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To India and Beyond....

Just back from an excellent rendition of Mozart's Requiem Mass, it was incredibly good, in the Soviet-era concert hall in the centre of the city. If you pass this way I thoroughly recommend it. We are planning to see Spartacus on Thursday, with he English National Ballet. If you remember the Onedin Line from the BBC in the 70s you will already be familiar with one if its most famous phrases.

Hope you had a cracking St. George's Day (clearly for the English readers....).

T x
 
Lancelot said:
Just back from an excellent rendition of Mozart's Requiem Mass, it was incredibly good, in the Soviet-era concert hall in the centre of the city. If you pass this way I thoroughly recommend it. We are planning to see Spartacus on Thursday, with he English National Ballet. If you remember the Onedin Line from the BBC in the 70s you will already be familiar with one if its most famous phrases.

Hope you had a cracking St. George's Day (clearly for the English readers....).

T x
Click to expand...
Was the phrase "i,m spartacus".. " no i,m spartacus " or am i thinking of some thing else ....????:rofl:
 
Well, what can I say? Greed beats the economics of sustainability every time. We have now been informed by a potential landlord that the Russians (over two hundred thousand here at the peak of their migration one year ago), take little care of the apartments they rent so there is very little point in renting out anything well decorated or aesthetically pleasing! That explains a great deal; the prices are reassuringly high, presumably because so much property here is owned by members of the diaspora who are keen to read the benefits of being an absentee landlord of a property which has no mortgage. A property which costs $400000 now could be purchased for as little as $4000 and certainly no more than $6000 in 1995. Much of the blocks in Yerevan which look "typically Soviet" were in fact given to the inhabitants for free after 1991.

How did I come to be writing this?

The day after the marvellous Mozart concert we were all packed up and ready to go to our new house in the "slum" area of Kond, the oldest inhabited part of one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. Armenia's first church used to be there until the Russians demolished it in the '50s...Opium of the people cannot be allowed to flourish. The only legal drugs being vodka and Communism. Our poor hound was attacked in the early hours (ironically enough in the English Park) by an overweight aggressive Labrador, receiving a tooth-hole in her side and a severe case of shock..and that was before the addition of the neck cone which makes her look like a psychedelic lampshade. Without the cone she licks the wound relentlessly.

Our move-in time to our stone-built house (next to a dilapidated mosque), was set for 1800hrs, a very quiet area and authentically ancient. Then the American landlord sent a WhatsApp message ninety minutes before H-Hour saying that his girlfriend's parents could not move out owing to their own home still having no water. Agghhh! Of course, it is difficult to say to your Outlaws that some eccentrics wish to pay rent in order to move into your house for seven weeks, a house indeed that was advertised on Air BnB as available, but there you are. Accordingly we set about finding somewhere else to go with Lancelot packed to the gunwales, rats on board, dog (with fetching neon yellow lampshade accessory), and cool box, not to mention a smoked fish in the passenger foot well!

With options costing £150 a night, or possessed of a kitchen that Sweeney Todd would not cook in dismissed we opted to head to the countryside, a beautiful single-story dwelling looking something between an Italian villa and Indian-Colonial bungalow (think Simla meets Lucca with a well-tended garden the size of a couple of tennis courts) some forty minutes (although only 14 km...good roads durch), outside town.

Just when you think things couldn't be bigger pain in the bum...we arrived in the village, over an hour away rather than the 30-40 minutes forecast. Looking like the First Guards Shock Army from Magdeburg had just swept through it this was a real dump of a place. As one of my guys might have said "Bootle on acid." The school has no glass in its windows, the post office is behind a series of bars that Pentonville would be proud of and the holes in the road are as wide in places as a Defender, look closely and you see the dogs have Crook-Locks. The mean streets of Bagariam...the pin in the map took us to a series of burned out shells; were we on the set of the Battle of The Bulge? Sadly, no!

Sending a message to the owner he sent us the correct coordinates, this time to the village of Bhagariyam - note the subtle difference which the Air BnB pin did not recognise. As we turned to the new location the lights failed...first time in almost six months! Eric the Electrical Elephant did his best and after a few minutes the lights came back on permanently. Don't even ask me why or how, it is a mystery why they failed in the first instance.

Arriving at the house were were met by a tremendously friendly and accommodating host who happened to see our booking whilst watering the garden - he lives in Yerevan. Without any messing we cracked a mug of tea and a shower before 2300 hrs. The following day...
 
...we returned to Yerevan, leaving the covert surveillance hound disguised as a prostrate standard lamp and the studying boy behind. Our mission: to find an apartment that does not cost the earth, big enough to not trip over each other and preferably near a park for the hound. A few other things beside, although as our reconnaissance showed, value for money does not figure. What we did not reckon with was the first property we looked at would be owned by a woman who has found God. If you have faith (and some of you probably do) fabulous, but please do n to lecture me on how we will all be punished on judgement day when I want to see how clean your house is. Also, remember to mention the family of refugees in the loft - it used to be part of the flat but a trap-door was put across the stairs in order to accommodate a homeless family from Nagorno-Karabakh. Now that is definitely an act of considerable charity; the family has lived rent-free for a year and might be moving out this week. Or equally, might not.

Now refugees have a hard time of it. Karabakh has been expunged of Armenians, the PM recently evacuating four key Armenian villages in order to avert further war with Azerbaijan, as the Russian "Peace Keepers" march out in order to join the sausage machine of doom in Ukraine. The average wage here is $300 a month for a forty hour week, so who the hell can afford to pay the exorbitant rents? That is a very good question.

The prices are pushed up by two main factors, the Armenian Diaspora sending vast funds to family and friends here in Armenia and the two hundred thousand Russians all create a self-perpetuating cycle of inflation, outstripped by demand. Half of the Russians have now gone elsewhere (approximately 50,000 to Serbia), but the expectation their spending has created has remained.

Having been condemned to hell and damnation we called to a day and headed out to our countryside retreat to regroup. That's when we opened the bottle of Georgian wine we were given by the oldies who insisted on feeding us. We'll crack it tomorrow we thought. Ha!

Yesterday we looked at three properties and came away disenchanted and a little disheartened. The rapacity of landlords with empty houses, some of which have been vacant for a months they told us, is shocking. They would rather rent for one month at $3000, with long periods of emptiness either side, than have constantly warm beds for a little less. Of course, they pay utilities and the maintenance of the place but every apartment or building we looked at was owned by an absentee landlord, most of whom live in the US. One lady claimed to be an interior designer and said she was available to "collaborate on projects around the world". Sh might yet I cannot see her having anything to do with interior design. Designing abbatoirs perhaps.

To that end we extended our stay here until Sunday and have a place to go in the city for a week, at the beginning of which our Main effort will be to find a property and resolve the clutch issues ("and the lights", says Eric) from a base in the city. Odin is with us!

Oh, did I mention that we missed the ballet because of our house hunting? Luckily it is on again next week
 
On the up-side it is still very much an adventure and every day is a school-day. The sun is in the sky, the temperature is 31 degrees (fifteen degrees higher than the seasonal average) and the defender Front-Flap-Air-Con is working fantastically, if the layer of dust on everything is to be believed. Oh, and we have only had two near-death experiences on the roads this week.
 
Especially for @Redcoat

Didcot power station at sunset!

A rival to Burger King?

Smoked fish anybody?

Pickled Veg?

Another “Defender”…

Strange statuary.

This time a gold one!

Souped-up Ladas- raised and alloy wheels.

I suppose a door is better than a goat!
 

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Oh dear. That's hard for you. Just when you need and want to settle-down for a few weeks. Is there an option to retreat to Georgia? Does it have to be Yeravan / Armenia?
 
Lancelot said:
Especially for @Redcoat

Didcot power station at sunset!

A rival to Burger King?

Smoked fish anybody?

Pickled Veg?

Another “Defender”…

Strange statuary.

This time a gold one!

Souped-up Ladas- raised and alloy wheels.

I suppose a door is better than a goat!
Click to expand...
Some wierd looking food there , I’d tackle the fish no probs , as for the defender 🤮, rather have the lada be more reliable 😂,what was behind FUKA DOOR 🤔, , loving the transcript 👍👍,regards STELLA 😂😂😂
 
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