Fashion Report from Vanadzor

If you want to fit in you have to wear tight black jeans, tucked into 5-inch stilleto boots, and then navigate through the icy rubble without even looking down. Since I can''t even walk around my apartment without tripping I am setting a new trend of Frankenstein snow boots, and hanging onto Yerets Blunck for dear life. The weather in Vanadzor is the kind where, if you don''t like it, just wait a couple of hours and it will change. One day can be sunny, snowy, rainy, windy, and whatever else there is weather-wise. Sunshine seems to win out most often. Vanadzor is the kind of place that smiles through its tears.

I was recovering recently from a fall in the apartment--I tripped on a raggedy piece of linoleum and fell straight onto my hind end and couldn''t walk very well for a few days because the whole area which would be sitting on a saddle, if I had a horse, was so sore. That's enough--I never did want to be an old lady who talks about her health. One night my reward for suffering in silence & working hard even when I didn't feel good was that we laid in bed and watched The Half Blood Prince and Angels and Demons on the computer. The Elders had watched 6 movies on New Year's Day and we didn''t get to because we were visiting people, although I had popped them 8 batches of popcorn and sent along a bag of candy, (which was a good thing, as they had forgotten to go food shopping, and couldn''t find any open stores ) so we borrowed two of their movies and it was fun. Our rules as seniors are pretty lenient!

My least two favorite topics have been covered so far--health and weather. Sorry.

The View From Our Window

This morning I took a bath with a big pan of drinking water I had heated on the stove. It wasn't too bad. It's not that much worse than every other day when water actually comes out of the tap, and there's enough pressure to ignite the scary old Russian water heater. There's something a little terrifying about having open flames at eye level, while you''re standing in the tub. Every morning I find myself humming "and I must go & fetch the water" as I fill bottles and buckets for the day. In the spring and summer our view will be very pretty, and by then we'll be used to being Armenians, though that is actually impossible because of the concept of TRADITION---which I will write about some day, because I think about it every day.

In Georgia I felt like I had to have a huge sense of benign irony, or I couldn't have survived the puzzling and completely baffling encounters with Georgian culture which kept me constantly off-balance. For instance, in both of these countries one is continually meeting people with degrees in engineering and/or economics. And in most---in fact all--- cases they are unemployed in either field. And both countries could really use some good engineering (because absolutely nothing works right-----it would take too many pages to describe doors that don't close, locks that don''t work, electrical outlets that come out of the wall when you pull the plug, & my favorite, sinks that always have a standing puddle of water because they aren't engineered to slope toward the drain) and some good sound economic policy, although I'm not sure there's such a thing in the entire world. But that's stuff that doesn't matter. Even a bucket bath doesn't matter, once you're dried off and dressed.

What does matter right now is that we are living in the midst of the most quaint, charming, unaffected, picturesque, uncomplicated, simple, direct and loving people I've ever met. They love to laugh, they are genuine and unsophisticated. They are generous and grateful, and, when it comes to the members of the branch, they really get it in terms of the Gospel. It's very humbling.