Lightening from clear skies: In memoriam: Teta Kata and Phil Klein

On parent knees, a naked new-born child,
Weeping thou sat’st while all around thee smiled;
So live, that sinking in thy last long sleep,
Calm thou mayst smile, while all around thee weep.

Sir William Jones (1746–1794), from Persian
____________________________________________________

I’ve only read about these situations. Within a half hour Thursday evening, I’d learned of the passing of two very lovely and exceptional people who were for countless reasons very dear to me.

The first was my grandmother’s sister “Teta Kata,” Aunt Kata in English. He name was Katarína, and Kata was the shortened version. The thing I remember about her most are the long summers we spent together in our cabin in the Low Tatra mountains in Slovakia.

One summer, Teta Kata’s granddaughter Ema, who is the same age as me and therefore made an ideal playmate, was at the cabin with us. Being in some peculiar childhood development stage, Ema thought she was a dragon and therefore had to sit on me and choke me. My Babi and Teta Kata had their hands full to keep me alive.

During the summers in Braväcovo my aunt, a botanical artist, not only went for long walks to sketch the picturesque vistas of the mountains, she also collected different species of flowers, plants and mushrooms and painted them in the cabin. One summer when I was little, she brought a poisonous plant to be painted for some book on botany and left it on the kitchen table in a vase. The plant consisted of a tall stalk that ended with four large leaves growing into a cross and revealing a large round blue berry in the middle. I ravenously loved blueberries and thinking that’s what the berry was, I ate it. Luckily, my mother noticed the missing berry and my soiled mouth and immediately had me throw up and drink some milk afterwards.

Of course, my memories of Teta Kata are not limited to my near-death experiences. I remember her as a beautiful, always fashionably but comfortably dressed old lady. She always presented a voracious intellect, sharp sense of humor and passionate love for her own and for my grandmother’s grandchildren. I remember the family gatherings at her garden near the Devín castle, where we played musical chairs in a tangible atmosphere of sweet life, love and family closeness.

During my childhood it was fashionable to have a so called “memory book,” which was a notebook with white pages where one’s friends and family drew pictures for the book’s owner to remember them by. These memory books were a source of great pride among ten-year-old girls, and we always carried them around looking through them and trying to outdo each other in the number of drawings in our books. When it was Teta Kata’s turn to draw something for me, as an artist, she painted a scene of a Greek coastal village on a piece of special paper, which she then glued into my memory book. None of the kids who looked into my memory book believed this painting was for real.

For every birthday, or other special occasion, Teta Kata always gave me a painting. As a kid, I was not able to appreciate it, but my Mom treasured these paintings and they are with her to this day for safekeeping. As a grown up, I proudly hang the painting of a magnolia flower she gave to Daniel and me for our wedding on a prominent wall in our home wherever it is.

My Babi who is a few years younger then my aunt is devastated. Teta Kata and she had always been the best of friends, which I believe was also visible in how alike they looked. With their similar way of dressing, same height and almost the same face and haircut, everyone thought they were twins. When I project the images of these two remarkable women in my mind, they represent authentic matriarchs and women I would like to be like one day. Now one of them is gone.

ZZZ

I learned of Dr. Phil Klein’s passing a half hour after I found out about my aunt’s death. I could not believe my eyes when I read the email. I had just written to him that morning thanking him for the praise of my blog, describing the Jewish community here and telling him I was looking forward to reading his writings about the happenings in Kesher Israel he was intending to start soon.

Always with a quiet voice, an incredibly clever, stinging but well meant wittiness; this fragile and gentle man made quite an impression on me, as I am sure he did on scores of others. I first met Phil and his charming wife Charlotte on a spring Shabbos morning after services at Kesher Israel shul, four years ago. I apparently made such a fantastic impression on them that they not only decided to visit Daniel and me in Slovakia to attend the famous New Years concert in Vienna with us, but also offered their fine-looking garden to us to hold our wedding ceremony. For logistics reasons this fell through, but we had the honor of Hakohen Phil recite the first two of the Sheva Brachos at our wedding.

During our short stint in Washington between postings in Bratislava and The Gambia, we were honored to be invited for a Shabbos meal during Phil and Charlotte’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. We heard many touching stories about Phil’s life on an upstate New York farm, Phil’s and Charlotte’s meeting and dating along with the viewing of pictures of their gorgeous wedding. The fact that they shared these intimate memories with us, along with their son Jonathan and daughter in law Shulamis, made me feel like a million dollars, as these fine people included us in their family.

While in The Gambia, I corresponded with Phil about interesting facts about the strange country we lived in, for he was always hungry for scientific, geographic or historic facts.

We had the pleasure to share several Shabbos meals with The Kleins over the past year in Washington. I always felt uplifted when I saw Phil coming to services on Shabbos morning, always very dignified with his cane and hat, above all when it was hot and he was sporting a striped black (or navy) and white crepe suit. For me, Phil represented the perishing race of New World gentlemen.

For many years, Phil had been the Baal Tokeah at Kesher Israel. Daniel remarked that he would have started blowing the shofar for the congregation starting tomorrow morning for the month of Elul heading to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This year, I can imagine that Phil in his striped crepe suit will sound the tekiahs, teruahs and shvarims for the assembled host in shamayim.

The Kleins were one of the last people we visited on our last day in the US, several hours before boarding our flight to Armenia, July 25, 2006.

What we eat

Many of my Jewish friends ask as their first question about our new country: “What do you eat over there?” Nu, it’s worse than I thought it would be, but we will survive. Before our final decision to take the position in Armenia two years ago, we spoke with the local Chabad shliach and about a month before our departure, we were lucky enough to have met him in Washington where he was attending a conference. On both occasions, we discussed many of the Jewish issues that naturally arise in places with small, unorganized communities. In particular, we discussed in depth the four products that have to be made or processed by Jews in order to be kosher: meat, milk, cheese and wine. (Bread is another questionable product, although considerably less of an issue, since in The Gambia I was used to making my own.)

The Rabbi assured us that everything is available: He said he brings in a shochet from Russia who slaughters cows and lambs and he himself still slaughters chickens; even though bird flu is affecting all the surrounding countries, miraculously it has avoided Armenia. He said he goes to a farm where he milks cows (chalav yisrael), watches local people make yogurt and adds rennet to the milk to make cheese (gvinas yisrael). He also assured us that we could get kosher grape products.

Upon our arrival in Armenia, the Rabbi kindly hosted us for Shabbos meals and supplied us with a few items to survive on for a while. These included a wheel of local cheese, two jars of preserves, a jar of peanut butter and a bottle of barbecue sauce proudly bearing an OU symbol. I asked about the possibility of getting some milk and yogurt (which I eat daily for its beneficial acidophilus bacteria). The Rabbi surprisingly answered that it is not possible to get yogurt and that when he gets milk, it is seventy liters at a time and therefore it’s not gonna happen. When Daniel asked him about the possibility of chalav stam, the Rabbi first didn’t know what Dan was talking about. Then, after an explanation about government dairy regulations acting as an assurance for kashrut, he denied the existence of the whole idea.

Although the heter of chalav stam has been applied to many developed countries, such as the US, it is not necessarily possible everywhere. Put simply, not all countries have laws (and/or proper enforcement of them) requiring that a product labeled “milk” must necessarily contain cow’s milk or that only cows are present on a farm from where the milk comes. Lubavitch Chassidim famously reject the notion of chalav stam, requiring them to eat chalav yisrael or no milk at all. As I believe in having an open mind within halachic limits, and find it unhealthy to live without dairy products, we were forced to do our own research.

First, we talked to the local US Department of Agriculture representative, who works with several local dairy farms who told us that there is no governmental supervision over the dairy industry. Even if there were laws, he said, there would definitely be no enforcement of them. So, Armenian milk products are basically not available to us. Since in the supermarkets, we’ve seen plenty of dairy products from Russia and because of the many Jews in Russia as well, we decided to try to find a list of kosher products from Russia on the Internet. And it delivered. We now have a ten-page list that not only assures us that chalav stam is applicable to Russian milk, it also lists a bunch of yogurts and even some cheese spreads from there that are kosher.

When we came to Armenia a little over three weeks ago, we brought a cooler full of frozen ground beef and chicken breasts with us. So far, we have not been forced to ask the Rabbi to supply us with the beef that is available. Surprisingly, he said chicken is not shechted here nowadays because of the bird flu threat. I still don’t understand why a month ago he told us that chicken was available, when now it isn’t. We were able to acquaint ourselves with the local beef over our first three Shabbosos here, during which the Rabbi’s family kindly and thoughtfully hosted us. At all six meals, after a delicious appetizer course of fish and salads, we were served similar food: chunks of fatty, stringy and bony beef with either potatoes or kasha. Obviously, the Russian shochet is not much of a butcher.

We do not have our kitchen yet, so we are making the most of what we can out of the embassy-provided welcome kit. It contains several pots and pans, basic utensils, plates, mugs, glasses and plastic containers. As the welcome kit was previously used, the only option we had was to find a large rock and kasher whatever was kasherable. Of course, we did not venture out the very first day to find a large rock in this world capital. Hungry and without a kosher kli, I took the only thing available and made some instant couscous … in a glass vase. For the past month, I’ve been cooking with two pots and a spatula. I’ve kinda gotten used to it and don’t really know what I’ll do next week when my eleven large boxes of kitchenware are due to arrive.

Making couscous in a vase.

Armenia is famous for its produce especially during the summer when all the heavenly tasting fruits and vegetables arrive to the local shukaner (markets). The very first Sunday we were here, we ventured to the biggest (and as reported to us, cheapest) covered market called the “Goom” and the following Sunday we explored the second biggest market “Prospect” shuka. Everything is available there from fresh fruits and vegetables to dried fruit and nuts, meat products, bakery products, herbs, spices, eggs, flowers and fish.

The "Goom".

Fruit display at the "Prospect".

The fruit and vegetables here are unbelievable, juicy and full of real flavor that I haven’t tasted since my childhood in Czechoslovakia. We didn’t even bother asking the Rabbi for wine or grape juice for sacramental purposes. As grapes are abundant in colors and flavors to no end, I just bought the juiciest and tastiest and made my own grape juice. Yummy!

Making grape juice.

As during the winter, fruit and vegetables are expensive and sparse, canning and freezing is recommended. Not having a job, I rose to the task and froze two kilos each of strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and peaches.

Washing the peaches and cooking sugar syrup.

Adding citric acid to cut up peaches.

Final product.

I have also attempted to make dill pickles. The first batch rotted probably because it was in a plastic container (and I left it out in 40 degrees Celsius heat for two weeks). Now I am trying to make a second one; the pickles are in a glass jar and will stay on the balcony for only five days.

Making pickles.

I get fish at the shuka as well. It is not as cheap as it was in Tha Gambia, where we lived on the ocean and by definition, the local fishes aren’t saltwater fish either. We get freshwater fish from Armenia’s lakes, especially the biggest one, Lake Sevan. First, I was a bit worried about freshwater fishes as they sometimes tend to taste “muddy,” as I define their flavor. So far, we’ve only tried one type, in Armenian ishkhan, a species of trout, but once my chest freezer arrives, I look forward to sampling the other “fins and scales” options. I went to the fish market in The Gambia often enough to learn the art of filleting fish from the local fish dealers. I never actually tried it in The Gambia, but the skill has come in handy here since, when you buy the fish, you get it whole, with the skin and scales and fins and head and tail. They do degut it though. I brought the fish home and dealt with it:

Meet ishkhan.

Before …

… and after.

Yes, it has fins and scales (on the knife).

A word about a special Armenian bread called “lavash.” It is paper thin and huge and one uses it to wrap foodstuffs with it: cheese, vegetables, cooked meat, fish, whatever you want. Though it has a neutral taste like pita and is so thin you can almost see through it, it is amazingly impermeable to wetness and quite strong (more than a laffa, for instance). As this bread is only made with flour and water and has to be baked in a special oven intended solely for the baking of lavash, the local Rabbi deems it as kosher; we are so happy. Lavash lasts forever in an airtight Ziploc bag in the fridge, and when it gets a bit tough, you just sprinkle some water on it, reheat it and it is fresh again. It is also ridiculously cheap, for a kilo of lavash you pay 300 Armenian Dram, which is the equivalent of 80 cents.

Dan with lavash.

No, there are no kosher restaurants in Armenia. Just like in The Gambia, my kitchen functions as the local kosher Chinese, Indian, Italian restaurant or just a simple typical American diner. Well, not so typical. We can only eat meat on Shabbos, so our supply of meat lasts until Rosh Hashanah, when we will restock in London. During the week, we only eat vegetarian food. The vegetables here are delicious, but there aren’t many types to choose from: tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, zucchini, eggplant, carrots, onions, garlic and potatoes. That’s it. There is a variety of legumes available as well, along with rice and pasta. Everyday I cook up some sort of a combination of the above: stuffed zucchini, ratatouille with rice, bean salad or whatever combination my imagination creates. It has happened on several occasions that my darling, hungry husband, after glimpsing the food, says, “What the hell is that?” However, to my credit, he always finishes what is dished up and asks for seconds.

A mystery: Matza makes me terribly sick, so I do not eat it during Pesach (with the exception of what’s required at the Seder and a k’zayis for each Yom Tov meal). Zehu. Otherwise I’ll spend the whole of Chol HaMoed in the vicinity of a toilet. When we first came to the embassy, people from several sections started giving us boxes of matza they’d been saving for us since April when someone from the Jewish community dropped some off at the Consular Section. I’ve been eating matza for a month now, at least every other day, and I’m fine. Is it true then, that not the actual matza, but the holiday of Pesach itself embodies the infamous revenge of God on the Jew folk?

Armenia vs. The Gambia: Electricity and running water

Our building in Armenia is new and for some strange reason the builders did not consider the installation of a generator while it was being built. Therefore, when there is a power outage (which occasionally happens here, even in a country with a fully-functioning nuclear power plant), there is no emergency power source. This is the second time I am without electricity and water for more then four hours within two weeks. In The Gambia, the Embassy provided and maintained our own generator. Here in Armenia, the Embassy provides generators and water tanks to people who live in houses, while the rest … are screwed.

[Battery is dead… ]

[Four hours later...]

I got lot of reading done in the sweltering apartment over the last few hours. I forgot that you also can’t flush the toilet when there is no electricity. Here we don’t have our pool to draw water from.

The Embassy supplies us with fancy security features to protect us, vulnerable US diplomats and our property on foreign soil. We have a radio, a safe, an alarm system and security lights outside the apartment. Last week we had a five-hour power outage during the night. It was pitch black, and the radio died within two hours as it was not fully charged. If something had happened, God forbid, we’d be dead and no one would even know we were in danger. So much for that. As the power came back, I got a call from the General Services Officer who proudly announced that the problem is not with the building, but with the city power supply. Not wanting to be “difficult,” I didn’t release what was on my tongue: “It is the building’s problem and therefore the Embassy’s problem that they don’t have a generator.” The Embassy Housing Handbook features a warning: “A power failure is NOT considered an emergency.” Following this statement, they forgot to put in parentheses: “Die, you bastards, die!”

In The Gambia, besides the generator, we had two water lines. One came into the house from the two 5,000 liter water tanks fed by the city water supply. When we drained the tanks during those periods when a high number of tourists in the country used up all the city water, the Embassy crew came with a water bowser and filled us up. The second water line was a tap coming from the ground next to our car park. We used it to water our garden. It was separate from the house line in order for us not to waste the precious water for the house on plants. This water line worked sometimes when the first didn’t and vice versa. One time when the house line didn’t work, but the garden line was spouting water, we dragged the garden hose in through the kitchen window so I could wash the dirty dishes.

Armenia vs. The Gambia: Furniture

Normally, the Embassy provides basic furnishings for all diplomatic residences. At some posts, the US government employees are responsible for furnishing their homes by themselves. We were lucky enough, that Armenia, like The Gambia and Slovakia, is a post that furnishes our homes for us. That is what we thought until we arrived in our apartment for the first time. The Bible of the General Services Section entitled, “The Housing Handbook,” states: “The Government provides and maintains quarters with basic furnishings and equipment in serviceable condition. A sample of furnishings is listed in the Furniture and Appliances list section on pages 24-31.”

The Embassy pays a higher than usual rent for our apartment, because it is furnished by the Italian company that manages this building. The company also owns a nearby hotel and the furniture pieces provided by them are clearly surplus from the hotel. Oversized closets even feature a sticker welcoming us to the Congress Hotel and suggesting security precautions for our valuable personal items. Why, thank you. The “Italian furniture” (which, by the looks of it, was in reality made in Poland twenty years ago) is made of light colored “wood” with white pressboard. The Embassy furnished the rest of the apartment with dark, cherry wood Drexel Heritage furniture. It’s a lovely match. When we requested changing the furniture to all cherry wood – much more practical then the modern Italian – the Embassy sent their housing coordinator to go over our list of requests.

My Italian/Polish furnished workplace


By the time she left, I was ready to kill this woman. During her whole visit, she was patronizing and talked me as if this was my first post and I didn’t know squat about how the system works. While in The Gambia, I had done her job as a part of my extensive portfolio. When I asked about matched furniture, all of her sentences started with a whiny, “But you know, Adela, this is not suitable and appropriate…” She informed me that I should not expect to change any of the furniture because we already have the pieces; therefore, why should the Embassy replace them? She reminded me that the Embassy pays an exuberant rent for the Italian/Polish furniture, and it is not their responsibility to make our residence comfortable or neat. In the end, I was told that we’d have to wait until all the newly arrived families chose what furniture they wanted to add or exchange in their residences and then they’d see what’s left for us. I just can’t wait.

Why don’t we complain? It is a known fact that if you complain about anything in the US Department of State, you don’t achieve anything and you’ll gain a reputation of a “complainer.” Therefore, we have to smile and hope that our patience and positive attitude will get us what we want.

In The Gambia, our house, painted pink on the outside, was furnished with light Drexel furniture inside. We were the only house in the housing pool with furniture of this color and therefore had the monopoly of this type of furniture from the warehouse.

Armenia vs. The Gambia: Housing

While in The Gambia we lived in a large house, in Armenia we were allotted a small apartment in a five-story building. An Italian company manages the building and it is supposed to be the best address in town. It is supposed to be sturdy enough to withstand an earthquake (I don’t want to find out whether this is true) and the apartments have “modern European equipment and furnishings.” That means a tiny kitchen with tiny appliances and beautiful modern bathrooms that are tiny and have only shower stalls, no cabinets, and there is no way in hell you could fit a washer and a dryer in there.

Therefore, the ingenious workers of our Embassy decided to turn one of the three bedrooms in our apartment into a “laundry room/study,” i.e., beside the washer and the dryer, they plopped a desk, a chair and a single bookcase for the entire apartment in that room. Noisy dryer and detergent fumes from the washer create a perfect work environment; in fact, if all of the employees of US Embassies all over the world had them in their offices, the US government’s goals would be achieved successfully, in no time. We decided to make the second small bedroom a guest room and a study and the third bedroom, shamefully ruined, remains a laundry room along with storage space. In The Gambia, we had a separate small building alongside, but detached from the house, for laundry, storage and bathroom for the household staff.

A word about the kitchen and how much the Embassy leadership cares about the comfort of their employees: In The Gambia we had a huge kitchen about which we fondly joked it doubled as a dance floor. We had numerous cabinets, an American fridge and a separate huge freezer and an American electric stove and large oven. There was no dishwasher due to the unpredictable water situation.

The kitchen in our apartment here in Armenia had originally nine cabinets (three less then our one bedroom apartment in DC), one drawer and about a foot of counter space. When we arrived here, I opened them to gauge their size. To my horror, one of the cabinets housed a boiler, the second a strange dish drying contraption above the sink, the third revealed a chimney-like orange pipe that assumedly passes fumes from the stove to the outside. The fourth was a dishwasher and the fifth is a cabinet under the sink with the water pipe in it. The sixth is a fridge and the seventh the freezer. Only the eight and ninth, one above and one below the counter were fit to store kitchenware.

As I have an Italian last name and a husband with some Italian roots and undeniable love for Italian food (especially cheese) and culture, I decided to use these facts to my advantage in my negotiations with the Italian super of our building. I met Francesco in our apartment when he came to solve the issue of the gas flames of the stove melting the cabinets above it. I put on an Italian accent and told him I was a REHN-na, and my husband is Italian from Mi-LAH-no and we cook-a and bake-a a lot; I have many utensils-a, which will not fit into the two available cabinets-a. It worked. Gazing upon my figure, Francesco must have remembered his MAH-ma and sympathized. The next day his workers came to raise the cabinets on one side of the kitchen, transform the drying cabinet into a regular one and add more cabinets and counter space to the other side.

The Italian thing turned out to be very bucolic. Francesco gave me cabinets and counters so I could prepare food. The urban side of Italy oozing with absolute style vanished with my accent of an Italian peasant woman caring more about fresh manicotti for her husband than Prada boots and Armani sunglasses for herself.

I now have five more cabinets, four large drawers and four more feet of counter. Of the “Italian” cabinetry, the original nine cupboards are very stylish and modern with white doors and a marble countertop. The new ones are green with a wooden counter, evoking more of an air of rural Tuscany than high-street Milan.

“Welcome to our kitchen design warehouse; you can choose from these models today.”

When Dan and I first met the Ambassador’s deputy in his office, he pointed to the door and said that it is always open for any of our concerns. Delighted by the kindness of this man, we decided immediately to address one major concern that still hung over us in our kitchen: The oven is not “European size,” but a half of it, which means it is a third of an American oven and it corresponds to the size of something manufactured by the like of Fisher Price. As soon as we said this and expressed our concern of having to bake our daily bread in this oversized toaster, he raised himself up in his chair, and, like a cobra ready to strike, reddened in the face and yelled at us: “Congratulations, you just made a terrible first impression, you are complainers. This is a twenty-five percent hardship post and this is what we have here. If you cannot live with that why did you even bother coming here?” Stunned and trying to save the situation, albeit all freaked out, I explained that while we are coming from a twenty percent hardship post where we had had an US oven, if it’s not possible to change the situation, we’d deal with it. This evidently calmed the beast, especially when I abruptly changed the subject and asked about his children. He sat back and was friendly again. I was happy to have made a new “friend.”

Differences and similarities between The Gambia and Armenia

As I am sitting here without electricity and water, this topic seems more than appropriate. The computer claims I have an hour and thirty-seven minutes remaining on the life of the battery; let’s see how much can be done within that time. The challenge is on.

Armenia Online

It wasn’t even a week after our arrival to Armenia and I had a DSL line installed in our new home. Daniel has Internet access at work and I, at home, am cut off from the world without it. The Embassy has an employee association, which we immediately joined as they offer a wide range of services that we wanted to use. There is a commissary with US grocery products, DVD rental, gym, tailor, hairdresser, dry-cleaning, etc.

They also offer the service of installing and providing a DSL in those diplomatic residences in which the quality of the phone lines allows them to do so. We are lucky enough to live in a newly erected building and the phone lines are pristine. An embassy employee, Avetik, came to our house, tested the phone jacks and enlightened me that we already have a DSL line. It was in the room with the washer and dryer and plastic shelves for storage. I propped the laptop on the ironing board and communicated with the world from there.

The next day Avetik called me up and said that in order to have the line switched to the office/guestroom, I have to call Fyodor, who is in charge of telecommunications in our building. With my broken Russian I spoke to Fyodor over the phone, he had no idea who I was or what I was talking about, but I got him to promise that he would come after two o’clock. I was utterly surprised when the doorbell rang at 2:30. It was two of Fyodor’s assistants. This time in Armenian, I explained what I needed. They did not get it and called Fyodor. Then they unscrewed the cover of the phone jack they fiddled with some thin colorful cables and in ten minutes, the line was in the office. The Internet worked, but since they did this, our other phone lines are fuzzy. You can’t have everything, I guess.

Armenia is located in the southwestern corner of Asia. To the south it neighbors Iran, to the east Azerbaijan; to the north Georgia and to the west Turkey. The border with Iran is open and Armenia has a warm and friendly relationship with it. The Turkish border is closed due to the fact that Turkey refuses to admit that the Turks annihilated a million and half Armenians. The border with Azerbaijan is closed because of the war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Although there is a ceasefire, there is occasional shooting across this border and the two involved nations hate each other. A lot.

Armenia and Georgia have a good, but cold relationship because Armenia has good ties with Russia. Georgia hates Russia. Above all it is because Russia supports the struggles for independence of the separatist territories of Georgia (Abkhazia, South Ossetia) and opposes Georgia’s newly found warmth with the West.

How does the political situation in the Caucasus influence my life? Since Russia shares a border with Georgia, it has space for mischief. Sometimes when the Russians are chasing Chechen rebels in the Pankisi Gorge, they “accidentally” enter Georgian territory. This pisses the Georgians off. Sometimes someone digs a pit somewhere near that border and punctures a hole into the oil or gas pipeline. The Georgians have to fix it and, unfortunately, Armenia doesn’t have gas either in the meantime.

Last week, a day after I had my DSL painstakingly installed, the fiber-optic cable was mysteriously damaged in two places in Georgia. Since the Armenian Internet network is routed through Georgia and it will take 10 to 15 days to repair it, until then I, an innocent (?) American, am left with a very slow Internet connection, if at all.

Radio Free Europe Online, Published: 2006-08-07 11:59
Two unrelated accidents disrupting a fiber-optic cable running through Georgia on August 4 and 5 sparked a widespread Internet outage in Armenia, Caucasus Press and Arminfo reported. The first outage was caused after a fiber-optic cable was damaged near the Georgian town of Kutaisi and led to a six-hour shutdown of Internet service throughout Armenia. A second incident the next day sparked a second outage after an undersea segment of the fiber-optic cable was damaged in the Black Sea. The Armenian telecommunications sectors remains vulnerable to external disruptions to its fiber-optic network, which is linked to the Georgian and Iranian networks to the north and south respectively. RG

View from our back balcony: these telephone cables tied to the trees lead to our building. Maybe it's better that the ones in Georgia got damaged...

Duct tape wallet and Radio Yerevan jokes

Day 13 in Yerevan, Armenia. Still without a job or any prospects of having one any time soon. I am pretty much bored out of my wits and also, can’t deny it, a bit depressed. I display classic symptoms of the first few months at a new post: sleeping past noon, still in my pajamas, not wanting to get out of the house, roaming aimlessly around the apartment either staring at piles of stuff still without a place to be put away or looking out of the window to see if the smog allows me to see Mt. Ararat. It’s not visible today. Checking emails, hoping I’ll have a full Inbox, but too lazy/depressed to answer those I have received. I make a promise to myself to do at least one creative thing a day and I decide to make a duct tape wallet – an intriguing idea I get from Google’s “How to of the day” which navigated me to a “wikiHOW” site. I made the darn thing in three hours. Killed time and made something cool.

My duct tape wallet:

Doing stuff with my hands gave me lots of time to use my brain and I thought of starting my own blog, or website to post my views to share them this way as opposed to sending it via email. The blog could be called “Radio Yerevan” – a reference to my childhood in Eastern Europe during communism. Radio Yerevan was a fictional radio station in the Soviet Republic of Armenia which cleverly answered a variety of ironic questions about the politico-socio-economic issues of the era. (My friend Vartan Akhchyan received a grant to research and write a book about this unique phenomenon of humor behind the Iron Curtain, which I am very much looking forward to reading.) People from Armenia do not know about these jokes, Radio Yerevan was born and is known only in Russia or Eastern Europe. Here are a few examples of the jokes:Question to Radio Yerevan: Which is the most beautiful city in the world?Answer: Yerevan- How many nuclear bombs are needed to destroy the most beautiful city in the world?- One … Correction, the most beautiful city is Moscow.

fdjgd
Advertisement in Radio Yerevan:
“Russian watches – the fastest in the world.”

fdjgd

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that in the Soviet Union the wheat stalks grow as tall as telephone poles?
- It is true, we can also proudly say that it even grows more abundantly.

fdjgd
Question to Radio Yerevan: I heard there is meat in Leningrad, will there be meat in Moscow?
- Yes, it’s a traveling exhibit.

fdjgd
Question to Radio Yerevan: Is there a difference between American and Soviet radioactivity?
- There is, Soviet radioactivity is not harmful.

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This one requires a bit of a linguistic explanation, but is worth it: in Slovak, the word “to sit” can 1. mean the action of sitting, 2. imply one’s work place (He sits in the third office on the right.) 3. to be in jail (He is sitting for robbery.) The following joke plays with numbers 2 and 3.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Where does the guy who creates the Radio Yerevan jokes sit?
- We don’t know, but he is surely sitting.

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This last one is fairly recent, I heard it from Vartan and it throws a new light on the Radio Yerevan humor concept:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Why don’t we hear new Radio Yerevan jokes anymore?
- Because the Jew who was creating them died.

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No more Radio Yerevan, but while I am on the topic of Jewish – Armenian humor…

An old Armenian man is dying. Prostrated on his deathbed he is surrounded by his sons. He attempts to prop himself up and drawing his last breaths utters very silently:
- “Protect the Jews!”
His sons don’t think they heard him right and ask:
- “What is it papa?”
- “Protect the Jews!”
The sons reply in disbelief:
- “Father, we are not Jewish, what are you saying?”
The father answers with his last strength:
- “Protect the Jews, because once they are finished with them, they’ll start with us!”

Between the years 1915 and 1916 the Turks systematically murdered million and half Armenians living in the territory of today’s eastern Turkey. When Hitler proposed the solution of the Jewish question, some worried about the reaction of the international society. Hitler answered: “And who remembers the Armenians?” He was right, without any obstacle he was able to systematically murder six million Jews.