The Taxi Drops Off Me, Jillien, Danelle and Lala...

6/13/2010 7:12 PM

The taxi drops off me, Jillien, Danelle and Lala at the edge of Yerevan proper.  “It’s a twenty minute walk into the center of town” says Lala, pointing at my map to show us where we are.  Someone walks up to us and offers assistance.  I buzz the guy away, but Lala stops and explains in polite Armenian that we’re fine, thanks for offering, and all the best to him and his family.  Apparently it’s the kind of town where strangers offer directions with the best of intentions. 

The girls are here to do some shopping, and I’m here to flaneur, or, as the Armenians put it, zbosnel, to stroll, to observe, to perhaps be entertained.  Some people are music snobs, others are drink snobs.  I’m a city snob, a connoisseur of the urban environment,  picking out themes and interactions like notes in a melody or bouquets in a wine.  Like music and wines, there are cities for different tastes, and judgment is subjective, but certain things CAN be universally agreed on, and certain subjective judgments will hold true across a wide range of critics and consumers.  A city connoisseur will pick up on things like a city’s walkability, its street plan or lack thereof, its locality and distinctiveness, and a half-dozen or so other characteristics. 

The city center is on a hub-and-spoke plan, with Republic Square at the center, broad commercial and institutional avenues extending out at regular intervals, connected with residential and retail streets.  Our first stop is a 24-hour pharmacy, a good find, stocked with brand names behind glass counters and professional looking women in lab coats ready to advise you which brand of toothpaste or razor to use.  Jillien and Danelle judge this too expensive looking, and they do sell exotic foreign goods like contact lens solution, at 8000 dram a bottle.  For reference, 8000 dram will get you a car and driver for the day.  So we stop into a convenience store, with a full range of products from Russian “Kapo” shaving soap (250 a tube) to Parker fountain pens (7500, with one ink cartridge, a box of generic replacement cartridges are 200, a box of waterman cartridges 2000).

Underneath each major intersection is a pedestrian passageway full of unbridled capitalism, small stalls selling sunglasses, candy, soda, cell phones, home décor and books.  Books are very popular and expensive.  Armenian-Russian, -English and –French dictionaries and textbooks are the biggest sellers.  One intersection is exclusively for booksellers.  They sell used Armenian tomes and a few glossy new ones in Armenian and Russian.  I pass on a Russian version of Twilight in favor of an Armenian copy of The Little Prince to practice my letters with (600 dram).  LaLa knows these particular booksellers.  She was also a student of the author of the most popular and comprehensive Armenian-English dictionary. 

We stop at a café in a park that rings the city.  Lala, like all people who have dwelled in a city long enough to see it change, laments the changes since she first knew it.  The city used to be distinctively Armenian, now it is becoming a hodgepodge of imitation European, turning public parks into cafes, mixed with the bustle and chaos of Asian cities, with hundreds of little stores in what used to be austere Communist underpasses.  Also, the city is getting too expensive, the middle class is getting pushed out and traffic has gotten worse than it used to be.   There’s a kind of universality to her complaint.  I share with her New York’s disneyfication, suburban sprawl and gentrification, and we agree that things used to be better in the old days.

We stop at what in New York would be a vacant lot, but in Armenia houses a 13^th-century church.  The church looks much smaller than it should be, a small chapel of a large complex.  In fact, it was before the communists came.  They destroyed the larger church and the Armenians built a school of science and engineering in its place “to hide the chapel” according to Lala.  When communism fell and religion was rediscovered as an integral part of national identity, the school of science and engineering was destroyed.  A billboard displays an ambitious computer-graphic of what the original church would look like rebuilt.

I drop into the Moscow theater, an ornate building in a large square filled with Lovecraftian metal sculptures of spiders.  The movies are all mass-market American: Computer-generated comedy #3, Video Game Adaption, Comic book adaption #2, Formulaic Action-Comedy.  The prices range from 500 dram for a seat in the back in the middle of the day to 2500 for a “VIP seat.”  I’m anxious to see what that entails.