Out and About in Sisian

Today we are on our way back to Shahumyan from Sisian. It was really exciting to see the new city we'll be living in for the next two years, but I have to admit, I'm happy to be heading back to familiar ground all the same. Hanging out around Sisian made me realize just how comfortable I've become with the routine of life back in our Shahumyan cluster, and how much I'll miss the friends I've made there over the past few months. 

So, while I ponder these thoughts, I'm just going to share a few photos from the past couple of days in Sisian.

This is the photo of the road my school is on- although my school is at the very far end of the street. It has a little stream that runs along its length, so that when you walk it, you're accompanied by a pleasant burbling brook sound. 

This is the neighborhood around my school... lots of old stone buildings with back gardens. Very pleasant. 

And this is a picture of town square. Right now, it feels very New England-y with all the leaves changing color. Shahumyan and the surrounding towns don't really have any trees in them (there are trees outside, in orchards, but not really lining the streets at all), It felt really nice to  be in a place where there are trees on either side of the road. 

Our future home...

Immediately after our counterpart conferences, we traveled with our counterparts to visit our permanent site in Sisian. We arrived in the late afternoon and were driven directly to our next host family's house. There we were shown the room in which we'll stay this winter. The three children of the family had prepared a special welcome sign for us.  

It's awesome. We love it. They are pretty great kids too- they spent the whole evening showing off each other's accomplishments. It was really touching how proud they were of each other. 

Our room itself was super comfortable, and very pretty.

The best part about it is that outside that huge window is a little balcony over looking the family's orchard/garden. It's a beautiful view. I'm looking forward to living here.

Counterpart Conferences

This weekend we met the women with whom we will be working most closely for the next two years. We spent the weekend in a hotel conference room, getting to know our counterparts and attending PC TEFL training sessions with them. It was interesting to see the wide range of backgrounds our counterparts represented. Some trainees have been paired with college professors who have trained in The US or the UK. Some of the English teachers from the smaller villages speak little more English than the students in our practicum classes back in Artashat. 

Sam and I were fortunate in that both of our counterparts spoke very good English. We had been worried that, since our Armenian is still very basic, we wouldn't be able to communicate clearly with our new coworkers. And as this partnership is the basis upon which any progress is to be made within the classrooms at our schools, communication between members is important. 

I will be working in an elementary school with two counterparts, but only one was able to come to the conference. Her name is Armine, and I couldn't have hoped for a nicer counterpart. She has worked with a Peace Corps Volunteer in the past, and that experience was positive enough that she applied to have a second volunteer assigned to her school. 

Meeting Armine was a huge relief. She was cheerful, energetic, and most of all, very open to ideas about adapting her teaching practices to embrace more interactive classroom styles. The older volunteers who have been doing this for a year tell us that the most difficult thing about working in the schools is convincing counterparts to try something new- but Armine is already there. This makes me feel really good about working together, and makes me very hopeful that we'll have a productive partnership. 

It also makes me feel a lot more comfortable admitting my own limited experience to her. Knowing that she feels like it's okay to tell me that she wants to change things about her teaching practices makes me feel like it's okay to let her know that I don't know everything either. This is something I'll have to keep in mind as I continue to work in Armenia: the best way to make sure that some one is comfortable enough to admit that they don't know it all, is to start by admitting it about yourself. 

Evening in Shahumyan

Just a few photos taken while strolling around Shahumyan this evening...

Making Tolma

Today brings the second installment of our ongoing series: Cooking In Armenia. Today's our host sister's birthday, so our host mom was busy all day making an enormous feast to celebrate the day. We got to help her make the tolma. Tolma is a traditional Armenian dish in which spiced ground beef, rice & onions are wrapped in blanched cabbage and grape leaves, then simmered on the stove for long periods of time. 

The hardest part is figuring out how to make best use of the irregularly shaped cabbage leaves, and then actually accomplishing the cute-mini-burrito-style wraps. 

All wrapped up, they look like little spring rolls. We eventually filled to whole pot. The plate at the bottom is to keep the bottom-most layer of tolma from burning and sticking to the bottom of the pots.

The plate is necessary because all the pots and pans here are of thin aluminum, very prone to hotspots. The cookware is just generally less high-tech than in the States- most notably (to me) the pan handles. I'm used to at least semi insulated pan handles back home, so I didn't think twice about grabbing the handle to a pan on the stove to move it to a more convenient position. Turns out that was a mistake, and I've got a mild burn on my hand in the shape of the pan handle to prove it. 

But apart from that minor mishap, the day went really well. The tolma (and the rest of the food) was delicious, and we had a really good time celebrating the day with our host sister. 

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. 

Horovats

Today we had our first taste of Armenian Barbecue, which people here call Horovats. This translates fairly well: verb used for this particular method of cooking is "horovel", or literally, "to barbecue". The adjectival form of this verb is "horovats", which translated into "barbecued". Thus "horovats" as a noun is "barbecued (food)". I know, describing the grammatical etymology of the name of the food isn't nearly as interesting as describing the food itself, but there's a reason I'm focusing on grammar. 

The truth is I don't like horovats. It's terrible, but there it is. We sat down to the table, and a chunk of meat the size of a large grapefruit was plopped in front of me. It had veins of fat and gristle running through it. There were no utensils. We eat horovats with our hands, they said. I looked at the smiling faces of our hosts, eager to share this piece of their culture with us. I knew what I must do.

I had to Daenerys Stormborn it up and eat that horse heart (it was actually just pork meat). I worked my jaw until it was sore getting through that chunk of meat. Sam helped with my portion. But in the end, we got through it and emerged victorious. 

We went home, and I immediately took some prophylactic peptobismol.