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.