Easter

These photos were taken on Easter Day, April 4th. I've been a little lazy these days about editing my photos, so sorry they are a little late.

This is the service in Noravank. There were women and children standing to the sides of the priests singing. I'm always taken with the way singing sounds in churches here.

This is one of the two churches at Noravank. The graves on the floor are of previous priests, they are meant to be walked on to show their humbleness.

This little girl did not want to stand and listen to the service. Her mom was so embarrassed at the way she was acting. I knelt down next to her and we started talking.
The light in the churches here is perfect.

Henni, our friend Karine and me.

Again, the ladies all gussied up for the holiday.

This is Karine's nephew, Gorik. Him and his brother, Davo, are in one of the photos from our photo exhibition with their grandmother, Tamara. I came to their house to eat an Easter meal. Their food is always so delicious!

I was helping keep Gorik entertained while the women were preparing the food.

How can you resist such a face!

The table was beautifully decorated with dyed eggs, wheat grass and greens. We had fresh "banjar" vegetables picked from the mountains, home made wine, beet salad, and my new favorite thing ever, "chamichov pilaf" which is rice with dried fruits baked in a lavash crust.

Tbilisi, Georgia

These photos are from my recent trip to Tbilisi, Georgia for a Social Media for Social Change conference. The conference was very interesting. I had forgotten what is was like to be surrounded by like-minded journalists. It was refreshing, but also a wake-up call. Man, has technology changed in the last year! One woman asked me to describe what I thought Media 2.0 was. I said, honestly, I've never even HEARD of web 2.0 and for the first 10 months of my service here I didn't even have real reliable access to the internet!!

I had been in Tbilisi once before when Henni and I traveled through on our way to and from Turkey. I came this time with a fellow PCV, Chris. He had never been to Tbilisi before, so I was the semi-tour guide. I brought us back to a restaurant that I remembered and we gorged ourselves on Lobiani, a round bread with red bean past inside, sooooo good!

We walked around everywhere in the city and got a pretty good grasp of the metro system. All the signs in the metro stations are in the Georgian alphabet (see Armenian alphabet thrown against the wall) and neither of us bothered to learn it before we came. Luckily, Chris is really good a gesturing. You should have seen him tell the waitress he wanted water with gas!

This is me and Chris. He's quite a character and I laughed a lot on this trip. We also got soaking wet more than a few times while walking in torrential downpours.

This is the coolest church sitting on a cliff above the river that runs through the middle of the city. There are churches just about every block and all the Georgians cross themselves when they pass by, even the taxi drivers while speeding down the narrow streets full of pedestrians.

Along the Tbilisi skyline you can see Mother Georgia. She has a twin that lives in Yerevan, Mother Armenia. Mother Georgia is holding a sword and a goblet of wine. Ohhh.... is Georgian wine good!

This is Sayat Nova's grave outside of the Armenian church. Sayat Nova is a very famous Armenian writer. After taking a few photos we walked into the church and greeted those inside in Armenian. They didn't think much at first and then we started up a conversation with them in Armenian. They were so impressed that these Americans in Georgia were speaking their mother tongue. We stayed for a while, lit some candles and went on our way.

There was about a 2 hour break in the rain yesterday so I took a little stroll up in the fields behind my house. It is impossibly green here right now. Its amazing how quickly it has changed! I was looking through photos from less than a month ago and the blossoms were just beginning to bud on the trees here.

I had not yet had a chance to explore this side of the city. I moved in during the winter and because there are a lot or construction projects on this side of town, it was super muddy. In this area there are also a lot of abandonded buildings. Maybe this was a greenhouse?


This is a little section of town that I had never noticed before. It has its own separate road from Yegh that comes in at the top of the hill from the road to Yerevan. This is looking down to the Arpa river, where the pointy bridge is. The broken landscape here looks impressive in every season!

A perfect little patch of light shining down on a few cows and the lone herder.