Yerevan

Breakfast with Father Davidian who introduced us to his assistant and brought up the possibility of getting a local driver and guide for our time in Armenia. The hotel is filled with priests and Americans. The American Diaspora is a huge community and provides serious funding for the Armenian population.

We did our standard city tour- with what was probably an ex-Intourist guide (lots of facts and figures and not much life). We saw the Genocide Museum and the eternal flame- a memorial to the 1 million Armenians killed or deported in 1915 from Turkey.

We also saw the National Museum, filled with beautiful old manuscripts and Bibles, the Sports Complex, and the other major sites of the city. We cut our tour a bit short and headed to the weekend market, supposedly filled with Armenian arts and crafts. A lot has been lost in the Soviet times.

We found a place with a breeze and great pizza to plan our next few days in the country. John noticed that the Armenian women are some of the most beautiful in the world- very much like the Persians (except these women are definitely not dressed in chadors- they’ve adopted the MTV as their standard of “cool”…very slinky and sexy. Even Father Davidian has taken notice of the women promenading through the streets.