Grape Fields

In search of some much needed alone time together, Sam and I took a walk through the grape fields outside Shahumyan today. It started out as a nice little walk together. 

The weather was beautiful, and this was the first time that we had really gotten away from town since we had arrived in Shahumyan. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but to us it was huge. You see, Armenia doesn't have any sort of general municipal waste management system, so people just burn their trash. What that means that is that air in town is always filled with smoke, usually with a strong odor of burning plastic. So in addition to being pretty, this was the first time we were breathing some really clean air in a month. 

We even saw some of the lizards that live here. (Before today, I hadn't realized that there were lizards here.) They look a little bit like young iguanas. If you look at the photo below very carefully you can see one in the middle of the photo on top of the brush pile. He's a little hard to spot, but it was the best photo I could get- despite the cooler weather these days, they're still really fast! 

We were having a really nice time, walking and chatting. We strolled through the fields for about an hour, and then decided that we should probably head back. 

And that's when we realized that we were lost. Immediately after this first epiphany, we also realized that walking through grape fields isn't like walking through other fields. When you walk through normal fields and you get lost, you can just say "that's alright, home is in this direction, so instead of walking along the sides of the fields, we'll just cut across the fields in the right direction until we get back to the road". When you're walking through grape fields however, there are essentially hundreds of 4 to 5 foot tall walls in between you and where you want to go. We weren't seriously concerned: every 20 minutes or so we would cross paths with families who were harvesting their grapes. Every one of them invited us to sit and eat grapes with them- we were confident that if we asked for their help, any one of them would immediately load us into their car and drive us right to our house. But it was a nice day, and we had plenty of daylight left, so we just kept on walking. 

Eventually, we stumbled upon a small orchard in the middle of all the grape fields- where we saw the most adorable herd of calves. Of course, being completely unable to resist the cuteness of immature animals, we decided to check it out. 

Upon further inspection, we found that one of the smallest animals in the pen wasn't even a cow- it was a baby gomesh! The baby gomesh and the youngest calf seemed to be buddies. At least, they hung out in the orchard together. It was adorable. 

We kept on walking for another two or three hours after we found the calves and the baby gomesh. We saw another orchard, and this one had some bee hives in it. 

Finally, we made it out of the grape fields. With Mt. Ararat on one side and Karmir Sar on the other, we we had a pretty good idea of where we were going and started to head home. 

The short walk turned out to take us the better part of 4 hours, but apart from sore feet, we emerged from the grape fields unscathed. I don't know that I'd have the energy for that kind of walk every day, but it was a really nice break from town life for an afternoon.