Zorats Qarer, again.

I'm realizing that I posted flower photos from my hike up to Zorats Qarer last week, but I completely forgot to post any pictures of the stones themselves! They were, as always, stunning. I brought my kindle, and spend an hour or so tucked between two of them so that I was in the sun but out of the wind, and finished reading Fruitless Fall- which, if you're looking for a good book about bees, you should totally read. In any case, it was a really nice way to spend a spring afternoon, and here are some photos:

Sam gets a haircut

Well, we're in Yerevan again for the weekend: I had training events on Thursday night and all day yesterday, but Sam came up to the city yesterday afternoon, and we took today to get some errands done that you just can't accomplish in Sisian. We got ourselves a big bag of broccoli from our favorite fruit khanoot (fruit stand) and Sam bought his guitar! We also trialed a hair dressers so that Sam can look sharp in a month when we go back to the US for a wedding. I think this may be the most relaxed he's looked in months. 

It's odd: it feels like we're always coming up to Yerevan for some sort of training event, but apparently we're here far less than other volunteers for whom the travel isn't nearly as arduous. There are also volunteers with much longer/more unpleasant journeys than ours, but some of them still manage to make their way to the capital more frequently than we do. I think a large part of it is that we're a couple, and so staying at site isn't nearly as lonely for us as it is for other volunteers. While it's nice that we're saving a ton of money by not going traveling to Yerevan when there is no training (PC reimburses travel expenses when you're there for training events), it also means we miss out a lot on the group social scene which is too bad, because we really like the other volunteers here. Hopefully, when we find independent housing, we'll be able to invite other volunteers to stay with us and that will help.

Snowdrops

While many people celebrated with chocolate or flowers, I spent Women's Day walking up to Zorats Qarer: Armenian Stonehenge. Well, I didn't spend the whole day doing that: it's only about an hour's walk outside of town. But, I did spend the afternoon walking out, reading among the rocks, and heading back. 

You might remember that our site mates Sasha and Andrea took Sam and I out to Zorats Qarer to welcome us to Sisian. It was  beautiful then, but I think that there's an extra special something to the place in springtime: Dnstsaghikner.

Dnztsaghikner, or Snowdrops, are the first flowers we see here in Sisian. They don't grow in the Vorotan river valley, but a few hundred feet up the mountains they speckle the landscape like small purple dancing fairies.

I think that photographing them might have been my favorite part of the entire day.

Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day- which isn't a widely celebrated holiday back home Here, that's hardly imaginable. Schools and businesses are closed. Women greet each other on the street with declarations of "Congratulations on our holiday". The town of Sisian has decorated it's bridge in honor of the day.

It's also interesting to me to watch the different ways in which the holiday is observed. Here in Sisian, it's something akin to an expanded version of Mother's Day back home. Women are given cards, chocolate, or flowers, and pastel colors seem to rule the decorating schemes. In Yerevan, it's treated more like a Cancer Awareness Day, with movie screenings and gathering which explore the challenges faced by women in Armenian society today... plus flowers and chocolate, because who doesn't love an excuse to get chocolate?

I was a little bit torn- on the one hand, the simple approach to the holiday taken in Sisian does give the women here joy, and there's not a whole lot of opportunity or impetus for social change the way there is in the big city, so why not just enjoy it? On the other hand, I feel like true gender equality will play an important part in this country's development, and the public awareness events in Yerevan contribute to that cause. 

In the end, I skipped most of the day's festivities in favor of going on a hike- it was beautiful weather, and I had been stuck inside for waayy too long. It was also the first time I've been alone for more than 20 minutes at a time since we arrived in country. It was a good day.  

Livestock on the Mountainside.

They've been grazing livestock on the mountainside behind our house for the past two weeks or so. Today I decided to take a picture, but you couldn't really see the animals because all I have is an iPhone with a dinky digital zoom. Lamenting my lack of opital lenses, I remembered the pair of birding binoculars that were given to us by my Aunt Jeannie (for watching Armenian birds, of which there are many- my favorite are the magpies, but that's a story for another day...). It turns out, they're not half bad as an iPhone lens. 

Host Grandma's Sewing Machine

Our Host Grandmother has an old hand-cranked sewing machine from the soviet-era that she still uses pretty much on a daily basis. I posted this photo of the machine of to the Vintage Sewing Machine Subreddit (yes, such a thing exists), and got a fascinating story back:

According to Redditor PAPPP: 

For those who have never heard it, assuming I'm identifying that machine right, those have a really cool story behind them. It looks like a Singer because it is... sort of. repeatedly.

As I understand the story, Singer set up a factory in Podolsk Russia starting in 1900, which was producing machines by 1905, and made sewing machines until it was mostly converted for munitions work during the first world war. After the revolution in 1917-1918 it was nationalized (Singer was apparently compensated some token amount in the process) and returned to sewing machine production under the names "Gosshveymashina" (Which is, AFIK, more or less "National Sewing Machine Factory") and later "Podolsk" - these machines were similar to but not exactly Singers, because under Singer the plant was mostly set up for major castings and finishing work, and many of the small machined and unfinished wood parts were imported, so they had to improvise/redesign for local production. (Hilariously jingoistic account of that part here.)

After the second world war it was updated with equipment and plans stripped from the more modern Singer facility in Wittenberg as war reparations, and produced machines under the badges Podolsk Engineering Plant (PMZ), and later as Kalinin Sewing Machines (ZIK). Then, in 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Semi-Tech, who at the time owned the Singer brand, bought the old factory and put the Singer name back on it until it was closed around 2000 (Source for the relevant bit of the Semi-tech part of Singer history here, the whole James Ting holdings scam fully collapsed less than a year after that article). Ref with most of the details but no sourcing of its own for the overall story here- I've read accounts that differ in some details elsewhere.

I'm not an expert (in fact I just barely know what I'm talking about) but that looks like one of the post-WWII approximately 15-91 machines from the PMZ era; the shape and decals match other examples I've seen pictures of, though the badge is a bit different.

Maybe you have to be a little bit of a sewing machine geek to really appreciate it, but to me, this is a really cool piece of history.

Sunset

Now that the weather is slightly less frigid, we've been trying to walk around Sisian more than we did during the winter. Today, we found ourselves at the Sisian Church at sunset, and it was a beautiful view.