Archive for November 2007
Thomas in the real christmas spirit, join him!
A good friend of mine from high-school in Norway, Thomas Skorpen, has started a fantastic initiativ. He started a facebook group a week ago named “I’ll give 1 NOK to development aid for every member who joins this group”, (translated from norwegian). In the last 7 days this group has been growing exponetially, and it’s still going. The member count is now at 26,581!
Update: The member count is now at 32,795!
Thomas keeping his head above water. [Unknown source]
A suspect of terrorism
I love taking pictures and I often carry my camera around, yesterday I discovered a place where I obviously shouldn’t take as many pictures. After rehearsals for “She stoops to conquer” I took the metro down to Republic square. I had the camera up and took some pictures as the metro arrived.
When I got of the metro, I wanted a shot of the metro driving off. I jumped off the metro with my camera ready and went click-click-click-click-click, as the metro disappeared into it’s tube. A guard came up behind me, took my arm and asked me to follow him. Three minutes later, at the top of the escalators, I found myself surrounded by the guard and four policemen.
I asked them if they spoke English, and they replied in Armenian asking if I speak Russian or Armenian. So I had to go on with my very limited Armenian. They started guiding me towards another room, and I pulled up the Norwegian Red Cross employee card, and managed to explain that I’m working in Armenia Red Cross and that I’m a hobby photographer. After a few sentences back and forth about me just being a foreigner loving photography, we came to an agreement about deleting the photographs and letting me go.
I absolutely didn’t want them to touch the camera; the first pictures on my card was from the last political opposition rally on Liberty Square. I doubt a portrait of Levon, the leader of the radical opposition movement, among waving flags would help my situation.
So I started deleting the photoes from the metro, carefull not to show any of the more “sensitive” photoes. Most of the pictures from the metro were crap anyways, so I didn’t really care about them, but I wanted some memories from this incident and asked kindly to keep some of the photes, like the one above. They agreeded and after a short lecture about photography in former Soviet, we parted with a smile and some laughter from both sides.
This is my first encounter with the police of Yerevan, and I must say they handled it pretty well. They were polite, and did their best to explain that this was all a matter of preventing terrorism. In the future I’ll continue taking pictures everywhere, but I might be a bit more discrete when photographing infrastructure.
To round it off, here a picture I just took of a lightpole, to illustrate my habit of taking random photoes.
[Article edited on Dec. 2nd, correcting a few typoes.]
The second LTP rally
A rally participant cheering “Levon Levon Levon”.
I find it interesting to observe the run-ups to the presidential elections in February. Curious as I am, and slightly above average politically interested, I went to the second opposition political meeting on Friday.
She stoops to conquer – follow-up
It’s about time to give another update on my rising career as an actor. As Tim points out in his comment on my previous post, I have been upgraded to, Mr. Hastings, one of the leading characters in this play. I really appreciate this part and I am having a lot of fun together with my co-actors during our frequent rehearsals.
Hastings and my dear Miss Neville
Our stage manager, Sonya, is doing a fantastic job, not just commanding us around stage and making sure I’m spinning my dearest Constance the right way, but also with sponsors and publicity for the play. The posters are printed and last night we put up a huge billboard by the Opera in Tumanyan street. The billboard in one of Erevan’s busiest streets gave me and my friend Jesse quite a reality check; we are having lead parts in a serious production!
Jesse, who plays the lead part, Mr. Marlow, in front of the billboard.
Expectations to the play are rising; billboards are put up, posters distributed and friends are getting excited. And we will these expectations; our performance is improving on every rehearsal, it is going to be great.
More pictures available at flickr. (They will soon be a bit better organized.)
Scandinavian invasion of Victory park
Yesterday I had the most extreme culture shock I’ve ever had: 150 Scandinavians invaded Victory Park in Yerevan to run orienteering. My brain totally stopped functioning when I saw 150 Scandinavians entering under the arc into Victory park. My mind simply couldn’t grasp the concept of my two worlds colliding like they did yesterday.
This is the coolest thing I’ve participated in so far here in Yerevan. It was fantastic, even though I felt like somebody violently knocked Scandinavia in my head and ripped it away again when we parted in the evening.
Falling in love with Yerevan
It’s the small things that matters, like when she smiles and her eye twinkles. It is in many ways the same with a city; when I get to know it and notice all the small things, I sometimes fall in love.
One of these little things are the farmers selling vegetables and fruits out of their cars. They show up in the streets, back alleys and yards. And these two are quite often right across the street from our office.
