Shimmer

My life in Yerevan keeps evolving into new arenaes with new friends and activities. Now I have ended up playing a few small parts in a staging of “She stoops to conquer”, written by Oliver Goldsmith, an extract can be read through google books here.

The play is hilarious, and I love taking part in the rehearsals. The play is scheduled at two dates in December at the AUA, American University in Armenia. I will post more on this in the next few weeks.

On Friday, purely out of curiosity, I went to observe a political rally on Freedom square. The opposition parties decleared their common support for Levon Ter-Petrosian and after a one-and-a-half hour speech he decleared his candidacy for the presidential elections in February. The square in front of the opera filled up with people, different newsreports gives estimates ranging from 10 000 to 20 000 people present.

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Finally the slack line has been introduced to Armenia. Last night we went to the Opera Square and found a couple of suitable trees. As soon as we stepped on the lawn we draw attention, and people were really staring when I pulled out the line and started putting it up.

We ended up having a lot of fun, playing around with the line and a haccy-sack in our little “gypsy-camp”. People stopped by all the time, some tried it out, others pointed and laughed. One strange fellow even threatened to call the police on us!

Check out more photoes on facebook.

I took this picture on the hike to Garni a few weeks back. I got it developed last week and I really like it so it’s on the wall in our appartment. I hope you all will have a good weekend and have fun, I will.

I just remembered these pictures from a few weeks back. Me and Jon, a norwegian friend in Yerevan, happend to be at the Opera square waiting for Renate and Ramune to come along, and a kid with a skateboard showed up. Skateboards aren’t common in Armenia, this is the first and only time I’ve seen one, so Jon decided to stroll over and make contact. It turns out the boy had moved here from the states and had brought his board with him. They asked Jon if he skated, and before I knew it he was teaching them how to do an ollie. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally it’s started raining here in Yerevan, last night it sereously started pouring down and flashes of lightening were thundering over the city. This started around 11 last night, afted I’d gone to bed. But I couldn’t help it, looking out on the beutiful longed for rain, knowing my camera was within reach; I had to get up. So I ended up sitting in the windowsill in my boxers getting soaked and taking pictures.

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Lava flowing and cooling down a few decades or something ago, the river washing it clean, results in a beautiful landscape and cool pictures.

Seeing this page some of my friends could react by saying: “WTF, this ain’t no 1337 shit!” And I understand them perfectly well, this template solution isn’t what you’d expect from a man who knows more programming languages than languages. To emphasize my point:

• HTML / Norwegian: Learnt it in my diaper days.
• Java / English: Speak it fluently, but sometimes I forget the spelling.
• C / French: Lost the pointer to the allocated memory space. Argh! Probably just put it on the stack and it got overwritten.
• Assembly / German: Vaguely remember it, understand some of it, and damn: It’s ugly!
• Basic / Spanish: It’s basic: I know how to order a beer.
• PHP / Armenian: I’m learning it, because I need it.

To those who’s grinning after reading the above, I’m sorry for letting you down. I will try to make it up on the content part. Hehe, this one goes to the very special, just thought of another one to finish it of:

• Simulink / Sexual interaction: Really fun once you get the hang of it. Can be a bit intense, but after some work you’ll get all the complex poles into the left half-plane and it stabalizes.

Yesterday Jon called me while I was wrapping up my stuff after the training and gave me a simple decision to make: “Wanna go windsurfing?”

Lake Sevan is situated at 1905 meters above sea-level, and there of all places there a windsurf center. They had state of the art equipment and really helpful personell. The wind had reduced to about 2-3 m/s at the time we got in the water and it took me about 20 minutes to get the hang of this again, it’s been a few years since last time I tried this. It was really fun and we all, me, Jon, Renate and Ramune really enjoyed the evening at Sevan.

Good times.

This weekend I participated as a facilitator in a training of volunteer peer educators in our Time for Choice program; an educational program on HIV and safe sex, inspired from the Active Choice program in Norway. Out of 26 participants, only 3 or 4 spoke much english, so I ended up improvising with body language and the little armenian I know when I wanted to communicate to them. It works for simple practical instructions, but for more complex things I have to rely on Emma or Mary to translate for me, and they are doing a great job.

We also did a condom demonstration and a relay with four teams, where the task is to put on a condom correctly and tell the instructor what you’re doing. Before the demonstration we asked if they wanted to have this demonstration; some were against and a discussion evolved in armenian, unfortunatly I didn’t catch much of it. Some reactions were: “You are teaching us bad things” and “you should learn it from your husband”. In the end I argumented with: “It’s better to be fooling around now and doing it wrong, than to be fumbling about when you first need it.” It seemed like quite a few of them recogniced this argument.

I’m looking forward to work more with this subject and with the volunteers I’ve met this weekend, I hope to go to see some of them in their regions soon.