Life in Armenia

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Life in Armenia

So I read that a diasporan from Glendale who loves his country (and presumably his people) did give a 100 dram tip to a taxi driver. And the taxi driver did point out to the (generous) diasporan that he gave too much money (25 cents too much).
If I read the story correctly, the taxi driver did much complaining & the diasporan found fault with this poor mans complaints. However the diasporan did find it commendable that the driver pointed out that he had received more than the fare (25 cents more).
An honest man does complain & bemoan his circumstance.
But he's honest.
That's gotta be worth a quarter.
Artashes

Well, I thought he was saying that the majority of Armenia's population needs to leave for Glendale asap, so that Armenia is free from the unsightly sound of the moaning masses and thus made bearable for decent non-moaning Armenians like himself (mostly diasporans doing their "good work" in Armenia): "The people who live here in Armenia ... should not have to be subjected to the incessant morass of the depressed masses".

[Federate]

Re: Life in Armenia

It's Time to Start Trusting

29 December 2013

I have lived in Armenia for nearly 14 years. It is a vastly different culture than the couple of others I have spent decades in - the American and the Norwegian. I am always working hard to separate what is done differently but well here from what I really believe could be done better here. I am constantly trying not to get tangled up in all the negativism about the immensely serious challenges this country faces, and also not tip over into choosing a path of naivete- focusing only on the positive - but then again, actually seeing the positive when it is there. There are plently of both the challenges and the positives in Armenia. The struggle is keeping the balance- seeing both.

I have heard a lot people say that one of the main issues facing Armenia is trust, or the lack of it. Trust between the government and the people, between the taxi driver and the passenger, between the tax inspectors and the shop owner- at all levels of society here, the trust is often lacking. This is based on painful experience through many years, meaning there is good reason not to trust.

What are the institutions that are least trusted in poll after poll of public opinion? The judiciary, the police, OVIR, the customs authoriites are always up there of those institutions least trusted.

So let me tell a couple of little stories.

When the foundation I started earlier this year was going to make its first export to the US in June of this year, I dreaded it. It was going to be an evil, corrupt, money-sucking experience, I was told by many. We packed the boxes and took them out to the air cargo terminal. Yes, there were some papers to fill out. Yes, there were some handling fees to pay. Evil? No. Corrupt? No evidence of that. It was a stressful experience because of two things: 1) We did not trust the system, and had heard awful things about it. and 2) We had not been through the system before and thus were not sure how things worked. The export experience went much better than expected. Trust in the system was created in us. We look forward to making many more exports of finely hand-crafted, Armenian made products.

Then just a couple days ago, that same foundation made its first import of a container of safety joints and eyes for toys, key tags and a lot of yarn for the projects. Again, we had heard horror stories of bribes, corruption, and more that we would meet. And we started the process expecting the worst. Again, yes, lots of papers, lots of time, many trips here and there to get one more stamp or one more paper. And we thought we had discovered a big problem that had cost us many hundreds of dollars extra- only to have that debunked yesterday because we had not understood how they calculated. Today the goods are in our warehouse. So again, the same issues of not trusting the system and not having gone through the system earlier had us seeing demons where there were none. Some trust established on the import side as well.

So let me say it. Export from Armenia is relatively painless and easy. Import to Armenia is relatively painless and easy.

Do not confuse those two statements with turning a blind eye to the many real and challenging issues that face this country. There are enough of those, and they are very real. But let's not see horrors where there are none. And when something functions largely as it should, let's recognize it as that.

We need to start trusting. Not naive trusting, but smart trusting.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/timothy-straight/its-time-to-start-trusting/10151917963738087

[Serjik]

Re: Armenia

When Im done with my studies I will go to Armenia to find work. At least say a few years and see what happens.

[Mher]

Re: Armenia

No transport fare hike in Yerevan on January 1

December 24, 2013 | 10:07

YEREVAN. – The public transportation fare in Armenia’s capital city Yerevan will not increase on January 1, 2014.

Yerevan Municipality Transport Department Chief Henrik Navasardyan told the aforesaid to Armenian News-NEWS.am.

As per Navasardyan, the commission, which was set up to discuss the public transportation fares in the city, was to convene a session at the end of December; but this session is rescheduled to January of next year.

The Yerevan city hall official informed that the public transport passenger flow is studied at present, and the session will be held once these studies are completed.

At the same time, however, Henrik Navasardyan does not believe that the fares will increase immediately after holding one session.

After the studies and the discussions, an agreement is expected to be reached on how much the public transportation fare will rise in Yerevan.

http://news.am/eng/news/186900.html

[Artashes]

Re: Life in Armenia

Cheq Zzvel?
BY BAIRAMIAN JULY 8, 2013 MALAISE OPTIMISM POSITIVITY TAXI DRIVER YEREVAN

Taxicabs are tabloids on wheels. Their drivers will tell you all sorts of stories, some true, some not. Yerevan’s taxi drivers aren’t as talkative as the ones in New York or pretty much anywhere else I’ve encountered them. They don’t seem to care much where you come from, only where you’re going. And if you’re not a local, you may be inclined, by fear or interest, to attentively watch the road as your vessel comes painfully close to running over several people during the length of your trip instead of striking up a conversation. But, like any taxi, if they talk, the information you glean, if true, can be a window to the society of which they are the transporters.

Taxi in Yerevan's Republic Square. Credit: Vigen Hakhverdyan
Taxi in Yerevan’s Republic Square. Credit: Vigen Hakhverdyan

Alas, we happened upon a jolly-looking-though-not-so-jolly young fella who, as soon as we sat in the car, started musing angrily about the people walking up and down Northern Avenue on a warm evening rather than spending their time in a park surrounded by trees and wildlife. I recently spent two weeks exploring wilderness throughout California; there wasn’t much question which side of that question I ended up on. We made a connection so now we had to talk – otherwise it’d be too awkward – so we did.

He must have noticed from my accent that I’m not from Yerevan, which isn’t hard to do. He asked me how long it had been since we’d come to Yerevan and I responded by saying, “one week.” He didn’t even flinch, immediately following up with, «դեր չեք զզվե՞լ» (“aren’t you disgusted, yet?”). It was a suggested eventuality in the form of a question. I wasn’t sure how to respond except by honestly saying that I wasn’t yet disgusted but sarcastically gave him the opportunity to tell us what was disgusting so we could become disgusted, too. He sounded off his laundry list of problems that I’d heard a thousand times. Nothing is ever new – except he was younger than the others, maybe in his 30s. I was hopeful that he was an exception, that he was the fake tabloid story. I didn’t have high hopes but I kept an open mind.

A few days later, I was speaking with a younger man, probably in his late 20s. We were doing some work together so he asked me what I was doing in Armenia and I told him that this trip was for a project but that it’d please me to move here in the future. He quipped back with the most common of the anti-Armenia retorts: «Երկիրը երկիր չի» (literally, “the country is not a country”, i.e. the country is a worthless xxxxhole that doesn’t deserve to be lived in by anybody who has half a brain) accompanied by him emphatically telling me not to move.

If a tabloid story could be considered a thesis, it would need to be validated by a few different sources before taking it seriously. I had one corroboration that Armenia was better off dead. Another taxi ride later, I might have been convinced.

Seated for a long car ride in another taxi, just barely beyond urban Yerevan, the complaints started flowing with unhindered fury. Everything from how much Kirk Kerkorian never wants to have anything more to do with Armenia to the condition of the roads to how villagers weren’t picking all their apricots thus letting them go to waste.

It’s a national pastime, really, complaining. I’m not at all surprised so many people want to leave. If I had to listen to that my whole life, I can’t imagine I would think that living anywhere, possibly even a dog shelter, was better than Armenia.

Thesis confirmed. Mass disdain, dismissal, disgust.

But I won’t accept it. The results are not final.

–

I had given that first taxi driver a tip when paying him, which he thought was a mistake and commendably pointed out. I told him it wasn’t a mistake. What I didn’t tell him was that I was sure that he would eventually find a way out and that I was especially pleased that I had contributed to him leaving by giving him that extra 100 drams so he could abandon this place he disdained so much.

He, or any of the people I have met, could have talked about better things. There are great things going on, too: Ayb High School, Luys Foundation, AYF Youth Corps, Civilnet, Green Bean, urbanlabEVN, Tumo Center for Creative Technologies, Dilijan International School of Armenia, Gyumri Information Technologies Center, ONEArmenia. And a plethora of others. If not talk about these things, perhaps the scenery, or the food, or that hundreds of children can run around soaking random people with water throughout the country, unattended by their parents, with nary a worry about their safety. We can talk about these things but we choose to focus on self-pity instead.

–

Young people who are supposed to compose the vivacious, sprightly, hopeful core of any country are repeating the same tired aphorisms of their parents. After many years of reflecting on this malaise, there is not one thing that I can point to that I consider valid: not that there are no jobs, not that the government is corrupt, not that the prices have gone up, not that the trash is not being collected. These problems aren’t exclusive to Armenia, it’s just that Armenians think that they are. What’s more, there is no interest by most in solving the problems. Somehow, invariably, the onus is always upon somebody else to figure things out and make them better. If that doesn’t happen, time to head for the hills (of Glendale).

Fact is, in Glendale, and whatever other place refugees (because that’s what people who leave a place they no longer feel at home are called) from Armenia settle outside of Armenia, this mentality hardly changes. The complaints remain. The nuclear physicist lamenting that he’s driving a taxi in Yerevan will be doing the same lamenting in Santa Monica except to someone who has a harder time understanding him.

–

America wasn’t perfect. People did xxxx. When there were no jobs, they created them. When the government was corrupt (I only wrote that in the past tense for effect), they organized and demanded accountability. When the prices went up, they toughed it out (side note: inflation is a well-known concept in this thing called economics and every time that the prices go up in Armenia, it’s not a governmental conspiracy, it might just happen, you know, just like that. That’s why I can’t buy a Double-Double for 50 cents as portrayed in those goddamn posters they have at every In-N-Out surely put there to mock you). When the trash wasn’t picked up, they threw it in the Hudson River and thus created the largest landfill in human history and called it New Jersey – and they even started living on it!

I’m only using America’s example because that’s the one with which I’m most familiar. But there are others. When English people realized how much England sucked, they didn’t relocate to Spain (although they decided to lay claim to a rock named Gibraltar just to piss them off), they conquered most of the world so they could create the most important city on earth and vacation in exotic places like India, Kenya, and the Americas without having to get a visa. When the Japanese realized they were living on a rocky strip of land that was useless in every way a normal country would need to operate, they started inventing things like samurai, Toyota, and sushi and are now able to buy whatever they want. Even Canadians, who long ago had to helplessly reconcile being an American territory, somehow resist the urge to join the mainland and keep working on being the most socialist state of the Union.

–

There is surely someone reading this and thinking that it’s so easy for me, a Diasporan, to so freely criticize the decisions of these suffering people from my comfortable Diasporan life (lol). First, I’m commentating on this as an interested party. That is, I live in Glendale and that is where at least 50% of emigrants from Armenia end up so I definitely have a chicken in this fight. Second, I’m commenting as an observer and a student of politics, history, and societies. Armenians need to realize that their problems are not unique and they are not the worst in the world and that if they’re going to leave Armenia en masse, they should be honest about the real reason they are doing so: they do not love the country. Until they’re in Glendale, of course, which is when the xxxxxing starts about America and reminiscing starts about the wonderfulness of Garabi Leech, Opera, and Cascade. Which is kind of like belittling and cursing your spouse until you get a divorce then, when you’re with your new partner, extolling your ex’s virtues.

Let’s put it all out on the table: when one loves something (a nation, perhaps) or someone, they commit to them, come hell or high water, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death does them part. If hell, sickness, and poverty dissuade you from your love, then it wasn’t love to begin with and it’s not love once you leave and profess it.

I hate to air dirty laundry but this is one of those things. Our nation has been overcome by naysayers and it needs to stop. The eternally depressed and depressing don’t get a pass because they think their life (and I guess no one else’s) blows a fat one.

The people who live here in Armenia who are working so hard to make this place better should not have to be subjected to the incessant morass of the depressed masses. Their work is already difficult. The young people who are optimistic about their country shouldn’t have their beliefs tested by the half-witted uninterested at such a young age. These people have to deal with unemployment, corruption, rising prices, sporadic trash cleanup. The last thing they need is someone telling them all the things that are going wrong in the country. After all, they must know – they are the ones trying to make it better.

Instead of asking if we are yet disgusted of this country, let’s ask another question: Բողոքելո՛ւց դեր չեք զզվե՞լ:

http://thegampr.com/2013/07/08/cheq-zzvel-3/

So I read that a diasporan from Glendale who loves his country (and presumably his people) did give a 100 dram tip to a taxi driver. And the taxi driver did point out to the (generous) diasporan that he gave too much money (25 cents too much).
If I read the story correctly, the taxi driver did much complaining & the diasporan found fault with this poor mans complaints. However the diasporan did find it commendable that the driver pointed out that he had received more than the fare (25 cents more).
An honest man does complain & bemoan his circumstance.
But he's honest.
That's gotta be worth a quarter.
Artashes

[Artashes]

Re: Life in Armenia

So I read that a 100 dram tip is given to a taxi driver from a person from Glendale.
So I check the exchange rate to see how much 100 drams is worth in US$.
-------- 25 cents -------
In the US we call that a quarter.
If I gave a quarter tip (twenty five cents) to anyone where tipping is appropriate it likely would be handed back to me with this refrain --- I think you need this more than me.
May I ask if anyone out there thinks that the small finger of a poor man is worth less than the small finger of a fortunate one?
Artashes

I love you, here is 25 cents.
Artashes

[Federate]

Re: Life in Armenia

lmao you called it

http://asbarez.com/116970/armenia-improves-position-in-corruption-index/

"Head of Transparency International’s Armenia office Varuzhan Hoktanyan, however, attributed the improvement to poor performances by a number of other countries rather than to Armenian authorities’ efforts to reduce corruption."

How can that be true if Armenia's score itself, different from it ranking, also improved from 34 to 36

o_O Are they becoming THAT predictable?

Mher, you're being too logical.

[Mher]

Re: Life in Armenia

Bracing myself for liberals to explain this as: "It's not that Armenia is improving, it's that everyone else is getting worse."

lmao you called it

http://asbarez.com/116970/armenia-improves-position-in-corruption-index/

"Head of Transparency International’s Armenia office Varuzhan Hoktanyan, however, attributed the improvement to poor performances by a number of other countries rather than to Armenian authorities’ efforts to reduce corruption."

How can that be true if Armenia's score itself, different from it ranking, also improved from 34 to 36

[Artashes]

Re: Life in Armenia

Cheq Zzvel?
BY BAIRAMIAN JULY 8, 2013 MALAISE OPTIMISM POSITIVITY TAXI DRIVER YEREVAN

Taxicabs are tabloids on wheels. Their drivers will tell you all sorts of stories, some true, some not. Yerevan’s taxi drivers aren’t as talkative as the ones in New York or pretty much anywhere else I’ve encountered them. They don’t seem to care much where you come from, only where you’re going. And if you’re not a local, you may be inclined, by fear or interest, to attentively watch the road as your vessel comes painfully close to running over several people during the length of your trip instead of striking up a conversation. But, like any taxi, if they talk, the information you glean, if true, can be a window to the society of which they are the transporters.

Taxi in Yerevan's Republic Square. Credit: Vigen Hakhverdyan
Taxi in Yerevan’s Republic Square. Credit: Vigen Hakhverdyan

Alas, we happened upon a jolly-looking-though-not-so-jolly young fella who, as soon as we sat in the car, started musing angrily about the people walking up and down Northern Avenue on a warm evening rather than spending their time in a park surrounded by trees and wildlife. I recently spent two weeks exploring wilderness throughout California; there wasn’t much question which side of that question I ended up on. We made a connection so now we had to talk – otherwise it’d be too awkward – so we did.

He must have noticed from my accent that I’m not from Yerevan, which isn’t hard to do. He asked me how long it had been since we’d come to Yerevan and I responded by saying, “one week.” He didn’t even flinch, immediately following up with, «դեր չեք զզվե՞լ» (“aren’t you disgusted, yet?”). It was a suggested eventuality in the form of a question. I wasn’t sure how to respond except by honestly saying that I wasn’t yet disgusted but sarcastically gave him the opportunity to tell us what was disgusting so we could become disgusted, too. He sounded off his laundry list of problems that I’d heard a thousand times. Nothing is ever new – except he was younger than the others, maybe in his 30s. I was hopeful that he was an exception, that he was the fake tabloid story. I didn’t have high hopes but I kept an open mind.

A few days later, I was speaking with a younger man, probably in his late 20s. We were doing some work together so he asked me what I was doing in Armenia and I told him that this trip was for a project but that it’d please me to move here in the future. He quipped back with the most common of the anti-Armenia retorts: «Երկիրը երկիր չի» (literally, “the country is not a country”, i.e. the country is a worthless xxxxhole that doesn’t deserve to be lived in by anybody who has half a brain) accompanied by him emphatically telling me not to move.

If a tabloid story could be considered a thesis, it would need to be validated by a few different sources before taking it seriously. I had one corroboration that Armenia was better off dead. Another taxi ride later, I might have been convinced.

Seated for a long car ride in another taxi, just barely beyond urban Yerevan, the complaints started flowing with unhindered fury. Everything from how much Kirk Kerkorian never wants to have anything more to do with Armenia to the condition of the roads to how villagers weren’t picking all their apricots thus letting them go to waste.

It’s a national pastime, really, complaining. I’m not at all surprised so many people want to leave. If I had to listen to that my whole life, I can’t imagine I would think that living anywhere, possibly even a dog shelter, was better than Armenia.

Thesis confirmed. Mass disdain, dismissal, disgust.

But I won’t accept it. The results are not final.

–

I had given that first taxi driver a tip when paying him, which he thought was a mistake and commendably pointed out. I told him it wasn’t a mistake. What I didn’t tell him was that I was sure that he would eventually find a way out and that I was especially pleased that I had contributed to him leaving by giving him that extra 100 drams so he could abandon this place he disdained so much.

He, or any of the people I have met, could have talked about better things. There are great things going on, too: Ayb High School, Luys Foundation, AYF Youth Corps, Civilnet, Green Bean, urbanlabEVN, Tumo Center for Creative Technologies, Dilijan International School of Armenia, Gyumri Information Technologies Center, ONEArmenia. And a plethora of others. If not talk about these things, perhaps the scenery, or the food, or that hundreds of children can run around soaking random people with water throughout the country, unattended by their parents, with nary a worry about their safety. We can talk about these things but we choose to focus on self-pity instead.

–

Young people who are supposed to compose the vivacious, sprightly, hopeful core of any country are repeating the same tired aphorisms of their parents. After many years of reflecting on this malaise, there is not one thing that I can point to that I consider valid: not that there are no jobs, not that the government is corrupt, not that the prices have gone up, not that the trash is not being collected. These problems aren’t exclusive to Armenia, it’s just that Armenians think that they are. What’s more, there is no interest by most in solving the problems. Somehow, invariably, the onus is always upon somebody else to figure things out and make them better. If that doesn’t happen, time to head for the hills (of Glendale).

Fact is, in Glendale, and whatever other place refugees (because that’s what people who leave a place they no longer feel at home are called) from Armenia settle outside of Armenia, this mentality hardly changes. The complaints remain. The nuclear physicist lamenting that he’s driving a taxi in Yerevan will be doing the same lamenting in Santa Monica except to someone who has a harder time understanding him.

–

America wasn’t perfect. People did xxxx. When there were no jobs, they created them. When the government was corrupt (I only wrote that in the past tense for effect), they organized and demanded accountability. When the prices went up, they toughed it out (side note: inflation is a well-known concept in this thing called economics and every time that the prices go up in Armenia, it’s not a governmental conspiracy, it might just happen, you know, just like that. That’s why I can’t buy a Double-Double for 50 cents as portrayed in those goddamn posters they have at every In-N-Out surely put there to mock you). When the trash wasn’t picked up, they threw it in the Hudson River and thus created the largest landfill in human history and called it New Jersey – and they even started living on it!

I’m only using America’s example because that’s the one with which I’m most familiar. But there are others. When English people realized how much England sucked, they didn’t relocate to Spain (although they decided to lay claim to a rock named Gibraltar just to piss them off), they conquered most of the world so they could create the most important city on earth and vacation in exotic places like India, Kenya, and the Americas without having to get a visa. When the Japanese realized they were living on a rocky strip of land that was useless in every way a normal country would need to operate, they started inventing things like samurai, Toyota, and sushi and are now able to buy whatever they want. Even Canadians, who long ago had to helplessly reconcile being an American territory, somehow resist the urge to join the mainland and keep working on being the most socialist state of the Union.

–

There is surely someone reading this and thinking that it’s so easy for me, a Diasporan, to so freely criticize the decisions of these suffering people from my comfortable Diasporan life (lol). First, I’m commentating on this as an interested party. That is, I live in Glendale and that is where at least 50% of emigrants from Armenia end up so I definitely have a chicken in this fight. Second, I’m commenting as an observer and a student of politics, history, and societies. Armenians need to realize that their problems are not unique and they are not the worst in the world and that if they’re going to leave Armenia en masse, they should be honest about the real reason they are doing so: they do not love the country. Until they’re in Glendale, of course, which is when the xxxxxing starts about America and reminiscing starts about the wonderfulness of Garabi Leech, Opera, and Cascade. Which is kind of like belittling and cursing your spouse until you get a divorce then, when you’re with your new partner, extolling your ex’s virtues.

Let’s put it all out on the table: when one loves something (a nation, perhaps) or someone, they commit to them, come hell or high water, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death does them part. If hell, sickness, and poverty dissuade you from your love, then it wasn’t love to begin with and it’s not love once you leave and profess it.

I hate to air dirty laundry but this is one of those things. Our nation has been overcome by naysayers and it needs to stop. The eternally depressed and depressing don’t get a pass because they think their life (and I guess no one else’s) blows a fat one.

The people who live here in Armenia who are working so hard to make this place better should not have to be subjected to the incessant morass of the depressed masses. Their work is already difficult. The young people who are optimistic about their country shouldn’t have their beliefs tested by the half-witted uninterested at such a young age. These people have to deal with unemployment, corruption, rising prices, sporadic trash cleanup. The last thing they need is someone telling them all the things that are going wrong in the country. After all, they must know – they are the ones trying to make it better.

Instead of asking if we are yet disgusted of this country, let’s ask another question: Բողոքելո՛ւց դեր չեք զզվե՞լ:

http://thegampr.com/2013/07/08/cheq-zzvel-3/

So I read that a 100 dram tip is given to a taxi driver from a person from Glendale.
So I check the exchange rate to see how much 100 drams is worth in US$.
-------- 25 cents -------
In the US we call that a quarter.
If I gave a quarter tip (twenty five cents) to anyone where tipping is appropriate it likely would be handed back to me with this refrain --- I think you need this more than me.
May I ask if anyone out there thinks that the small finger of a poor man is worth less than the small finger of a fortunate one?
Artashes

[Mher]

Re: Life in Armenia

Bracing myself for liberals to explain this as: "It's not that Armenia is improving, it's that everyone else is getting worse."

"Or Armenia is the best in CIS? that's nothing to brag about, why compare it to those countries"