Hello everyone! Sorry it has been so long since I posted last. As many of you who have kept blogs before know, it is very hard to make time to write, especially if you want to write in detail. I will try to update the frequency of my posts to twice a week, but I won’t promise it will happen!
It is incredible how quickly one gets to know and love people if they are forced to live with them for a week. Just one week ago for today I was writing my first blog post and feeling a bit like I was living in a house with strangers. Now, after just seven days, I can truly say that I am living in a house full of friends. This can be attributed mostly to the amount of time I am spending with these awesome people! For example, we are free to split up into groups and do different things after work, but each one of us always wants to stay in one big group so we are always walking around Yerevan in a group of 21. This isn’t always the easiest thing because 21 different people don’t often want to do the same thing, but (at least so far) we have all just wanted to be with each other. We have been alternating going out clubbing nights with café nights and stay at home nights, having a great time no matter what we are doing.
Just to go back in some sort of chronological order, last Sunday night we had an awesome Welcome Dinner at Arma Restaurant with the interns, our coordinators, and guests affiliated with AGBU including the director of AGBU in Armenia, Ashod Ghazarian. We all had a very good time eating, drinking, and dancing! Below is a picture of Nora, Nairi, and I at the welcome dinner:
On Monday morning, I started my internship at the UNDP in Armenia! If anyone reading this is Armenian or knows any Armenians, you all know that the ethnicity is often stereotyped as being late, unorganized, and a little bit lazy (interesting enough I don’t fit into any of these stereotypes which is why I find Yerevan life a bit frustrating at times). Well, my first day of work (and second and third actually, if I am being honest) was a little bit of all three of those characteristics. Aline and Anna (our internship coordinator and activities coordinator) accompanied each of the interns to work just in case there were any problems. I was the first on the list for my taxi (with Haig and Sara after me), and so Aline, Sara, Haig, and I arrived at the UNDP at 10:30. I was actually more nervous then I typically am for this sort of thing because I have trouble understanding Eastern Armenian and I didn’t know what to expect. As it turns out, my supervisor Armen Baibourtian (who happens to be the Senior Advisor to the UN Resident Coordinator of Armenia) hadn’t yet arrived at work so we waited about 30 minutes for someone to be sent down to get me. At this point, while I was entering through the gates, an Armenian woman who had been standing in line to side of the gate pushed me and said in Armenian to the guard “but I was in line first.” Later, I found out that the line of people that were waiting outside the gates were Armenian refugees who were trying to speak to representatives at the UNHCR. Yes, I was pushed aside by a refugee woman who thought I was taking her spot in my black formal dress and 4 inch heels… Anyways, for now, I will just let you all know that I spent the first three days of my internship on Facebook, email, and chatting it up with the awesome native Armenian girls that are also interning at the UNDP. I have some projects coming up so hopefully I will have more to say about my internship in the future but for now here are some pictures!
On another note, we went out a few times during the week to different types of places. Our first full-out night on the town was on Thursday night to a small bar called “That Place.” Since we are 21 interns plus friends we pretty much filled the place up and the people that were there before us literally just got up and left when we came in. On Friday night, we decided to try a pub called “The Beatles Pub” and after waiting for our taxi for over an hour and a half, we arrived to find the place wasn’t really happening. We left the pub and wandered aimlessly for a while until we found a club called “Giza Club”. It was completely empty on a Saturday night at 1 AM but they still made us pay a 3,000 dram cover charge for each of our boys (thankfully there are only six of them!). We have found that most Armenians that live in Yerevan don’t go out very much (especially the girls who hold a very traditional role here- more about that later). We had a really, really great time at Giza dancing to typical American club music and enjoying the relatively cheap drink prices. Here is a picture from that night:
Each weekend, we are touring different historical sites around Armenia with the group. On Saturday, we went to Garni and Geghard (a church and a pagan temple) and today we went to Etchmiadzin and Sardarabad (a church and a monument). I will tell you all about these trips in the next few days- promise!
Stay tuned for more posts and let me know if you have any questions about my travels!
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