Armenia ... we are here!

We have now been in Armenia for 2 full days. We arrived in Yerevan at about 3:30 in the morning on Wednesday (Tuesday at 3:30 pm US time). We were greeted by Darren who is the person who has invited us out to spend the week here. After getting into the guest house where we are staying, we met Tom who is running the guest house while we are here. We drank tea and talked for a bit before we decided to try to get some sleep. We were all able to sleep until about 1 pm and then got dressed to go out into the village where we are staying. We walked through the streets to get to the market. It was amazing to see the places where people live. Many of them have blown out windows with only light curtains. The Soviet era is very visible here. The ghosts and bones of a very ancient culture seem buried underneath the minimalistic buildings. We visited an apostolic Armenian church which was built in 1270. It was small and very beautiful. It is funny to me to think that it wasn't for another 200 years that we had the visitation of Columbus that we think of as the furthest back our Anglo history goes in America. After visiting the church we continued walking through the village. There is a particular smell in Yerevan because people don't have trash pickup but instead burn all of their garbage. The city itself is quite polluted and you can smell the ashe and smoke in the air. After getting to the market, we walked through the stalls until settling on some lamb, vegetables and herbs to take home. We took a very squished taxi ride home and began settling in for the night. We were all exhausted and unfortunately, the Armenian culture is a late culture. While dinner took a long time to prepare, it was well worth the wait. We had a dinner of roasted lamb, pasta, herbs, lavash and cheese. It was so amazing. They take the herbs, all different kinds, and wrap them up in the lavash and eat it plain. It was delicious. After dinner and clean up we were all wiped out. We went to bed with full tummies and thankfulness.