31-July-99 To Yerevan
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Yerevan, Armenia, 9:45 AM I have no idea what “what time it really is” means. I work up in Newton on Friday at 5 AM and it's now approximately 20 hours later, that would be quarter to 1 AM there. It's a bright beautiful morning here. I had my eyes closed some of the time on my flights, but it's been an unsatisfactory couple of day fragments on the sleep front.
The flight from Boston to Heathrow was not more than 2/3 full on a 777. Dudes, if you have a choice of planes to fly on and one is a 777, grab it. The seating is comfortable, 3-3-3 (unless it was 3-4-3) and there's an individual 6 inch LCD video screen for each seat and a cupholder on the back of the tray table so you can store a beverage even with the tray up. I had a choice of six or eight in-flight movies, if I wanted to watch on that tiny screen.
I watched part of The Matrix but decided that a) the whole premise wasn't believable enough -- maybe it is for people who never get further from home than their cubicles, but nobody's going to set up a virtual reality for me that has Yerevan in it, and b) a movie that's a showcase for special effects doesn't cut it on a six inch screen. Then I watched some of Cookie's Fortune but again the tiny screen and frequent interruptions made me give up.
The best thing on the video system was a flight status channel. It had a real-time map of where we were, display of airspeed, continually updated estimated time of arrival, distance covered and distance remaining, etc. The map wasn't all that interesting when we were over the middle of the Atlantic, but I would be wildly enthusiastic about it if there were things to see below.
I was in the left aisle seat of the middle section, with empty seats next to me. Midway through the flight an Indian woman asked me if I would move into the middle seat of the left section so the woman she was traveling with, who wasn't feeling well, could lie down across the seats of the middle section. I was rewarded with profuse thanks and bows with hands pressed together.
There was a Concorde on the tarmac at Heathrow -- not a surprise, but exciting to see anyway.
We landed on time but waited over ten minutes before getting to the gates. I was nervous as precious minutes of my 50 minute layover ticked away. Then there was another security checkpoint to go through! I got to the gate for the flight to T'blisi and Yerevan after they announced the final call for boarding.
That plane was full. I had an aisle seat. Next to me were two young men wearing T-shirts with what looked like a Bible verse (guessing from the line at the bottom) in Georgian (guessing from the alphabet) on the back. They turned out to be part of an eight-person team from the Salvation Army in Atlanta that was working in the Republic of Georgia for the summer. By 2 AM (in some time zone or other) we were having an interesting conversation about religion, five miles in the air over Romania or the Black Sea.
Oh, their T-shirt verse was II Timothy 2:8. Here's the translation I found: “In every place, then, I want the men to lift their hands up reverently in prayer, with no anger or argument.” Not bad.
The plane emptied 2/3 out at T'blisi. The terminal building at T'blisi is all arches and exotic looking. Douglas Adams says that no language has ever come up with the expression “as beautiful as an airport,” but it's just possible that phrase exists in Georgian. It's too bad all I saw of T'blisi was a 45 minute layover without leaving the airplane, but it'll have to do. We landed in the dark and took off after the sun had come up over the Caucasus mountains, and could see the way T'blisi stretched along a river as we left.
Oh, you know how your plane will leave the gate, taxi down a taxiway to the end of the runway, wait its turn to get onto the runway, then get on the runway and take off? In T'blisi we taxied the wrong way down the runway, hung a U turn, and took off. Nobody else wanted to use the runway for half an hour before or after us.
It was just half an hour more to Yerevan, and we saw Lake Sevan from the air. No lake but Lake Titicaca in Bolivia is both bigger and at a higher altitude than Sevan.
Mount Ararat -- yes, THE Mount Ararat -- is on the western side of the valley that Yerevan is in. It's HUGE. It dominates the view more than Mount Hood does in Portland or Mount Ranier does in Seattle. It's not the biggest peak among many; there's just no other mountain anywhere near as big anywhere near it. No wonder people thought it would be the first thing to emerge from the flood. The trouble is, there's so much air pollution that the only place I got a really good view of it was from the airport.
Passport control at Yerevan airport was the same kind of booth as in Moscow but ten times faster, and I went through the green “nothing to declare” line at customs.
The cab I got to town had a broken speedometer so I couldn't tell at what rate we were flying low. We got to the right hotel in spite of my speaking neither Armenian nor Russian, passing stands with piles of watermelons and other melons on the curbside and at least one flock of dark brown sheep.
There was someone who spoke English at the hotel, and I got registered successfully and was given a card with the room number and was told “key on the floor.” The Soviet system at hotels (and this was a leftover Soviet building) is to have a concierge-of-the-day, dizhournieh, (must come from French “de jour”) on each floor. I traded my room card for a key mounted on a HEAVY chess queen with the room number on a brass plate on the bottom. The chambermaid who showed me to my room explained with some difficulty (since we had no language in common) that I had to switch on the electric water heater if I wanted to shower.
The room was lovely (or lovely-ish at any rate). It wasn't what you'd find at a Best Western, but was much nicer than the apartment we had stayed at in Moscow for a week last summer. The far wall was all windows that could open, so it was bright and airy. There were two twin-sized beds, a wardrobe, mini-fridge, writing desk (with a chair that threatened to fall apart as I wrote the first draft of this), and mirror. The bathroom had a modern toilet, deep bathtub with hand-held shower but no shower curtain, sink and mirror, plenty of light and room to turn around in, and hot water mornings and evenings.
I changed clothes, washed some spilled airline food off my shirt and pants, and set out to explore.
Back in the lobby was a stand displaying maps and newspapers. After I drew a blank on her Armenian and Russian, the woman asked, “Parlez-vous Francais?” so I grinned and got her to point me back to the desk to exchange money and to find me a city map in English.
Republic Square
There are little cafes in all the parks, groups of plastic tables and chairs with a headquarters kiosk. I got something advertised as cappuccino that turned out to be a Nescafe international coffee instant, but it was enough to fix my caffeine deficiency headache. I continued up Abovian Street, passing many more cafes, street vendors selling soda, ice cream, and sunflower seeds.
After walking around a lot of downtown I still couldn't figure out how shopping worked. I saw lots of food vendors, but few stores. It turned out that for one thing I was in the wrong part of town, and for another I didn't know what to look for.
After a while I came to a building that looked for all the world like a Moscow metro station. There were several doors on one side saying something in Armenian letters and several others saying something else, and what looked like metro turnstiles inside. Better yet, the map showed a metro station about there, and another a block from the hotel. I decided to be brave. The only hard part was explaining how many tokens I wanted. Holding up four fingers worked. The woman grumbled a little at giving me four ten-dram bills back in change for my 200 drams. At 530 or 540 drams (I think “dram” must be the same word as “drachma”) to the dollar, 40 drams for a metro token is about eight cents! The system and turnstiles are just like the Moscow metro, but the escalator in this station was shorter than any I ran into in Moscow. The turnstiles don't really turn -- you put your token in and wait for a green light to come on, then go through. There are electric eyes to check that you don't go too soon, and if you go without paying (or even before the light turns green) some bars swing out and block your way. The station was similar in structure and design to Moscow stations -- that is, a big central platform with polished stone walls and chandeliers and archways out to the platforms by the trains. As in Moscow, there are LED clocks at the ends of the platforms telling how long it's been since the last train. These were running at six minute intervals, and the trains were only half full.
I went back to the hotel and admitted that my body clock had no respect for the Yerevan time zone, and napped for a couple of hours.
I had read about the Yerevan vernisage, open-air art & handicrafts market, in several places. Since it's only there on weekends, I figured I ought to track it down, and walked out the way I had been before. It turned out to be all paintings, some interesting but a lot the same as each other. It's clear that some artists have worked out one good landscape, typically a picture of an old church with Mt. Ararat in the background, that they do over and over.
Vernisage
It was pretty hot all day. Every two or three blocks I would look for a vendor selling sprite or ice cream. At 120 drams for a 250 ml glass bottle, you can go through a lot of sprite without much damage to the budget.
Anne's flight was due at 17:10 and we were to meet at the Hotel Armenia, just around the block from where we were staying. I figured an hour and a half for her to get through the airport stuff, so maybe 18:30. By 18:15 I was sitting at the sidewalk cafe in front of the Hotel Armenia nursing a coke, keeping an eye on people in front of the hotel. I didn't speak the language here, and Anne was going to be able to communicate with everyone in Russian. If something went wrong and she didn't show up, I was stuck there with no real reason to be there and not much hope of enjoying my stay. At 18:30, what else, Anne walked right over! That has to have been one of the all-time highs of life -- going a quarter of the way around the world to rendezvous with your daughter to travel together for a week. I wish you all an experience like that.
You know, I think it was a high for Anne, too.
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