Ale-Ale-Verdi

Just north of Vanadzor I ended up getting picked up by a variety of people.  One was some sort of utility van where I got to balance myself in the back while we ripped around the switchbacks, one was with a dumptruck that seems to have left a pretty minimal impact on my memory, and a lot of the time I spent walking and listening to my iPod.  What was great about walking was the view, which I evidently opted out of taking pictures of, and the opportunity to stop at little stores for iced tea, more ice cream, peaches, and whatever else they were cooking up.

I made one fatal step, however, in continuing along the main road.  A convoy of dumptrucks roared past me and then a few minutes later came roaring back.  The man in front hollered to me that the road was closed due it being washed away from the flood the previous week* and we had to detour.  They brought me along with them and we drove high up into the hills on the other side of the creek.  If there was a time to kill me and leave my body in the back woods of Armenia, this was it.

Oh, Gorby.  You slay me.

The drivers were great, but unfortunately had no idea where we were going.  They kept making wrong turns and following the wrong dirt roads.  At one point when we hit a dead end and all three drivers got out to convene, I joined them and said,

“Guys, guys, don’t worry—I got this.  I have an honours bachelor of arts, specializing in geography.  I’ve taken a class on cartography, I can do this.  Where’s the map?
“There is no map.”
“Okay, well I can’t help you then.”

And I got back into the truck to enjoy the view. Despite having a pretty strong sense of direction, the fact that there wasn’t a map (and at some points not even actual roads), made me pretty much useless.  Thanks, Ivory Tower.

We finally found the main back road and went through a remote mountain town where we stopped to get water and—of course—ice cream, and then find out how the hell we were supposed to get out of this town and back to the highway.  We switched back and forth until, lo and behold, we caught sight of the river below and of Alaverdi up ahead.  Have you ever been to the Boundary Museum in Grand Forks and seen the model smelter display from 1919?  That's what Alaverdi looks like, it's uncanny. From here it was smooth sailing to our destination until we were inevitably stopped by the police for some reason.  Probably to extract a bribe.  They took me as far as some sort of mine installment and bid me adieu.  It was a somewhat tearful goodbye as I had really grown to like these guys.

The next group to pick me up were two young guys in a Lada.  They asked to see Canadian money so I gave them two dimes, which they said were beautiful.  It’s true!  The Bluenose is the shit.  Personally, I wouldn’t mind a little less QEII and a little more Trudeau, Pearson, and Belinda Stronach on our money to spice things up.  They asked me if I had been to Army because they were both soldiers, and they referred to me as Aleksandr Velka.  What a successful name I have.  It is constantly opening doors in the former Macedonian realms.

The weirdest point was clearly when I was let off by the two soldiers and walked past some sort of sketchy Taj-Mahal-themed casino/strip club which was actually in the middle of nowhere.  Some fat man hollered at me to come in and gamble, but I just couldn’t articulate the plethora of reasons as to why I wasn’t going to do that, not least of which I had budgeted my very last Armenian currency to get me to the border, where I would spend the residuals on peach juice and pretzels, and I didn’t have time to be developing a seriously debilitating gambling problem.

Bros.

Oh wait, no, the weirdest part was when I was passed by the exact same Mercedes SUV driven by the Lords of Armenian Internet themselves, who had made their rounds in Vanadzor and were now heading for the borer.  They took me as far as Noyemberian, the last town before the crossing, and told me all about the flood.  From there I started towards the border and realised I had entered the zone of containment that seems to spring up around all political borders--the vultures were circling and swarthy brigand stopped his Lada and gestured the international sign for money, so I gave the Russian word for "No" and shut the door.  I was shortly picked up by a delivery truck driver who only begrudgingly acknowledged my existence.  That’s all I’ve ever really wanted from anyone.

*I just knew this was going to happen.  When I was driving in with the British couple and we experienced torrential downpours, it reminded me of when I was a treeplanter up North Fork in 2005 and the road washed away. 

Stoked on Alaverdi.

Just a couple Armenians hanging out at an abandoned power-generating station.  Nothing sketchy. 

Due Dilijan(ce)

Foiled again by UNDP.  What is this, Kosovo?

My couchsurfing host was an American Peace Corps worker who had two cats.  These two cats turned out to be the bane of my existence and I had a hard time sleeping without sneezing from the fur or having one jump on me and bite me.  But before all these night terrors we had a nice dinner of vegetables and lentils, she told me how everyone in her building thinks she’s a big hooch for having so many young men stay with her (loose American morals and all), and we discussed the merits of Armenian dentistry.

Kardashian family photo op.

In the morning Hillary walked me to the highway to flag down a car.  She barely put her hand out when two Armenian teenagers screeched to a halt, presumably stoked that they were finally going to land a sexually-liberated American girl.  Were they ever disappointed when only I got into the car.  They were only going as far as the monastery on the peninsula up ahead, so I walked from there.  They insisted I come look at it with them but I put my foot down and said I had already seen it and needed to get to my next destination, Dilijan, quickly. They seemed to understand the urgency, as Dilijan is a pretty renowned spa town. 

Further along the highway I contemplated jumping on the back of the slowest moving train in history but could not confidently predict where it would end up.  Either a fisherman or a cement truck driver picked me up a bit further down, I can’t remember which.  What didn’t pick me up was a convoy of UNDP vehicles.  Oh, I remember what happened: I was picked up by a young guy in a dumptruck who dropped me off at a fish stand at the end of the lake.  Glad I got that memory sorted.

Then the two best people in Armenia picked me up.  They were in charge of Internet or something.  I have no idea what they were actually doing, inspecting the internet cables or something around the country, and they spoke English.  I loved these guys because they were very intelligent and offered lots of excellent insight.  They pointed out all the Doukhobor and Molokan villages along the way and were shocked to learn that Doukhobors in Canada were marrying into the local population.  They were also shocked to learn that I, as a self-identified white English Canadian, felt I had more in common with a Vancouverite of Asian descent thenan with an Anglo-Saxon Torontonian.  Believe it, entho-centric nation states!  Starbucks and mountains over humidity and smog is a much bigger unifier than coincidence of ancestry, so get used to it.

Lake Sevan (which is actually a resevoir) and--you guessed it--a monastery silhouetting the  horizon.

They took me all the way to Vanadzor, where I had planned to stay with another PCV.  Wouldn’t you know it, the one time I decide to get my ducks in line I don’t actually need to stay there.  I thought it would take me a full day to get to Vanadzor but I managed to get there before lunch, which put me within smelling distance of the Georgian border. I met up with the PCV, however, and we ate pizza and discussed Jersey Shore.  He was from Montana or something.  Somewhere in the west, and somewhere obscure.  So I think Montana.  He then pointed me in the right direction, north, and I hit the old dusty trail after loading up on two packaged ice cream cones.*

*Packaged ice cream cones are currently the best thing in existence.  I love these little packets of joy more than most material possessions in the world.  Have you had one?  GO to Armenia.  Everything about it sounds a little off, and the cone is pretty questionable, but the ice cream is so good, and it’s the perfect treat for any time of day.  I insist you go because who knows how much longer these things will be around, or how much longer Armenia itself will be around.            

Lucky Number Sevan

“Aleksandr Makedonski, we must to have cheese!”

As it turned out, my driver was not planning on knifing me but rather cutting a large block of white cheese, ripping apart some bread, and then pouring shot after shot of vodka.  You see, I was operating on Code Orange after my little mixup with post-Soviet conflict zone militsia, and plotting game trees at every situation that arose, including wrestling a knife out of his hand, knocking him out with the bottle of vodka (that I only had been feigning drinking) and then light his car on fire and roll it down the hill.  Do you see what travelling does to seemingly rational people?

In any case, I hardly feigned drinking the vodka at all.  In fact, we got pretty seriously into the vodka.  I had at least two and a half shots, which let me tell you under my present condition were way too much vodka.  Just as I was about to put my foot down on the vodka an enormous bus-van rolled turned off the highway towards the caravanserai and out piled a gaggle of Swiss-Germans of varying ages, snapping pictures and chattering away about bahnhoffs, or Angela Merkel, or schadenfreude or whatever the hot topics in German is these days. 

They were from some university, Basel, I think, and were on a two week monastery-crawl of Armenia and Georgia.  They were hitting every single monastery in Transcaucasia in two weeks.  It sounded exhausting.  I mean, they really should have been carrying all their luggage on their backs and desperately hitchhiking towards the Georgian border with no clear plan—that’s the stress-free way to travel.  The driver of the bus and my own driver, conversing in the local lingua franca—Armenian—arranged some sort of deal in which the bus would take me.  No one consulted me or the people who had actually chartered the bus but that didn’t seem to matter.

The students and older ladies in the crowd seemed to love me and were delighted to take me with them and give me water.  The foppish Swiss-German professor wasn’t so keen on me tagging along but you want to know what, Switzerland?  You’re getting a FREE RIDE with the European Union, Schengen, French, Italian and German infrastructure, and every other conceivable circumstance of your existence so spread some of the MFing wealth.  Not all of us have the luxury of spending $9 on a head of iceberg lettuce.

We drove up and over the pass and left a landscape I can only describe as being Osoyoos-esque over the pass and into a landscape that I assume is very similar to Scotland, if I base my point of reference on an advertisement for tourism in Scotland I once saw on the London Underground in 1995 as well as scenes from Trainspotting. So all this meant one thing: I had crossed one of Armenia’s seven climactic zones and was now on the shores of Lake Sevan.  We stopped at two monasteries along the way and learned a whole bunch about monasteries in Armenia.  Or at least the tour group did, as it was all being conducted in German.  One was on the shores of Lake Sevan in an ancient graveyard.  The Armenians actually do have a pretty legitimate claim to being the most ancient culture in the Soviet Union.

We finally made it to the town of Sevan and to ANOTHER monastery and a hotel where I departed from the group.  I had, after all, arranged for a place to stay via couchsurfing.  I was set to walk back into the town but an old German man thrust some money into a taxi driver’s hand and demanded the driver take me to my destination.  Apparently no one wanted to see me die, which I think is kind of sweet. 

Ну, погоди! (Nu, Pogodi!)

Waking up with the initial thought of “Why did I come to Jermuk at all?” I immediately set to work getting myself out of Jermuk and back to the main highway.  I was hoping to somehow get to either Yerevan or Lake Sevan that evening and that was a pretty tall order.  I walked out of town to the more proletarian part of Jermuk to use internet and send a postcard.  Then an old man in a Mercedes picked me up and drove me to the highway.  He initially asked for money but I said no.  He said okay.  Or rather he was so busy hollering into his mobile and spitting flecks of gold everywhere that he didn’t have time to further hound me for money.  

Back on the highway was such a dream.  It was boiling hot and it was bone dry.  I loved every second of it and would have loved to stop at one of the great roadside eateries offering shashlik and tea and luxurious oriental seating arrangements but I was so angsty about getting back to civilization.  Some sort of biznezman screeched to a halt, backed up, hollered at me to get in, and then drove me to the nearest town.  He told me he’d drive me to Lake Sevan for $30 and I told him that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to Sevan or stay in the south a bit longer.  I was getting really good at this whole bullshitting business.

The town we stopped in was basically a page torn out of eastern Washington.  It was hot, dusty, desolate, and seemingly 30 years behind, so perhaps a little cutting edge compared with some parts of eastern Washington.  In the tourism bureau (SO cutting edge) they turned out to not be very helpful at all, as it was actually a hotel that offered zero tourism services for free.  So onwards I walked, out of the sleepy town of Vayk to where a dumptruck picked me up and drove me to the turn off to a gravel pit.  This is what I love about dumptrucks.  Whenever I am getting a ride with a real person they take me to the city centre and I have to spend an hour walking out.  Dumptrucks only go to random gravel pits in the middle of nowhere, so I’m fresh back on the road. 

The truck driver told me it was a must that I see the local cathedral.  I lied through my teeth telling him I would, and you know what?  It felt good.  I then kept on walking and stopped in a corner store that sold iced coffee with milk.  I bought about 4 and some kefir.  Some might argue that eating dairy products without expiry dates on a sweltering hot day while hitchhiking is a bad idea, but my counterargument is that I am absolutely full of bad ideas, and (almost as much as I am full of coffee and kefir at any given moment) I was ready for anything, including explosive diarrhea. 

Further along I passed through another small town and made it to the critical junction where I could follow the main road to Yerevan or cut up north to Lake Sevan.  I was full of caffeine, probiotics and probably severely deficient bin essential salts and minerals so the natural decision was to head north and see what Sevan had to offer.  I barely made it along before an old man in a Lada Niva screeched his brakes, backed up and hollered at me, “Oh my god, get in the car! Get in the car right now! It’s dangerous out here!  There are bad people!  Please get in the car!”

Since I tend to get so caught up in excitement and living in the now, I hopped in, ignoring the clearly implicit contradictory message of “EVERYONE in Armenia can’t be trusted, including me.”  He was totally wrong, however, as he was the friendliest and most helpful person in the history of Armenia.  He wasn’t going far, but parked his vehicle across the middle of the road and forced other drivers to stop and take me with them.  I told him I was fine and wanted to take pictures of the beautiful landscape.  He finally agreed and let me go, then drove off to his village to presumably tell him wife about his crazy day. 

Further along I was picked up by an old couple who had to periodically stop the Lada and dump water into the engine to cool it down.  Then through a village, where I saw a cop stopping a guy in a Volga.  The man later gave me a ride and was complaining about the militsia.  I told him I know exactly what he means because in high school the police were always shutting down our parties.  Despite these being fundamentally different issues entirely we definitely bonded.  We stopped at a Caravanserai at the top of the hill to eat. He had cheese, bread, and meat, and wanted none of what I brought to the table, which at this point was a bloated bottle of hot kefir.  He also pulled out a bottle of vodka and then out came the knife which he pointed at me and said, “Pogodi!”* 

While 7 year old me was delighted by the cartoon, 24 year old me was delighted by the Nu Pogodi-themed electronica show happening in Tbilisi.  

*Obviously you remember Ну, погоди!, a popular Soviet children’s cartoon which ran from 1969-2006.  Apparently there were only 20 episodes, each ten minutes long which to me sounds absolutely insane.  Maybe I’m so conditioned to absolute garbage being cranked out at 24 episodes per season, but the quality of each Ну, погоди! episode wasn’t so great that we needed to wait 1.85 years on average between episodes in order to fully digest and appreciate each one’s artistic merit. Anyway, I saw a mural in Tbilisi that was some sort of stencil of Ну, погоди! and I was all “Oh heeeey!!!!”

Kings of Krunk

I was basically at the crux of my escape from Nagorno Karabakh, and began my descent down back towards Armenia.  As I set off by foot an ice cream delivery truck immediately picked me up and dropped me off at the bottom of the hill.  Then as I walked barely any further another ice cream truck stopped and picked me up.  But this was no ordinary ice cream truck, either, and at this point I was pretty well-versed in Armenian ice cream trucks.  It was doing some sort of express run from Stepanakert to Yerevan in one day.  Come to think of it, I have no idea why this ice cream truck was going all that way, but I can assure you that there was definitely ice cream in the truck because they fed me some.  Revellos!  My favourite!

Oh. My. God.  I had no idea how interconnected Lil Jon and Armenia are.  Look at those teeth.  Kings of Crunk is all about making it in Armenia and making sure people know you've made it. 

The ice cream truck drivers loved me.  They absolutely loved me.  And if you only could see how good I was at Russian at this point.  I was bullshitting with the best of them.  They told me all about politics; what they think an Azeri moustache looks like; what the president of Armenia is; how Kim Kardashian is an even bigger one of what they think the president of Armenia is; and countless other tales.  Both had fought in the war in the 90s and both of them were not phased when we passed something called “Café Krunk” and I absolutely lost my shit and screamed, “STOP! STOP THIS VEHICLE NOW! IT IS NEEDED BY MY THAT I MAKE PHOTOGRAPH!”  Then I tried in vain to explain what “crunk” means in Russian and they just laughed, handed me another ice cream and said, “Foreigners.”

3-6-9
Damn you're fine
Move it 'til you sock it to me one more time
Get low, get low, get low, get low, get low, get low, get low

The drivers also insisted that I go to Jermuk, to the thermal spas.  Normally I brush this kind of stuff off but this was the first time that an Armenian did not insist that I go visit the local monastery so I believed they must be on to something.  I decided to get out at the turnoff to Jermuk and began the long walk.  I made it pretty far before a bread delivery truck picked me up and drove me right to the heart of town.  The two men driving it told me they didn’t speak Russian well so I was happy to be on even footing.

Jermuk was definitely a spa town that gouged every tourist dollar (but in this case rouble) one had.  I thought that maybe I could just break into the old abandoned Soviet hotel at the end of town and sleep there but upon approaching it I realized how eerie it was.  So eerie.  Instead I inquired at a hotel that seemed reasonably cheap but the catch was that they offered me dinner and breakfast and ended up just not giving me change.  I don’t like that kind of sneakiness.  Then there was a Slovak also staying there and the woman put us in the same room because she no doubt did not want to have to clean two separate rooms.  I would have been more unimpressed if the Slovak wasn’t ballin’ and bought champagne at dinner.  I was totally living the glamorous life of a Ukrainian coal miner sent to a spa in the Caucasus to recharge.

There was also a massive chess tournament going on because if there is one thing that Armenians seem to love, it’s reminding the world that Gary Kasparov is of Armenian descent.  I don’t think I actually got to go to any “spa” as it were, as much as it is my dream to lie naked on a cold marble slab and have some 300lb Armenian woman lather me up and just go to town on my back to work out all the kinks from carrying a 23 kg backpack for 10 months.  

Sisian

I liked Sisian because there was nothing to particularly dislike about it.  What was dislikable, however, were these two girls who insisted on talking to me and then leading me to the local museum where I was forced to pay 1,200 drams to look at peasant implements and old carpets.  It was a one-room museum and the old crones demanded I pay the full international rate.  When I handed a 20,000 dram note the crone told me I needed exact change.  I said I didn’t have that and she had the audacity to ask me why I didn’t have the exact change.  After being escorted by the two young ladies to a grocery store to break the large bill I had in order to return to pay the 1,200 dram fee, I concluded that these wily females were all in collusion and I made my escape from their gold-thirsty clutches by going to the “Stonehenge of Armenia” just outside the town limits.

 If you’re currently flipping a coin trying to decide whether you should pay all that money and going to Stonehenge OR paying very little money but spending a lot of hassle and emotional energy by going to Sisian, Armenia then I suggest you do neither and let the magic of Google Images do the walking for you.  Both are a massive disappointment, the latter especially.  What was good about getting there and away is that for most of the walk I was given a ride by locals, and I always appreciate that sort of thing. 

After eating a second meal of shashlik and looking at a map of Texas, I prepared for my trip to the Step, the great mountainous republican capital just over the hill.  

US AID

That's right, fall into my Iowa trap. 

Finally, the US Ministry of Foreign Affairs intervened and helped me out, and it was about time too.  It’s no secret that I was a little annoyed they didn’t offer me a ride in one of their howitzer-Hummers in Kosovo when I nearly died, so it was a welcome treat when an ex-Foreign Ministry worker who had rented a car and was driving around Armenia stopped and asked me if I was from Iowa.  While that seems like a pretty strange question, I was wearing a t-shirt with “IOWA” boldly emblazoned across the chest because I found it in a thrift store, it was cotton, I needed a shirt, and no one has actually heard of Iowa.  It was also dark blue so as to hide all the nasty stains I was sure to pick up from all the peaches I would be eating and then wiping my hands on my shirt.

Sometimes I take really terrible photos out the windows of moving cars.  This is arguably one of those times. 

Anyway, the driver’s dad was from Iowa so he stopped to pick me up.  You should have seen how disappointed he was when he found out not only was I not from Iowa, but from Canada.  So disappointed that he actually made me sit in the back seat, which I thought was a little weird.  But whatever, a free ride is a free ride, and I got the chance to talk about Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and hear the top-down, all-knowing and omniscient point of view from an ex-member of the diplomatic community. Enlightening!

Falling water is really in right now in Armenia. 

What was nice was the opportunity to stop and take a couple of pictures, and then get delivered right to the turnoff for the town I was going to be staying at, Sisian.  Sisian was lovely.  It reminded me of a town in Moldova. I can actually make several comparisons between Armenia and Moldova, mostly because both are shaped like a delicious cookie, as my friend Jon in Albania has oft been quoted with saying.  In Sisian I had arranged to stay with a Peace Corps worker (just like in Balboa in Moldova on my way to Transnistria, another breakaway Soviet republic!  The similarities are striking!). 

It would be so infuriating to be a regional development officer and then find out that your multi-national state was breaking up and descending into civil war when your region's main supply line is through the territory that your government is now at war with.  Like, ugh!  What a waste of sunk capital.  This isn't the 1950s.  We aren't rolling in cheap Japanese steel anymore.  Get it together, nationalist insurgents. 

Having neither a phone, or an address, or a map, or anything to reach this person, I resorted to the one think I am good at:  parking myself in the centre of town and giving the locals something to gossip about.  As usual it worked, and people were soon milling about, only too afraid to make the first move and ask what I was on about.  I surprised them by speaking first (“He speaks!” they all presumably gasped) and asking a group of teenagers if I could use one of their phones.  

Sometimes it's my lot in life to make teenage Armenian girls blush when I sit in front of the Sisian univermag looking hopeless and lost and ask to use their phones.

If it weren’t for teenagers in the former Soviet Union, I might very well be dead.  They rallied to the caused, called the only other English speaker in the city, who happened to be my Couchsurfing host, and who showed up promptly.  We then ate shashlik and he told me about Texas.  I of course paid because PCVs make $7/day and I was not paying to sleep, but in any case I still felt like a good portion of today was bankrolled by Hillary Clinton and I am very, very thankful to her.  

Thanks, guys! ;)

A Pretty Good Indicator of What Armenia Looks Like

This is basically what Armenia looks like.  For some reason Wikitravel produces beautiful maps of every country on the planet that I have ever been to except Armenia.  So I was in the Yerevan region trying to get to the Syunik region and evidently the Vayots Dzor region is the Bermuda Triangle of Armenia.  Is was so hard to get out of and no one was going through.  If I were this little keystone wedge I'd be exacting tolls and threatening the entire country with supply chain interruption until all the riches of the east poured into my coffers.  But this is probably why I'm such a global success and why Armenia is landlocked and doesn't have a national transportation strategy. 

Caravan From Yerevan

After spending about 16 euros on a place to sleep (the only hostel in Yerevan.  If this were still 2010, despite my clever way of back-dating these blog posts even when they are being written in 2013 after I piece my shattered memories together from journal entries, emails, facebook status updates, and postcards I still haven’t mailed, I would probably think about opening up a hostel in Yerevan to cut this monopoly), I decided to get on out of Yerevan.  I felt kind of guilty too, I mean using Yerevan for just a night and then tossing it aside like an old shoe.  But I was in a rush to “do” Armenia and cross it off my list.

Artashat strip development.

Normally I’m not such a “player,” as it were, with visiting countries, ticking them off like a Contiki tour and carving another notch in my passport, but I am only realizing now that I actually had a schedule to keep to.  You may very well remember that I met one of Georgia’s up and coming rappers, Ice, and he had invited me to one of his shows where we would presumably get bottle service*.  I thought it was this coming weekend but it is actually the weekend after, so I was given about 6 days to really make myself known in Armenia and get my name going around the water cooler. 

I would hate to be Armenian and have to look across the Turkish border to see  one of my biggest symbols of my national identity.  It's a lot like living in Grand Forks and seeing Galena Mountain. 

I started by taking a marshrutka to the next town south of Armenia, which I discovered was a bit of a dead end.  The best thing about this town is that it might have actually been in Turkey it was so close to Ararat.  I walked to the highway, took several pictures of Ararat, vaguely remembered that Adam Egoyan film (Ararat) from c.2003, and then thought about waiting for a marshutka to take me south. 

How much do you know about Armenia’s transportation system and geography?  Probably as much as I did at this time.  There were no marshrutkas going south because there is a certain dead patch in the middle of Armenia and travelling through it passes a certain time threshold. Kind of like how 5 hour flights across North America are more painful that an 8 hour transatlantic. As a result, drivers would not leave for the south past a certain point in the day.  It was already noon or so, and after about half an hour of waiting with some mother and her two kids and a couple of false starts, I decided to walk.

If I could give anyone any advice about travelling n Armenia, it is to walk.  Don’t even look like you want a ride.  EVERYONE will stop to pick you up, force you into the car, and tell you it’s too dangerous to walk.  My first chauffeur was a truck driver heading south.  We made it as far as the first major hill when his truck died.  I told him I wanted to help (not going to lie though…I secretly didn’t) and he said there was nothing I could do but keep walking. 

So I kept walking.  And you know what I came across?  A bunch of old people selling water and peaches on the side of the road.  If you have any idea how obsessed I am with eating fresh peaches and absolutely reveling in the depravity of sitting in a field devouring peach after peach, then you’ll know I stopped to sample the good.  Each peach was something ludicrous like $2!  In Armenia!  On the side of the road.  I was so upset about being charged the International Rate that I stormed off, despite them chasing after me to strike a bargain.  But like I said to Azeri State Railways, you had your chance.

You know what's messed up?  Google Maps is trying to tell me I went though Azerbaijan illegally or something.  Who does that?  Who builds a road through an enclave?  Who decides to build an enclave in the first place?

*I LOVE bottle service!  When I moved to Toronto and I heard people talking about bottle service in the cluuub I was all, “wtf is bottle service?” but it turns out it is something I absolutely live for but only when I go to third world countries.  If you’re in Toronto or somewhere like Las Vegas it seems kind of pointless, but when you’re in Dushanbe and you and two American embassy workers are the ones dancing to Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” while rich Tajiks smoke shisha and disinterestedly watch this foreign entertainment and you’re thinking to yourself, “Yes.  Yes, this is it.  This is the actual highlight of my life.  This is where my life peaks!” then bottle service just naturally seems like a good idea.