Armenia and Georgia trip

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 :)