April Showers
Alright, it's official: I am incapable of updating this blog once a week. I'm so behind with events that I don't even know where to start! I last spoke about my host brother's birthday, which was two months ago. How I am that behind, I have no idea, but in order to catch up (always with the catching up!) I'm going to do a photo entry rather than a wordy one.
Without further ado, in April I did the following:
Helped bake and decorate a wedding cake for my friend Damon's wedding. Courtni was the maid of honor/pastry chef/florist and I stayed up all night before the wedding to help her out.
Drove through Armenia on the Saturday before Easter on a spur of the moment decision. Courtni and I were supposed to fly to Mestia, Svaneti with some other friends; instead we hopped a marshrutka to Yerevan. Our marshrutka driver had to pay for our visas at the border because they didn't accept dollars or have an open money-exchange place. Lucky we had a nice driver!
Wandered and ate Armenian food in Yerevan. This is the train station where we bought our tickets back home on one of the nicest trains I've ever been on. Granted, I've only been on trains in Texas, Georgia and Armenia so who knows what my standards have been lowered to, especially considering Georgia.
We also attended an Armenian church service on Easter Sunday, both of us were excited that we were in the first official Christian country on such a major Christian holiday. Very interesting to be there, though we couldn't understand much.
However, it was a beautiful church, inside and out. It might have been in Armenian, which is even further from any language I could understand, but that didn't stop us from staying for quite a while to listen to the singing.
After church we participated in the Armenian Genocide Walk in which we walked for almost 3 hours carrying daffodils to lay on the Memorial of the Armenian Genocide.
The monument has a constantly burning flame in memory of those who died in the genocide and the march consists of thousands of people coming from all over Armenia to lay flowers in memorial.
After the march we ate dinner and took a night train back to Tbilisi, though we had only been in Yerevan for a grand total of 24 hours. As whirlwind as it was, it was fun. We were both concerned on our trip back when the man who checked our passports at 4 AM on the Armenia-Georgia border took the passports, flipped through them, glared at us, then disappeared with Courtni's passport. We figured it was partly due to the presence of Turkish visas in both of our passports and partly due to the short time we'd spent in Armenia. We made it back in the end, though, somehow.
Once I got back from Armenia, I was able to have Easter dinner with my family. It consisted of multiple grass plants, egg fights with the dyed eggs above (which are dyed red in reference to the blood of Jesus) and avoiding eye contact with a fried piglet's head that was on the table across from me. And they say dating is awkward.
A few days after Easter the weather cleared up enough for me to take a walk through the field behind my house and see all the lovely little white and yellow flowers that dot the entire field.
Unfortunately, while the rain had cleared, the ground hadn't quite dried and I had a bit of trouble with my boots. Getting stuck in a combination of mud and various animal feces is not a pleasant experience, but the view was worth it, as it tends to be in Georgia.
Without further ado, in April I did the following:
Helped bake and decorate a wedding cake for my friend Damon's wedding. Courtni was the maid of honor/pastry chef/florist and I stayed up all night before the wedding to help her out.
Drove through Armenia on the Saturday before Easter on a spur of the moment decision. Courtni and I were supposed to fly to Mestia, Svaneti with some other friends; instead we hopped a marshrutka to Yerevan. Our marshrutka driver had to pay for our visas at the border because they didn't accept dollars or have an open money-exchange place. Lucky we had a nice driver!
Wandered and ate Armenian food in Yerevan. This is the train station where we bought our tickets back home on one of the nicest trains I've ever been on. Granted, I've only been on trains in Texas, Georgia and Armenia so who knows what my standards have been lowered to, especially considering Georgia.
We also attended an Armenian church service on Easter Sunday, both of us were excited that we were in the first official Christian country on such a major Christian holiday. Very interesting to be there, though we couldn't understand much.
However, it was a beautiful church, inside and out. It might have been in Armenian, which is even further from any language I could understand, but that didn't stop us from staying for quite a while to listen to the singing.
After church we participated in the Armenian Genocide Walk in which we walked for almost 3 hours carrying daffodils to lay on the Memorial of the Armenian Genocide.
The monument has a constantly burning flame in memory of those who died in the genocide and the march consists of thousands of people coming from all over Armenia to lay flowers in memorial.
After the march we ate dinner and took a night train back to Tbilisi, though we had only been in Yerevan for a grand total of 24 hours. As whirlwind as it was, it was fun. We were both concerned on our trip back when the man who checked our passports at 4 AM on the Armenia-Georgia border took the passports, flipped through them, glared at us, then disappeared with Courtni's passport. We figured it was partly due to the presence of Turkish visas in both of our passports and partly due to the short time we'd spent in Armenia. We made it back in the end, though, somehow.
Once I got back from Armenia, I was able to have Easter dinner with my family. It consisted of multiple grass plants, egg fights with the dyed eggs above (which are dyed red in reference to the blood of Jesus) and avoiding eye contact with a fried piglet's head that was on the table across from me. And they say dating is awkward.
A few days after Easter the weather cleared up enough for me to take a walk through the field behind my house and see all the lovely little white and yellow flowers that dot the entire field.
Unfortunately, while the rain had cleared, the ground hadn't quite dried and I had a bit of trouble with my boots. Getting stuck in a combination of mud and various animal feces is not a pleasant experience, but the view was worth it, as it tends to be in Georgia.
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