1-August 99 Erebuni Fortress
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Breakfast was included with our room at the Hotel Erebuni. I wrote “breadfast” on my first try there, and it's not such a bad typo. There were many chunks of an inch-high loaf of bread, slices of cucumber and tomato quarters, slices of a very salty soft cheese, and a couple of slices of hard salami. Then the waiter came over and asked if we would like omelets. Sure. There was also butter and an apricot spread, full of fruit flavor, not very sweet, more like apple butter than jam in texture, for the bread.
We set off to look for the vernisage, the open-air art & handicrafts market, to see if there were more crafts than I had found the day before. By the metro station near the hotel we saw another flea market. “It could be something really random, like car parts,” said Anne. Sure enough, there were booths with rusty old drill bits and odds and ends of machinery! We gave up without looking to see if there were interesting booths there, and rode the metro up towards where I had seen the art sale the day before. It seemed to be exactly the same, though, even to having the same paintings in the same places, and we moved on.
Probably the best known museum in Yerevan (which by no means puts it in a league with the Louvre) is the Matenadaran, the museum of ancient manuscripts. We headed for it.
Along the way we passed a shop window with beautiful marionettes in it. The next window looked like a box office, and advertised a show in twenty minutes. Anne asked how long it would last, what the show was, and the price. It was a 40 minute show, The Golden Calf. Hmm, we decided, why not. Fans, if you're looking to make it big in the entertainment industry, being a puppeteer in Yerevan is not the way. Admission was 200 dram, 40 cents, for each of the 30 people in the audience. Just watching how the children in the audience were interacting was pretty interesting. The puppets in the show were as complex as any I've seen, with perhaps twenty strings each, and were beautifully manipulated. The three characters in the play were a fox woman with curly blonde hair, a wolf looking a lot like Goofy with patched old pants and jacket, and a baby chick. Halfway through the show Anne whispered that it must have been The Golden Chick, not calf -- the Russian words for chick and calf differ only in one sound and she had confused them. The show was in Armenian and neither of us understood a word of it. Um, maybe I understood two words. “Mother” is “myrus” and “father” is “hyrus”, and the characters kept saying “myricki” and “hyricki” so I'll bet those are “mommy” and “daddy.” The acting must have been good, because we enjoyed the show despite not understanding it at all.
Darn! The Matenadaran turned out to be closed Sundays and Mondays. We headed back to the hotel. It wasn't a total loss, because we found we could get on the internet from the hotel, and we sent an email home to let Arlene know we had both got there and met up successfully.
There are three sets of ancient ruins in Yerevan, and we thought we'd try to get to the Erebuni fortress, a walled city from the seventh century BC. The dijournieh told us to take one of three minibus lines that we could catch on the street around the corner.
About every sixth vehicle on the street in Yerevan is either a bus or a minibus. The minibusses have three rows of two seats on the left and one on the right and a bench for four across the back. A few of them look new. A lot of them look as though they won't fall apart until tomorrow or the next day. The one we got on probably had had shock absorbers at one time, but they had long since given up their unequal battle with the streets.
We rode to the end of the line across the street from the museum of the fortress Erebuni. It's red stone with marvelous winged lions like Assyrian or Babylonian ones in high relief. I guess the Babylonians were hot stuff when the walls of Erebuni went up, and were style setters throughout the northern fertile crescent.
They unlocked the museum and turned on the lights for us! I mean, it was officially open, but there hadn't been anyone there. We saw pottery, a potter's wheel, a king's bronze helmet, and iron arrowheads, all 2700 years old, that had been dug up either on the hill behind the museum or at one of the other ancient sites in Yerevan.
A museum staffer pointed us to the path up to the ruins. Up. There were lots and lots of hot dry steps. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to get a tiny bit cooler as we climbed and there was more breeze. At the top of the hill we were at the base of the ancient city walls.
Erebuni walls
There were more steps to go up in between the walls, but the main path led off to the left around the walls, and we followed that. Halfway around the site we came to what had once been a splendid hall with a frescoed wall and wooden columns. As we were admiring it a little old man emerged from a tiny building across the street and offered to guide us around. He had worked there for thirty years. He showed us storerooms, the city garrison, the brewery, the temple where the slave laborers who built the city could worship their gods, and cunieform inscriptions.
We guzzled a liter of mango juice at a shop at the bottom of the hill and caught the number 74 minibus across the street from the museum to go back. On the way out we had noticed a shouga, an outdoor market, close to our hotel. We got off there on the way back and checked it out. It was a big area covered with booths, some with small structures for shelter, all with big tarps or awnings shading the merchandise. There were mostly fruit booths, cheese booths, and liquor store booths! We don't know what the story is on liquor licenses, but having an indoor location must not be a requirement. Picture the next flea market booth you run into with shelves displaying a variety of vodka, whiskey, and brandy!
We walked back towards the hotel and noticed another outdoor market in an alley on the other side of the main street. This one had booths on both sides of the alley and had no food, but booths selling clothing, stationery, household goods, and recorded music. “Aw, it's just like a Russian market, no reason to stay,” said Anne.
Have I emphasised enough that we were getting thirsty every two or three blocks? It was still hot -- the next day someone told us it had been 39 degrees celsius in the shade the last few days (do the arithmetic: 9/5 times degrees celsius plus 32 gives degrees farenheit. 40 celsius = 104 farenheit) -- and dry. A block closer to the hotel we passed someone selling kvass from a tank on a cart. I'm not positive what kvass is -- I think you soak pumpernickel bread in water and let it ferment. It tastes like, oh, maybe imagine a quart of water mixed with half a glass of stout with a slice of rye bread sitting in it. I had tried some in Moscow last summer and didn't like it much, but a cup of it hit the spot today. I think I need to be really thirsty to appreciate kvass. Oh, fifty drams for the cup of kvass. It was a grown-up vendor on a busy city street, but more like a kid lemonade stand price.
This poster for motor oil just struck me:
Tehranol!
After walking around the ruins we were ready for a siesta in the hotel.
We puzzled over where to go for supper. I had noticed a Lebanese restaurant on the street behind the Hotel Armenia. We went there and got several salads and a plate of labnie, yoghurt with most of the water drained out. The labnie was good, but the olives were straight out of cans that we could have gotten in Stop and Shop in Newton. Oh, the tabouli! When I make tabouli (from a recipe in Diet for a Small Planet) I use bulghour and some parsley and mint and lemon juice. This one had parsley and mint and lemon juice with some bulghour. I'm going to mend my ways.
After dinner we walked back up to the corner of Nalbandian and Sayat-Nova to find a bakery we had noticed earlier and sat down to a couple of pieces of baklava.
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