried back in October when I realized that our house only had one tiny electric space heater. Then once November came around, my family dragged in a wood stove that hooks up to a pipe in the wall. Of course, wood stoves can only be lit when someone is home/awake to feed the fire. And while I know many Americans use wood stoves to heat their houses (and I’m not sure how the system works), wood stoves here are only capable of heating the room in which they are located. And even then, while they certainly take the chill out of a room, you’ll never really feel warm unless you are sitting within a one meter radius of the stove. 

Another problem with keeping houses warm is the fact that houses here are basically cinder blocks or cement covered with dry wall (if you’re lucky). A little thing called insulation is conspicuously lacking, causing any heat that is generated to be immediately sucked from the house.

I guess I’m lucky that that little electric space heater has been now moved into my bedroom since the wood stove was set up, since my room is the furthest from any source of heat, but because of either the cost of electricity or the danger of leaving it running for hours on end (or more likely, both) I can’t leave it on while I sleep, and obviously leaving it on when I’m not home is out of the question. Which means that my room is perpetually cold. If I don’t wear a sweatshirt to bed I will wake up in the night from the cold. Sometimes on cold nights, I get into bed and wait for the blankets to warm up… but they never do. And let’s not talk about getting out of bed in the morning. I’ve now started a ritual that when my first alarm rings, I get up, hit snooze and turn on the heater. Then hopefully after 30 minutes of hitting the snooze button my room will be sufficiently warm that I can get out of bed without completely freezing to death. Then I take my clothes, which all feel like blocks of ice, and warm them in front of the heater for a few minutes before putting them on.

Oh, and let’s not forget about school. It’s clear that whenever the school was built, however many years ago, undoubtedly during soviet times, there was some sort of central heating in the school. Cast iron radiators can be seen here and there around the school, quite like my own home in America. But, the days of central heating are long gone. As in most homes, the school relies on wood stoves to heat the classrooms. But, of course, with probably over 20 classrooms in the school, there are not enough wood stoves to go around. Some classrooms are lucky to get a wood stove, most still go without. We teachers are lucky because in our lunch room and in our teacher’s room there are wood stoves, and so after every class we go and warm our numb hands during the 10 minute breaks between classes. I have no idea how the children are able to study in these conditions. When I am sitting and not moving my whole body turns to ice and all I can think about is the cold. I am always happy when I can get up and teach the class because it means I can move around and get the blood flowing.

But, all this I can handle. Sure it means that I spend a lot of time huddled around heaters and drinking tea in the morning just to hold a hot mug in my hand for a few minutes since the wood stove has been out for the past 8 hours and the house is the same temperature as outside. All this I knew coming to Georgia. All this I have experienced before when I lived in Chile during university. This is nothing. The part about this that irks me the most is what is produced by all the wood stoves.

I used to love the smell of a wood stove when I lived in America. That lovely smell of burning wood on a winter night. It was always something pleasant for me. But here, when every house in the city is burning their wood stoves to warm their houses, the air becomes thick with smoke. Perhaps if they were only burning firewood it could be tolerable, but Georgians use their wood stoves as another form of rubbish disposal. Every form of waste in my house with the exception of glass bottles and food scraps are thrown into the fire. Plastic bags, potato chip bags, candy wrappers, today I even saw a plastic egg carton thrown in. For the first few weeks, the smell of burning trash in the air was absolutely sickening to me. Just walking home through the smoke filled streets was enough to make me slightly nauseous. But, as I write this I realize that I haven’t felt that feeling in the past week or so. I guess I’m getting used to the smell of burning plastic… which is probably not a good thing because breathing in those toxic fumes can not be good for one’s health.

All I can say is, for those of you who are planning to come to Georgia, be prepared for the cold of winter. Long underwear, thick sweaters, fuzzy socks and slippers will all be put to good use in your daily life. Not to mention a good winter jacket, scarves, hats, gloves, and (the one thing I forgot) good boots.

Georgian Language Cognates

I’ve found that while for the most part, the Georgian language is something completely different from anything I’ve ever studied before, there are a lot of random cognates with English, and even more so, with Spanish. Here is a list of the words I’ve learned so far (Romanized) that are cognates with other languages that I know.

Georgian            Spanish            English

Biblioteka            Biblioteca             Library

Moda                   Moda                        Fashion

Istoria                  Historia            History

Matematikas       Matematicas            Mathematics

Kimika                Quimica            Chemistry

Fabrika               Fabrica                        Factory

Inglisuri              Ingles                        English

Ghvino               Vino                        Wine

Computori          Computadora            Computer

Chai                    Té                        Tea  (ok, this is not a cognate, but we call Indian tea “chai” 

                                                                  In English.)

Torti                   Torta                        Cake

Televisori           Televisor            Television

Biologia             Biología            Biology

Aut’obusi           Autobús            Bus

Klasi                   Clase                        Class

Skola                  Escuela            School

Kaphe                 café                        café                       

Bari                     Bar                        Bar

Politsia                 Policia                        Police

T’ualet’i              Inodoro                 Toilet

Parki                    Parque                        Park

Muzeumi            Museo                        Museum

Rest’orani            Restaurante            Restaurant

Ophisi                  Oficina                        Office

Banki                   Banco                        Bank

Es                         ésta                        This

Kat’a                    Gato                        Cat

Mobiluri               movil                        mobile/cell phone

Kontsert’I            concerto            Concert

Konphrentsia        Conferencia            Conference

Eqskursia              Exurción             Excursion

Pikniki                  picnic                         picnic

T’aqsi                    Taxi                        Taxi

Ena                        Lengua                        Language/Tongue

And of course, every language has its false cognates; here are some that I especially like

Deda- Mother

Mama- Father

Bitchi- boy

Chika- cup

Kino- cinema (this comes from Russian I think)

I wish I could say that all these cognates help me speak Georgian, but unfortunately Georgian verbs are like some kind of alien language to me, long strings of consonants that don’t belong together and which are conjugated in a manner that still mystifies me despite having been explained several times now. To give you some idea of what I’m up against, I’ll conjugate the verb “to like” in the present tense for you.

Momts’ons                        Mogvts’ons

Mogts’ons                        Mogts’ont

Mots’ons                        Mots’ont

Anyway, I’ll continue to study, though now I have only a little more than 1 months left of my stay, so I don’t know how much I can improve in one month. 

It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter…

The first week I spent in my city it felt like summer, but just a week later the weather changed and it started to feel chillier and chillier and since the beginning of November it’s been downright cold all the time.

No, wait, I take that back. I lived in Vermont for 5 years. I know what the cold is. 0˚F for weeks on end, snow storms where you loose your car in a parking lot and never a snow day because Vermonters are well prepared for dealing with ridiculous amounts of snow and are completely fearless in the face snow and ice. Here we just had our first frost this week, and this city still hasn’t seen snow yet this year (one of the only places in Georgia).

But, the one key difference between here and there is a little something called heating. In America, even a cold house is still probably tolerably warm if you put on a sweater and warm slippers. Here, well, it’s normal for the temperature inside the house to be the same as outside the house. I was a little worried back in October when I realized that our house only had one tiny electric space heater. Then once November came around, my family dragged in a wood stove that hooks up to a pipe in the wall. Of course, wood stoves can only be lit when someone is home/awake to feed the fire. And while I know many Americans use wood stoves to heat their houses (and I’m not sure how the system works), wood stoves here are only capable of heating the room in which they are located. And even then, while they certainly take the chill out of a room, you’ll never really feel warm unless you are sitting within a one meter radius of the stove.

Another problem with keeping houses warm is the fact that houses here are basically cinderblocks or cement covered with dry wall (if you’re lucky). A little thing called insulation is conspicuously lacking, causing any heat that is generated to be immediately sucked from the house.

I guess I’m lucky that that little electric space heater has been now moved into my bedroom since the wood stove was set up, since my room is the furthest from any source of heat, but because of either the cost of electricity or the danger of leaving it running for hours on end (or more likely, both) I can’t leave it on while I sleep, and obviously leaving it on when I’m not home is out of the question. Which means that my room is perpetually cold. If I don’t wear a sweatshirt to bed I will wake up in the night from the cold. Sometimes on cold nights, I get into bed and wait for the blankets to warm up… but they never do. And let’s not talk about getting out of bed in the morning. I’ve now started a ritual that when my first alarm rings, I get up, hit snooze and turn on the heater. Then hopefully after 30 minutes of hitting the snooze button my room will be sufficiently warm that I can get out of bed without completely freezing to death. Then I take my clothes, which all feel like blocks of ice, and warm them in front of the heater for a few minutes before putting them on.

Oh, and let’s not forget about school. It’s clear that whenever the school was built, however many years ago, undoubtedly during soviet times, there was some sort of central heating in the school. Cast iron radiators can be seen here and there around the school, quite like my own home in America. But, the days of central heating are long gone. As in most homes, the school relies on wood stoves to heat the classrooms. But, of course, with probably over 20 classrooms in the school, there are not enough wood stoves to go around. Some classrooms are lucky to get a wood stove, most still go without. We teachers are lucky because in our lunch room and in our teacher’s room there are wood stoves, and so after every class we go and warm our numb hands during the 10 minute breaks between classes. I have no idea how the children are able to study in these conditions. When I am sitting and not moving my whole body turns to ice and all I can think about is the cold. I am always happy when I can get up and teach the class because it means I can move around and get the blood flowing.

But, all this I can handle. Sure it means that I spend a lot of time huddled around heaters and drinking tea in the morning just to hold a hot mug in my hand for a few minutes since the wood stove has been out for the past 8 hours and the house is the same temperature as outside. All this I knew coming to Georgia. All this I have experienced before when I lived in Chile during university. This is nothing. The part about this that irks me the most is what is produced by all the wood stoves.

I used to love the smell of a wood stove when I lived in America. That lovely smell of burning wood on a winter night. It was always something pleasant for me. But here, when every house in the city is burning their wood stoves to warm their houses, the air becomes thick with smoke. Perhaps if they were only burning firewood it could be tolerable, but Georgians use their wood stoves as another form of rubbish disposal. Every form of waste in my house with the exception of glass bottles and food scraps are thrown into the fire. Plastic bags, potato chip bags, candy wrappers, today I even saw a plastic egg carton thrown in. For the first few weeks, the smell of burning trash in the air was absolutely sickening to me. Just walking home through the smoke filled streets was enough to make me slightly nauseous. But, as I write this I realize that I haven’t felt that feeling in the past week or so. I guess I’m getting used to the smell of burning plastic… which is probably not a good thing because breathing in those toxic fumes can not be good for one’s health.

All I can say is, for those of you who are planning to come to Georgia, be prepared for the cold of winter. Long underwear, thick sweaters, fuzzy socks and slippers will all be put to good use in your daily life. Not to mention a good winter jacket, scarves, hats, gloves, and (the one thing I forgot) good boots.

Mestia, foiled again…

Every week we plan on going to Mestia, a little town in the heart of the Svaneti region deep in the Caucus Mountains. It is supposedly the most beautiful place in all of Georgia (and by Georgian logic, that means the most beautiful place in the world). I am fortunate enough to live in Samgrelo, the region just next to Svaneti, but nevertheless, every time we plan a trip up there, something happens and we are unable to go.

The first weekend we very nearly made it up there, but we stupidly accepted an invitation to a wedding instead at the last minute. Then the next weekend we were going to go but my friend was invited to meet up with some of her friends in Kutaisi. Which, when we got there, it turns out they couldn’t meet anyway, which is how we ended up in Batumi that weekend. We were going to try again this past weekend, but it was raining here, snowing there and with the perilous mountain roads that I have heard about, I was not willing to risk it in bad weather (not to mention we would have been wet and miserable up there anyway). This weekend I have planned to go to Armenia. Will we make it next weekend? Who knows.

I’m realizing I don’t have many weekends left before I’m done with Georgia. I’ll be finishing teaching after the 2^nd or 3^rd week of December, planning a trip to Turkey for about 2 weeks, and then heading back to America for a belated Christmas, then, if all goes to plan, back to Korea two weeks later to start a new job, for which I am signing my contract for this week. 

I wish I had more time to do all the things I want to do here. I still want to go to Mestia, Vardzia, Gori and  to a ski resort. A friend of mine invited me to go with her to Abkhazia, one of the Russian occupied regions of Georgia, because she has some friends working up there with an NGO. Not to mention there are still a few places in Tbilisi that I still need to see, like the sulfer baths, the huge cathedral, the fortress, etc etc etc. And every day I’m hearing about more beautiful places I must see before I leave. So much to do and so little time. And of course, though it’s a small country, there are no highways, no high speed trains and you must rely on marshutkas for transportation which are unpredictable about time tables, prices, and just finding them. Just getting anywhere in this country is half the battle and half the adventure, which means lots of time wasted when you’re trying to get from point A to point B, and when you only have 2 days a week to explore, it’s just not enough time to see everything you want.

If you come to teach in Georgia, be sure to come with enough time to see everything you want to see, so you don’t leave here disappointed. The week long orientation in Tbilisi affords little time for actual exploration of the city as you’re locked in the hotel from 9am-8pm most days. Then, once you’re placed, if you’re lucky you’ll be somewhere central where you can explore easily on the weekends. If you’re unlucky, you could be in a village where marshutkas only come every few hours to take you to another small city where marshutkas to where you want to go also come infrequently, and you could spend a whole day just getting to your destination. My trip to Armenia this weekend will be about 13 hours of travel. 6 hours to Tbilisi, then another 6 hours to Armenia. For me to get to Khaheti, it’s 6 hours to Tbilisi and 1.5 hours to Khaheti. And I’m in a major city! Just be sure to plan your trips carefully!

Showering

My Shower

I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that I was lucky because I have been placed in a house with a real shower with hot water. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that I am showering every day here in Georgia. My goal is always to get a shower in once every two days, but usually I’m lucky if I can get 3 showers a week, usually it’s closer to two.

To get into the shower I need to face a few battles. First, the hot water must be turned on. Unfortunately, we don’t have on demand hot water, but a hot water tank that must be heated up. Just turning it on doesn’t mean I have hot water. I’m not sure how long you need to wait to get hot water, but it’s usually more time than I have. I’ve waited up to an hour for the water to warm up, but that is still not long enough.

Then, if there is hot water, the next problem I must face is whether or not the shower head is working. For the past two weeks, every time I have wanted to take a shower, there has been some problem with the shower so that only a dribble of water actually makes it out of the shower head, the rest drips down the cord. If my host father is at home, he can always fix it for me, but if he is not home, which is often the case, then I must go without the shower.

So, lastly, if I do have hot water, and I do have water pressure to take a shower, I must consider the temperature. If the wood stove is burning and the house is warm (and by warm I mean not cold) than taking a shower might be reasonably comfortable. If the wood stove is not burning, that means that the house is the same temperature as outside, and just to give you an idea of what temperature that is, we had our first frost this week. Getting undressed and into a shower when the air temperature is in the single digits (Celsius) is not a fun time, even if the water is hot. There’s never enough water pressure to cover my body, so one part of me is hot from the water, but the rest of me is freezing. Therefore, morning showers have now become impossible.

Now, me and my friends look forward to the weekends when we can stay at a hostal with a good, hot shower and hopefully one that even has central heating so we’re warm when we get out of the shower and warm when we sleep. That doesn’t always happen, hostals and guesthouses are often the same as our own homes, if not colder, but that is at least the goal. And I'm one of the lucky ones. Many folks I know live in villages and don't even have hot water (or an indoor bathroom) to speak of.