I spent about 10 days in Armenia in Summer 2016. Not sure why it's taken so long to publish the below - as you can see, it didn't take long to write.
I'd previously been hanging out in Georgia so got to the border and then was driven to the capital Yerevan by one of the office drivers. We didn't share a word of a common language, but he gave me the most delicious hot cheese sandwich i have ever had so I thanked him by bowing in a kind of Japanese way. On the way we passed Lake Sevan which looked cold.
Yerevan has an array of attractions for the lazy traveller, all within half a mile of each other. Best is the Cafesjian Art Centre (photos below).
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| Some of the Cafesjian Centre's wildlife |
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| Another indigenous Cafesjian species |
The Armenian Genocide monument and museum is a couple of miles out of town, is very moving and is rather hard to make any jokes about so i'll move on.
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| Toasting marshmallows not encouraged |
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| This charming fellow is not remembered fondly by the Armenians |
The Museum of Art has some excellent items but the way around is very badly signposted so I kept walking into closets, ladies lavatories and so on and had to be retrieved and set back on the right path by museum attendants.
The historical museum has all sorts of weird stuff, including an object purported to be the world's oldest shoe which interestingly was in almost the exact shape of my Nike Tiempo astroturf football boots.
The Armenians are on very bad terms with most of their neighbours, most notably the Turkish (genocide) and the Azerbaijanis (war at the moment, sort of). I tried to discuss the Kurds with one of them, thinking he might see them as a similarly oppressed people, and it turns out that the Armenians hate the Kurds as much as anyone else for their part in the genocide - supposedly the Turkish tricked them into carrying most of it out.
Mount Ararat loom over the city like somewhere Noah might have beached an ark. Unbelievably, I don't seem to have a single photo of the only thing anyone seems to take a photo of in Yerevan, but you can look a photo of it up online.
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| This chap clearly hasn't been to the genocide museum lately |
