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| Country |
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| Yerevan |
Thursday morning; final breakfast at our hotel: honey, hard boiled eggs, bread and peas. We bumped along the pot holes in the streets of Vanadzor - Melik and other drivers on the road do a great job navigating around each bump. Where pot holes are concerned, all rules of the road no longer exhsit - you are allowed to drive wherever you want to avoid them, including 2 inches away from the next car, 1 inch away from the next car - sideways in the road (I don't know how they do it), in the middle of the road, on the opposite side of the road, you can even weave very quickly back and forth and pause on the sidewalk if need be. It's very interesting and makes me glad that I'm not the one behind the wheel.
We were headed to Lake Sevan about one hour away. Lake Sevan is the first and most famous national park in Armenia. It was designated a national park in 1978 and is one of the largest freshwater alpine lakes in the world. In Europe only Lake Geneva is larger. Lake Sevan covers about 4% of the country (close to the forest cover). It is almost 2,000 meters above sea level. We arrived just in time for a light rain - that didn't daunt us as we climbed more than 200 steps to the Sevanavank monastery. Ancient ruins, amazing views. The site of the monastery used to be located on an Island in Lake Sevan - at some point under Soviet rule, the Soviets decided it would be a good idea to drain Lake Sevan to 1/5 of it's original size so that they could farm the land. The plan was started but protests by the people stopped the draining project - but the island became a peninsula instead. It is a very popular vacation spot and people from Yerevan drive up for picnics and beach and swimming during the hot summers.
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| Lake Sevan |
After Lake Sevan, we continued our drive to Yerevan. Along the way we stopped and collected Obsidian - along the side of the road! Veins of it run through this region from ancient volcanos it sparkles in the sunlight as you drive by - large streaks of it on the mountains and along the sides of the road - I've never seen anything like it!
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| Collecting Obsidian |
We arrived in Yerevan - quite an adjustment after spending time in the village countryside - similar to spending time in Apalachia and driving to New York City. Yerevan, the capital city has a population of 1.2 million and is a bustling modern metropolis - electronic billboards similar to NYC - fashion on every corner - the best shoe watching ever! We visited the museum Matendaran; a research, restoration and repository for ancient manuscrips. We had a brief tour given by a guide who spoke English (faster than I could listen) and we learned a lot about Mesrop Mashtot - the man who invented the Armenian alphabet. We looked at early 7 and 8th century math books that discussed geometry, a round world and multiplication tables. Parchment was used (lamb skin), lapiz, gold leaf, cochineal beetle (crushed for a red color) were used. Garlic mixed with gum arabic was used as a glue. A very interesting afternoon.
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| Outside the Matendaran |
We have packed away our work pants, cement stained t-shirts and work boots and are adapting to our new role as tourists in the big city of Yerevan.
