Wait! Are you sure this is the right page?
It's not a redesign; I just liked the wrapping paper from the souvenier store we stopped in.
There were more people at breakfast than we had ever seen before, but, surprise! The restaurant staff recognized us among the crowd and treated us like old friends as opposed to all the johnny-come-latelys.
I asked for tea and they didn't bring Anne coffee, though, and she wanted some. We stopped in a cafe up Abovian street that we had seen on several previous trips. She got a cappuccino that really was (instead of a Nescafe flavor) and I got a little cup of Armenian coffee.
Our plan for the day was to see some of the museums in Yerevan and buy some things to bring home.
First stop was the Matenadaran, the museum of ancient manuscripts. What we had read about Yerevan said that it was the one museum that everyone who went to Yerevan had to see. I'm not sure Anne was convinced, but she was a good sport. The museum is up lots of steps, at the end of Mashtots Avenue. Here you see it:
Museum 1
In front is a big statue of Mesrop Mashtots, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet:
Alphabet inventor
A big staircase went up two stories around an atrium. Along the stairs were many big old ceramic vessels. Were they there because books are vessels to carry thoughts through space and time? At the top, around the three sides of the space that didn't have the stairs we were standing on, were pictures (all in a limited palette of green, blue, and brown) of the history of writing: on the left, mesopotamians trying to write in cunieform; on the right, Greeks somewhat chaotically writing in their alphabet; in the middle, the culmination, the Armenian alphabet being carved on stone monuments. We went into the main exhibit room at the top of the stairs.
I figured it would be interesting, but I didn't realize the impact. The first case completely got to me. There were palm leaves with Sanskrit writing; parchment scrolls with Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic; books in Latin, Arabic, and Armenian. Chinese. Greek. Georgian. Dozens of people were reaching out to me across a thousand, fourteen hundred, two thousand years with their words, not knowing that I couldn't even recognize their alphabets. They didn't have electronic publishing to help spread their ideas; only a relatively few scribes could read and write, and few people would see a book that existed in a single copy; but they had things they needed to write down, pass on, and remember, just as I'm trying to do here. The rest of the room, with historical documents, medical texts, books of music, and illuminated manuscripts, was wonderful, too, but it was really the first case that made the walk across Yerevan and up all those stairs worthwhile.
In front of the Matenadaran, sitting on the stair parapet, was an old woman who had a display of rag doll horses she had made. Anne is wild about horses and we were charmed by seeing the person who made them -- she was working with needle, thread, and bag of rags when nobody was going up or down the stairs. Anne got a medium sized horse and I got a small horse and rider (could be Red Riding Hood, from the costume). Anne had a long chat with the woman (in Russian, of course, so I didn't get much of it) and reported that the woman had said that Armenians and Jews got along great, and that a marriage between an Armenian and a Jew was perfect. She stopped before telling Anne, “Have I got a grandson for you!”
Rag doll sculptress
Next stop was the folk art museum. We paid our admission and they turned on the lights and unlocked the exhibit rooms for us. There was a room of woodcarvings, a room of metalwork, and a room of fabric art; I guess I'm glad we saw it, but nothing stands out in my memory.
A block from the folk art museum was a row of fruit and vegetable stands. The melon vendors were on one side, and two rows of small fruit vendors were past them. We looked at some apricots but they didn't look really good. One booth had something we couldn't identify -- fresh hazelnuts, in their husks. The vendor cracked one for us to show us what they were. I looked longingly at the melons, but we were too far from the hotel to want to carry one. The watermelons are all smaller than American ones and just about spherical.
Melon market
On our way out we had noticed the Children's Art Museum. Since Arlene is an elementary art teacher, we figured we had to bring back a report on it. It was pretty dark inside, and Anne asked if they could turn on the lights, but the attendant said, pshaw, you can see. The gallery upstairs was small but had several very impressive pieces by Armenian junior-high and high school age kids, and the attendant said there was more downstairs. Wow, was there more downstairs. There was room after room, with child art from all over the world. There would be a sign with the name of a country (in Armenian and Russian -- I think English, too, but I'm not even sure) and three to a dozen pictures by children from there. It must have been a holdover from the Soviet days; the work from the socialist countries looked much more sophisticated than that from western countries, and that couldn't have been an accident. The work from North Korea, in particular, looked like propaganda posters.
Around the second corner we started hearing music, and became convinced that it was coming from upstairs. When we left the museum we walked around the corner and found another ground floor entrance. This gallery had a piano and a couple of musicians warming up and doing a sound check -- but mostly, an exhibit of children's illustrations of fairy tales. They were spectacular in terms of color, detail, and imagination. It turns out that the World Bank Staff Art Society has sponsored publication of a book with the fairy tales and illustrations, and that the art exhibit will be shown in Washington DC later this year. Copies of the book were for sale there! My shopping for a present for Arlene was over. Sorry, though, I can't find an ISBN on the book.
By this point it was midafternoon. We had seen three museums in four hours and were more than ready for lunch. Though it seemed a little silly, we went back to the cafe on Abovian street where we had had coffee earlier and ordered a pizza and a khatchpuri. It turned out not to be silly! The pizza was delicious and entirely different from an American one; it didn't have tomato and the spices were more like allspice and paprika than oregano. Khatchpuri is a Georgian dish; it looked as though you start with bread dough, roll it out to the size of a small pizza crust, fold the edges back to leave a diamond shape with a hollow in the middle, break an egg into it, throw in a few chunks of butter, and bake. There was more than we wanted to eat.
Almost across the street from the cafe was a gift shop we had found several evenings before, the Salt Sack whose wrapping paper is the background. We got several small ceramic figures dressed in native costume and a painted wooden figure, and I couldn't resist getting a doudouk. The woman running the store spoke more English than anyone we had run into since our travel agent Ashod, and as she was wrapping up our purchases she became more talkative. “People in this country forgot their traditional crafts for those seventy years,” she said,“ but there's beginning to be a revival. See over there on the wall? That's a salt sack. Families used to keep their salt in things like that. Can you guess what this is?” It was a densly embroidered canvas diamond, about four inches on a side; or rather, two diamonds attached at the top and bottom, with a thong through the top that connected to a much smaller diamond inside the two large ones. I had no idea. It was a needle case. You put your needles through the small diamond, pull the thong to put them safely between the embroidered canvas pieces, and put the thong around your wrist. See -- I remember that better than anything in the folk arts museum. Next time you're on Abovian Street, stop in at Salt Sack and tell them you read about them on the web.
We had been on our feet for a lot of the day. We went back to hotel to rest, and I got another zourna (!) from the Armenia Golden Hands souvenier booth in the lobby,
Zournas and doudouk
and a couple of 375 ml bottles of Ararat brandy from another stand in the lobby. That did it for souveniers. We walked back out to the corner of Sayat Novii and Nalbandian to the bakery where we knew we could sit down and get some baklava.
On the way back we saw another melon stand. This time we were close to the hotel and I was ready to try one of the yellow melons we had been seeing. This was the closest I got to speaking any Armenian. I picked out one and asked the woman, “Lav eh?” She smiled and said, “Shad lav.” Of course she's going to tell me it's very good! At 120 dram per Kg, the 1400 gram melon (the scale went up to 1 Kg; the man at the stand put a 1 Kg weight in the other pan of the scale) was 168 drams. Round up to 170, there's nothing smaller than a 5 dram coin anyway. That's 33 cents for a melon, and I almost counted the money in Armenian. And you know what? It really was a good melon.
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