T’ek’eyan V.

after another bus ride, i was now in yerevan for the third time. reason for me staying so long was that a frenchman, gregoire, from an overland whatsapp group reached out and said he would be hitchhiking to iran soon, so we made plans to meet up a couple of days later.

on tuesday, he and his friend ellie from iran met up with me to discuss our plans, and we also had the idea of going to the theater on thursday, the day before our departure. we had a blast at the ballet, it was a great introduction to armenian culture from their perspective. there were tons of people from abroad there, and i talked to a group of german summer school students, one of them was even from my area. after the ballet, we went to a bar and i met a couple of other friends of greg's.

back at the hostel, when i wanted to pack up, i noticed my credit card was missing. i looked for it everywhere, but it was nowhere to be found. finally, i checked my phone to look at the payment history. there were over 20 transactions amounting to more than 260€ during the last 24 hours, none of them mine. i froze the card right as another 45€ payment tried to slip through. it was from a bar in yerevan. i also saw that there had been payments at the hostel, so i woke up the hostel owner.

long story short, the police came, it took them more than 3 hours to get an interpreter and i was up until seven in the morning. although we had all the witness, paper and video evidence we could've ever wished for and knew exactly who took the card, the police didn't do jack shit. i wasn't too upset about my money being gone, my card missing or my plans with gregoire destroyed, those were all my fault. but the fact that the police didn't bother doing anything at all when everything was nicely layed out in front of them left me deeply disappointed. additionally, i got sick from going running in the rain a day before, so that didn't help the situation much either.

i did, however, meet štěpán from czechia in the hostel. we discovered that we were both hitchhiking to nepal and hit it off super quickly. i decided to leave with him on tuesday instead of wasting another opportunity and waiting for nothing.

big shoutout to the owner of hostel jan, who bought me food when my card was gone and let me stay for as long as i needed to for free.

big fuck you to the armenian police.Read more