Author: Chris

From the top of the Cascade Complex. Mount Ararat can be seen in the distance

To approach Yerevan from the north is to enter a mildly hallucinatory state. One has just passed through the exquisite foothills of the Lower Caucasus and is faced with a valley where zoning rules do not reach and where whatever can be built is being built, wherever there is room. The outskirts of the city resemble nothing so much as the pieces of a child’s model town set thrown into the air and left wherever they landed- here a McMansion that would not look out of place in the more vulgarly wealthy precincts of the US, sidled up next to corrugated tin shacks; there a primary school with a splendid view of a cement factory. Brand new Audis cut off Lada Nivas  as they tear towards downtown. It is as lawless a suburban landscape as could be imagined. Looming over it all is Ararat, the spiritual symbol of the nation despite the fact that it is ruled over by a bitter enemy. The visual confusion resolves itself as one nears the outskirts of the city proper: rows upon rows of deeply stereotypical Soviet buildings, the architect’s brief calling for his usual grey, forbidding and dilapidated. Even an optimist begins to fear the worst for this town.

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I have always been drawn to cities. To a detached mind they offer unparalleled scope for observation; there is simply more stuff to consider in the course of a walk than can be found in the countryside. They also provide the individual with a greater opportunity to have what might be called “positive unanticipated social interactions”, or as James Howard Kunstler puts in his work The Geography of Nowhere,

“You are able to see other people along the way. You may even have a conversation with a stranger. This is called meeting people, the quintessential urban pleasure. (Or else it is called a mugging, the quintessential urban calamity.)”

I have further been drawn to cities as laboratories for how built environments influence human activity- how they affect how we work, how we socialize, how we express our political rights (or lack thereof!). Visiting six different national capitals in a short period of time offers the amateur urbanist a great opportunity to examine what, in the physical landscape, is privileged and prized in each and to consider what this may say about the societies that built them. It is even more interesting, to my mind, to be able to case study five capitals of countries that all received their independence, from the same central government, at the same time. Interwoven in these relatively new national capitals (though most were SSR capitals) is a story about the past 26 years, about fledgling countries coming to grips with their independence and with their relationship to their history, to Russia and to the rest of the world. So let’s begin with the first one appropriately first.

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I begin by sharing two stories, both from Kyrgyzstan.

The first is that while horse riding along Lake Song-Kol (I believe Kol and Kul merely mean “lake” in Kyrgyz, so this is a bit like saying Lake Song Lake but it is what everyone calls it in English), we stopped at a yurt camp with our guide to sleep for the evening. Shortly after we arrived a large number of middle-aged Kyrgyz entered the camp. These were, we learned, friends of the patriarch of the family that ran the yurt camp, and they had come for a big party. A little while later, while Grace was off to the privy, I was standing outside when some of the party spotted me. The loudest of the bunch, a man with an impressive array of gold teeth (if he had any real teeth remaining, they weren’t obvious) approached and asked where I was from. I told him I was American and he shouted “TRUMP” in my face, assaulting both my ears and my nose with the scent of pure booze. Older Kyrgyz men frequently shout TRUMP upon making my acquaintance; one earlier that day declared me “SON OF TRUMP,” causing peals of laughter from the assemblage and a deep sense within me of having gotten clowned.

Back at the yurt another of the men declared, “Trump хорошо, Obama хорошо, Putin хорошо” (Trump is good, Obama is good, Putin is good). While I couldn’t quite get on board with his judgment of world leaders I appreciated his broadmindedness. Thus acquainted, I was taken by the arm towards where their cars were parked to try “schnapps”. At this point Grace returned and we both had shots of vodka pushed into our hands with the instruction to down in one. This repeated twice more in short order. The men seemed particularly impressed with Grace’s fortitude and all wanted to take pictures with her.

Grace and our new comrades

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We arrived in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, at around 5 AM, our flight from Athens having been delayed by about an hour. Our first day in the city was spent recuperating from the ungodly flight time and exploring the old city and the modern east bank of the river. I think we will have more to say about our time in Tbilisi as we revisited this vibrant and beautiful city several times over the course of our travels in Georgia, so I won’t dwell on it too much in this post except to say that our first days were spent wandering the streets of the city and getting acquainted with Georgian food and drink.

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Soundtrack for this post: Kid Astray, “Roads”

We’ve well and truly done it now kids! Saturday, 8 July 2017 will go down as our happiest and most special day (thus far). We were so glad to share our wedding ceremony with so many of our friends and family and I think this consensus view is that our reception was a pretty excellent party, thanks to the beautiful setting, great weather, good food, awesome band and of course all the party people.

We are so grateful to everyone who helped make it such a special day, especially our parents. A special thanks goes to Grace’s parents who, at a time when they should have been putting their feet up and relaxing after the wedding were helping us disgorge the contents of our apartment across their living room and dining room. We would not have been able to make our great escape on Wednesday morning had it not been for them allowing us to basically dump our stuff and ditch.

Ditch- that’s basically what we’ve done. We have only what can fit in 94 total liters across two backpacks, and the rest will have to wait. But, if you have to start a backpacking trip, you can do worse than a business-class flight to a cliffside house with a cave jacuzzi on an incredible volcanic island in the Mediterranean.

Bright and early on the morning of Wednesday, 12 July, we arrived at Heathrow Terminal 5. Jim, Grace’s dad, had already purchased us an upgrade to business class on our flight to Santorini, we then witnessed him sweet talk various BA staff first into letting us check in at the First Class Desk, and then into using the First Class lounge, a den of aeronautical opulence the likes of which neither of us had ever witnessed. Suffice to say that such an auspicious beginning to our journey was both blessing and curse- though the most relaxing, pleasant way to wait for a plane, it represented a high point of luxury we are unlikely to summit again any time soon.  Well-plied with champagne and eggs benedict, we rolled towards the boarding gate.

The flight was quickly away and we were well treated by the staff up front, particularly by Andrew, an attendant whose travels had seemingly taken him on duty to virtually every place we would soon be visiting. His recommendations bespoke someone who had spent short periods of time in various cities all over the world- he recommended what was interesting in most city centres across the Caucasus and Central Asia, but had not had time to explore outside the areas nearest the international airport. It offered an interesting contrast to the type of travel we are hoping to pursue.

We landed at Santorini’s small airport and collected our rental car, a tiny VW Up! (I am not excited about the Up!, or at least not to that degree. The exclamation point is in its full name. It seems unfair to those of us of a more sober mindset that we must feign excitement for a German microcar in order to maintain nominal accuracy.) The man behind the rental car counter espoused some interesting views. He was a supporter of Brexit (which, perhaps given Greece’s recent experiences with the EU at its most overbearing and economically violent, is not so surprising) and claimed that Chinese tourists pretend that they speak worse English than they do. We allowed his commentary to pass largely unchallenged; he seemed uninterested in our views and was otherwise pleasant. We then set out in the Up! for our home for the next several days, a hillside apartment in the hilltop village of Pyrgos.

The rest of our adventures in Santorini will have to wait, but we will leave you with the view from our little house on the hill here:

As Grace and I were planning for our frighteningly imminent world tour we decided early on that we were going to have a blog. I’m not sure why we set our hearts upon such a thing. I am not, nor is Grace, to my knowledge, a particularly diligent diarist and my creative writing has largely been confined to snide emails and bond offering memoranda in recent years. In my defense, if you think there is no creativity involved in making a baggage handling company or a ladder manufacturer seem exciting to investors you are gravely mistaken; I have spent years of my life writing narratives about companies so mythically boring it is difficult to believe they exist at all except to serve as a punchline in an office-set comedy.

It is difficult to know how to begin a new creative endeavour, because to do so requires either a concrete goal or an imperviousness to the potential embarrassment that comes from changing or ending the endeavour altogether. Unluckily, I have neither, which is why a large pile of discarded ideas slumps in the mid-recesses of my mind. But Graham Greene wrote in The End of the Affair,  “[a] story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead,” and people really seemed to like his writing so I’ll take his word for it. Here is the arbitrary moment.

In two and a bit weeks Grace and I will be married. In three we will have stashed or thrown out our earthly possessions save what can be carried in two 50L backpacks and will be on our way to visit more countries than I’ve seen in the rest of my life combined. We will have to adjust to a different lifestyle, to looking out of place every day, to coming up with new focuses and ambitions in the absence of a career to structure our lives. But we’ll also get to see parts of the world barely anyone I’ve ever met has been to, and hopefully get some new insight about the world and ourselves. Or at least maybe a real suntan for the first time in my life.

I suppose I hope that writing here will do a few things: allow us to keep in touch more easily with our family and friends around the world; help keep a record of what we’ve seen; and give the two of us a new avenue to spark discussions between ourselves. What one of us records may be totally different from the other, and that’s exciting! In the moment we may lack the insight that comes from putting virtual pen to paper.

At any rate, you may get a whole lot of pretentious drivel from me, but the pictures should be pretty!

–Chris

PS wish us luck at our wedding!