Everybody Loves JJmond

If yesterday's post wasn't enough to prove we've officially gone feral, then buckle up. Today we accidentally trod on a cat, hurled rosehips at each other's heads, and got adopted by a couple called Papa Gagik and Mama Garin.

Our Armenian culture crawl started out strong, first stopping at Charents' Arch, a striking stone gateway with views out to, uhh, nothing. The arch is supposed to frame Mount Ararat in all its patriotic whimsy, but instead it framed a dense milky fog and my mis-shapen head.

Feeling suitably enlightened by the great white void, we hopped back in the van, tuning in and out of the mutterings of our tour guide, Varga, who freestyled facts all the way to Geghard Monastery, dropping bars of trivia like he was about to go head to head with Eminem. Having felt like I'd just downloaded the entirety of Armenian wiki straight to my head, I stumbled out of the van feeling like a corrupted USB stick.
Luckily, Geghard was worth every megabyte.

It was an atmospheric, shadowy monastery half-built into knobbly cliffs, and surrounded by sweeping valleys and gorges. Between gawping at the backdrop and the tragic state of a Soviet-era Lada, we lost our tour group, instead finding our way to one of the monastery's echoing cave-chapels, where the ceiling spotlight had me starting to feel all funky and monk-y. The acoustics transformed the noise I make when my dentist tells me to 'open wide' into a half-sacred, half-demonic ambience. Still, without Varga, there was a creeping sense that we were missing something educational.

Between discussing the most memorable times I'd ever wet myself, the next stop took us to the dramatically named Symphony of Stones, a gorge brimming with hexagonal basalt columns that looked like Mother Nature was going through an intense Lego phase. Then at last, we gandered Garni temple, a Greco-Roman colonnaded oddity perched above the fractured gorge, where we squinted into the sun and posed like philosophers after asking yet another meaningless question.

At the end of the tour, we were delighted with a Lavash making demonstration, a cultural insight into the ancient Armenian art of bread making. It works whereby two elderly women emerge, faces dusted with flour and aprons rolled up in fury, only to slap each other silly with dough until one of them yields, or the bread finally gives in and agrees to be Lavash.

Following the tour, our day took a stark turn from slapstick to sobering at the Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial. An eternal flame burns in memory of 1.5 million Armenians who were massacred by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Sombre but dignified, it was an important stop, albeit a difficult thing to write about. It honestly hit harder than expected.

Speaking of tone shifts, we then had to endure our taxi driver cat-calling girls straight outta the museum, crazy huh.

And after gobbling up yet more Soviet stamps and badges at the market, our evening concluded by goofing about on electric pedalos, peaking into the cathartic cathedral, and a munching a meal at a restaurant called Burger Queen (who knew his majesty was married!?)

The next morning, we were seen off by Papa Gagik and Mama Garin, our hotel hosts turned guardians. You don't meet these two, you are adopted by them. Papa ambushed us with a bear-hug, Mama force fed us strawberry cake, and somewhere between the warm cheek-kisses, we realised we hadn't just stayed at a guesthouse, but in a chaotic and affectionate Armenian sitcom, an unaired pilot of Everybody Loves JJmond.Baca selengkapnya