Newman, I'm in Armenia because there's no place I'd rather be at the moment. I came over here on an ASU summer program, decided I wanted to stay, had the good fortune of stumbling into a job, and that's that.
And don't think of Armenia as an intimidatingly foreign place. It's Europe. It's not Western Europe, of course, but it's still Europe. And with the exception of what's been going on recently, it's an extremely safe place to live.
Although, incidentally, I did sort of get attacked yesterday. My dad was in town visiting, so a couple of my co-workers and I set up an outing to a historic site, a 1600-year-old monastery about an hour outside Yerevan. And on our way back, as we were passing by a small village, our car was accosted by four boys (probably age 13 or so). They were just standing on the road, spaced out so that we couldn't pass through without running over at least one of them - as far as we could tell, their goal was simply to force us to buy flowers from them. My friend who was driving managed to disperse them a little by inching the car forward ever so slowly... but that didn't shake the resolve of the boy who was hanging on to the front of the car. So my friend Alex (big, intimidating guy) got out of the car and scared him off. The boy returned a few seconds later, armed with a cattle prod in each hand, trying to stab Alex before he could get back in the car and, having failed at that, trying to bash the car as we drove away. Interesting experience.
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