Serpentine, shel, serpentine

 

Sorry I havent written since Istanbul.   Spring-induced torpor.   Spring actually started in March this year (late March, but March).   Today the temp was in the low 70s.   Mostly it is in high 50s-60s.    Cold at night.   My favorite season.    Green is starting to appear on trees and bulb flowers are peeking out of the ground.  

 

I'm trying to start some tomato seeds to grow some heirlooms over here. We'll see.   They are at the two leaf stage now and I have no access to good growing medium or fertilizer of any kind.   I'll poke around in the hardwareish stores near the shooka this weekend and see if I can't find something to give these sprouts a chance. 

 

A couple of stories:

 

1.  A friend at Caritas invited me to Easter dinner with her family.   I came early and sat with her in the kitchen watching her and her mother in law cook.  Kind of strange for me to be a spectator in a kitchen.   That's not the normal order of things.    Lots of hardboiled eggs for the table, dyed with natural dyes so a little more quiet than what you see in the US.   They actually eat the eggs here, not hide them in the grass.   Some of the other traditional dishes included boiled rice with raisins (no other seasonings that I could discern), baked fish, various cooked greens w/ yoghurt on top, another green called aveluk which can be quite tasty cooked with garlic.  Sort of a bitter green like collards or chickory.  

 

An easter dinner tradition is to click eggs with another person and try to break theirs and keep yours whole.   I tried a couple of times.   The 5 year old daughter beat me.   Of course, she used a trick egg.  There is apparently technique to this, but it is not yet a recognized sport.   Look for egg cracking at the olympics one of these days.

 

2.  Roads

 

I'll definitely have to include some pics here.   Those of you who saw The In-Laws   -   the original version with Alan Arkin and Peter Falk understand the reference in the title of this blog.   The rest of you should rent this movie immediately and prepare to laugh out loud.  

 

Road repair is underway on the main street near my house.   Its done very differently from the US.   First,  a few crews dig out all the holes that need to be patched and configure the edges into a rectangle.   The holes are 6 to 8" deep.   Then, they leave....for weeks now.   There are no orange cones or anything else to mark these holes so every car riding down the street swings back and forth  in a snakelike pattern with very little attention paid to which side of the road you are on, just aiming for the  part where there are no holes.  

 

There must be 50 holes in less than a mile and some of them are 4 feet across.  No consistent pattern exists.    In the daytime you can see most of them and twist out of the way.  I'm sure at night the number of broken axles increases dramatically.  

 

3.   Pics for this part too.   I have a few examples of how Armenians prune trees.   What I learned at master gardner class about never, never topping off seems to be the opposite of what occurs here.   I'm not going to describe them here.   I'll take a few pics to illustrate and post them in the next couple of days.  

 

Most of the volunteers in the June class have been selected and they are busy emailing those of us on a group Armenia PC list and asking all the questions I asked last year.   Its nice to be on the other side of the queries about what to bring, what to leave, what's it like and how about that language.     I've heard there are 13 vols in the 50+ group.   Let's hope more of them  stay than in my group (6 out of 10 are still here).