Shimmer

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.]