Finding the consulate wasn’t necessarily the easiest thing
in the world, but what I did enjoy was asking people how to get to it,
eventually finding it, pleading my case to the ambassadress (they have a female
consul! How progressive!) whom I easily
disarmed. She interrogated me a bit about why I wanted to visit, where I would
stay, what regions I wanted to see. I
was told Aghdam was OFF limits (AghDamn!) but that I must visit the cathedral
at Vank. Promising I would do all of the
above, I paid my $9 for the visa and somehow got tricked into buying a map for
the same price (—! Now who was
disarmed?). Floating visa in hand, I was
out the door and ready to take in what Yerevan had to offer.
 |
| Are you not excited about Yerevan? |
 |
| How about now? |
So let me tell you what Yerevan had to offer: Chinese
food. Did you know that in Yerevan there
was once one Chinese restaurant, operated by two Armenians, who then split and
one left and opened up a Chinese restaurant right next to the other one? Well, I went to one of them and it was
actually really good. The waitress asked
if I wanted bread as a side dish and I asked for rice. She said, “In China they eat rice the way we
would eat bread” and I said, “Um, yeah, I know.
I’m from Vancouver.”
There was also an amazing terrace scene in the
downtown. Like, amazing. Around the opera house are so many terraces
and patios that there is little more one can do except sit and drink
coffee. And I was fine with this because
it gave me a chance to sit, reflect, and write postcards:
Dear ____. You know, there is something depressing about sitting and watching a fat, middle-aged Armenian taxi driver sit in his taxi with his legs out, lethargically eating a piece of fried dough (with a perpetual crumb on his bottom lip), moodily staring straight ahead through half-closed eyelids in 35 degree heat at midday, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Is it more depressing to be him, or to be me, who sits here watching him and documenting it. Or is it more depressing to be you, who were presumably delighted to get this postcard* and then discover all it really sheds light on is my choice of taxi drivers in Yerevan (if I ever, god forbid, chose to take a taxi. But, just like everything else in the ex-Soviet world, my choice is limited to only type of driver, the only variance between them being how many gold teeth they have on display. Also, by how many donkeys I have seen them hit.** So while I may hate taxi drivers with a burning passion, I clearly do not hate them as much as they apparently hate Georgia’s stray donkey population, as much as I dream about slamming into them at 80km/hr and having their fat carcasses rolling over the hood of my Lada, hit the pavement, bounce, get up and go back to grazing. LRB
Wow, so happy I
discovered this postcard. * refers to
the fact that this person never actually received this postcard because it is 1
out of about 60 postcards that I have taken the time to fill out but have never
taken the time to stand in a post office lineup because it is such a painful,
soul-leaching experience. ** is a direct
reference to the time I was in a marshrutka heading for the Armenian border and
a taxi tried to overtake us but instead slammed into a donkey. The donkey rolled over the hood of the taxi,
lost control of its bowels on the hood, and then staggered away. The old woman in the back of’ the taxi
started screaming, the taxi driver started screaming, I shouted, “Holy
F$%&!” inside the marshrutka and then started laughing, and all of us
remember it fondly to this day.
No comments:
Post a Comment