We have two friends from Armenia, and one day there was this idea:
let's make a trip to Armenia! The two friends we know independently
from each other, and they got to know each other through me. We also
decided to make a trip to Georgia while we were there. Initially I
hoped that the main focus of the trip would be hiking, but since I had
my knee injury, the focus shifted from hiking to eating. Both of our
friends were in Armenia at this time, spending their vacation there.
They said they will organise everything we want and show us around. But
not everything what they said about Armenia was how we imagined it. I
want to write about what really surprised me, and which things i found
really awesome. I will also mention something about Georgia, though
that was too little time to gain any cultural insights.
Khor Virap
Pride
Armenians are really proud of their country, of their culture, of their
everything. That strucked me especially when I compare it to how Polish
people think and talk about Poland. I could even say that this is a
complete opposite. Also the behaviour of our friends confirmed this,
and since they both work in IT field and are rather smart people, I
could not attribute this to primitive instinct of belonging to a group
(which some poorly educated Polish people show e.g. during football
matches). It is also not the nationalistic kind of pride, more like a
very strong sense of where they come from, where they belong, almost as
if it was something sacred. On one trip we were told that the national
identity of Armenians has always been very tightly connected with
religion (as this is where apparently the first Christian churches were
built), so maybe that is where my impressions came from?
People
People seemed nice. Of course it is a different thing when you are a
tourist in a contry and you actually live there (I can say that
especially after moving to Germany), but I cannot help connecting those
impressions with what I already know about my Armenian friends. It
seemed to me that people treat any other people with respect. I did not
see any sign of "I am better than you" attitude, even in man-to-woman
relation. That may of course just be only a superficial impression, or
biased with the fact that I knew some people from there before. It was
also visible that people are not afraid of being not perfect, which is
again completely opposite to what I see in Germany. A street musician
which sounded as if he just started learning to play guitar, or people
singing terribly out of tune in Karaoke parties, dancing and having
loads of fun there. I would say that this is way more healthy way of
living, and I presume that because of this people there must be happier
in general.
Visual taste
A hotel covered in blinking lights, making it look like a toy castle
for a princess little girl. Casinos lit up with orange and light green colours. Flea market
souvenirs with awful lot of flowers and decorations. Many times what
crossed my mind was the word "kitsch", but I suppose that this is just
the fact that it is another kind of taste that is foreign to me. But
isn't it worth attention, that things like taste in visuals can vary
between people, but when you think about music, what is out of tune is
simply out of tune for everyone. I also learned once that the notes
that sound good when played together sound good for everyone, because
of how our brains are wired. It is interesting that it is not so when
you think about visual art, especially as sight is supposed to be our
primary sense. I remember the girls being amazed at one kind of jewerly
where real flowers were sank in some kind of solid transparent medium,
and I was thinking that even though the idea is neat, I would never
wear something that looks like piece of transparent plastic with a dead plant as a
bracelet.
The window of a stationery store..
Food
Since my recent idea of being a vegetarian I did not explore a lot of
meat dishes, and meat seems to be main type of food in Armenia.
Everyone, but everyone would immediately make jokes when they heard of
someone being vegetarian, even the waiter. I did try some meat dishes
though, and I can say again that the dish called "barbecue meat" is
just awesome, and once I tried it, I do not see any point in eating
meat prepared in any other way. Luckily, same kind of meat can be found
in Munich's Georgian restaurant, it's a little pricy though.
Armenian barbecue at my friend's home
What I liked the most of all the foods that I have tried was a
dish called "barbecued vegetables". Well, one of the mistake our
friends made when presenting us Armenian foods, was calling the dishes
by their name, for example not explaining that "BBQ vegetables" is not
simply vegetables that have been put on a grill for some time, but they
are special sort of vegetables, barbecued in certain way. And here it
is: tomatoes, eggplants and peppers are put in fire until they are
cooked inside and burned outside. Then the burned part is peeled off.
Here, surprisingly the burned part is just a layer of the width of the
vegetable skin, so it is actually not that much that is left out (I was
lucky to help preparing it at my friend's house). Later, the vegetables
can already be served, or they can also be smashed together, creating a
kind of vegetable mash.
Grilled vegetables in Georgia
Does not look very inviting, but tastes just amazing. You can even feel
a tiny bit of the burnt taste but without any bitterness. The whole
dish is very juicy and the vegetables look as if they were sank in oil,
but in fact it is only the vegetable juice. This dish has so much
taste, that you could easily distribute it into 3 times the volume.
Definitely the best thing I ate in Armenia and Georgia, and the next
thing to do is to learn to prepare them myself.
Another
popular dish is "kebab", but it has nothing to do with the kebab we eat
in Germany (good that this semantic difference was mentioned to us by
our friends :P). It can be made from any kind of meat, and to me it
felt like a kind of cooked minced meat that is formed in something of a
shape of a long sausage. I am not a fan of this dish, mainly because
the meat feels very soft and loose, and this is simply not the way that
meat is supposed to be. But I know that some other people loved it.
The remaining dishes, like khachapuri or khinkali can be
googled of course ;)
Taking a taxi/car
Taxi is the main means of transport, also within the city, and it's
cheap. And again, the semantic difference has not been clear to us. Taxi can mean both the car with a TAXI sign on
the top, as well as a kind of private car which you order with a
smartphone app. I am still not sure if the latter is a legally approved
ways of transportation, but it seems that when people say "take a taxi"
they mean this. Even the hostel ordered this kind of "taxi" for us to
bring us to the airport.
Apart from taking a taxi, you
can also take a car. But that does not mean renting a car, which
apparently can be quite pricy there and is not popular at all. What it
means is renting a car together with the driver. He will take you
wherever you need to go, wait for you, and bring you back. And all is
very cheap.
That said, it is interesting how getting to
a nearby town becomes same kind of affair as going to the other side of
the city. When one uses public transport, getting to another town has
to be planned in advance, one needs to check the bus schedules, compare
it with train schedules, compare the prices. Here you get into a car
and tell them where you want to get. Not very environment friendly, but
so convinient.
Traffic
At the beginning I did not quite understand what my friends
meant by saying that renting a car and driving in Armenia/Georgia
without prior experience of the traffic there (or other
'non-paranoidly-ordered' countries) is a sure way of getting into a
car crash. Now I understand. Let me try to explain.
Firstly, it is not that people drive in a mean way, or
agressively - which one may assume when somoene says that it is tough.
They seem to always pay attention to all the other drivers and
pedestrians, and whenever the have to slow down and make space for the
other to compensate for their mistakes they do it gladly. People watch
out for all other participants of the traffic a lot.
And they do it in order not to have to strictly follow
traffic rules. The lanes are just a recommendation, the "don't
overtake" signs are just a suggestion, moving your car to the side so
much that one wheel almost drives on the grass is perfectly normal
manouver, so that the car from the opposite direction can overtake
another car next to you, on a two-lane road. Logical, isn't it :P
Changing the lanes is also simple, you do not have to change them
one-by-one, if you see that there is a passage opened, you just
quickly drive across, and of course all other drivers will see that
and slow down if neccessary. Indeed, huge room for cultural
misunderstandings here :D
Also pedestrians.. I have seen two pedestrians crossing a
road outside of a pedestrian crossing in the way that they got to the
middle of it, and then stood there and waited for an opportunity to
cross the second lane. All is good until now, except there was no
grass or any other gap between the lanes. They were just standing on
the white double line separating the lanes, in the middle of heavy
traffic, and no one even bothered. The cars would just pass few
centimeters behind and in front of them, and it seemed that this is a
very normal way of crossing the street.
I would say this is a lot of trust for other people, and the
traffic seems to function as whole, rather than a set of independent
units. It is also less dummy proof, of course.
One more think, honking. Car honking is not just a way of expressing
anger or strong disagreement, it is means of communication. They have
this funny way of barely touching the wheel, quickly two times, which
makes a very indecisive short double sound. From what I got, they use
it to say hi, or just to say "hey, here I go, please watch out for me
now". Even in Yerevan standing on a hill and looking at the city
panorama we could hear the double short honk here and there. I am
tempted to say it is almost cute :)
Georgia
The first thing we could say about Georgia was that the capital -
Tbilisi - at least its center - is very beautiful and modern looking.
Of course not without overwhelming amounts of blinking lights, but by
that time we have gotten used to it ;)
Freedom bridge
Tbilisi at night
Cafe at the end of the cable car
The freedom bridge made the biggest impression, by its light effects,
even despite looking like a huge snail ;) There is also a park with
singing fountains and a caste on the top of a hill, with a cable car
going there over the city. Definitely a great place to be for 2 days,
but I am not sure how much there is beyond that. Also we could see
that it is only the centre that has been strongly invested into, of
course the other parts of the city look less stunning.
The food, the food is just amazing. It is hard to answer the permanent
question of our friends "is the food better in Armenia, or Georgia,
Georgia right?", as we have simply tried just a very limited sample of
both. But yes, the restaurant we were taken to by our driver in
Georgia was definitely awesome. And yes, the wine in plastic bottle I
bought there for 10€ was finished during next 2 days :)
And that's it
I definitely want to go there again, both Armenia and Georgia, maybe
best separately. The duration of this trip - 9 days - was definitely
not enough. I want to go hiking there and sit in the nature. I want to
visit some music/jazz concerts, for which we simply didn't have the
time/energy. I would like to hang out with some local people, going to
some local events or hikes. So simply feel the place, rather than
rushing through with a camera in my hand. But for what we had available
I think that this was a good overview :)
