How to walk out of a church:
August 19, 2010
Okay so today I went with my team-teaching counterpart to see the state university I might be teaching at part time (eventually), and then we also decided to stop by the new church (there are two main ones, a very old one, and one that is relatively new). It was quite big and built in the same style as many of the old churches I have also seen. We went into the church and bought some prayer candles to light. They actually remind me a lot of the candles I saw in Thailand you could sometimes buy to light there. This is very common in most churches here and it is not rare for there to be no services and instead people just stop by to light candles.
After a few minutes we decided to leave and I was aware of the specific etiquette involved in how Armenians exit a church. When walking out of the door one must face the front of the church (towards the altar or just towards the inside) and walk out backwards. My counterpart did this, and I just walked out normally.
I am not sure what to do. I am not Armenian, nor a member of the Armenian apostolic church. I am aware of the tradition and respect it, but I don’t know if performing the tradition would be seen as an affront to Armenian traditions or not. I’m torn and I’ll probably go through this same situation over in my head whenever I visit a church. And I'm okay with that.
August 24, 2010
I was walking to work today, it's been rather cold the last couple of days, and I saw one of the strangest skylines. The city I live in is nestled between two mountains in a skinny little valley that dictates the shape of my city. It's length is much much longer than it's width, and each side is surrounded by large mountains.
I walk towards the city center to my work so I have one mountain range to my left and another to my right. It was cold this morning, and on my left there are clouds (or maybe fog) that is actually obscuring the top of the mountain range, which was pretty cool, but also extremely gloomy and depressing looking.
I then look to my right at the other mountain range and see the most amazing bluest, zippity-do-da sky ever with barely a cloud in the sky. I've seen stuff like this before but having the weather hanging over each mountain range just brought the contrast from one side of the sky to the other into a much sharper focus. It was like the happy, bright mountain on one side and his dark, depressive twin on the other. Very cool, and I wish I could have gotten a picture (I must learn to always bring my camera with me!) but even that wouldn't have done it justice, though I could have taken a video but I wouldn't be able to download it so what's the point.
My internet at work is fast enough to watch videos. I got to watch some clips from the daily show, which is probably the non-family/non-person related thing I miss about the states. I haven't been able to laugh like that since I've been here which was a good feeling laughing at something funny, clever, and poignant. Don't get me wrong I have laughed here lots of times, with Armenians and Americans and it feels great, but something about laughing at clever American satire is just a whole different kind of laughing. Good times.
Okay lastly I want to talk about Grammar Books, and specifically The Grammar Book. No seriously that is just what it is called. I'm not saying like there are grammar books but this is THE grammar book. It's just what it's called. And it is pretty massive so I'm comfortable with the title.
But anyways we used excerpts from this book in my Structure of English class in the states, so I didn't own this book, but I did have another Teacher's grammar of English book that is still very good.
The Grammar Book has somewhat gained legendary status in our program, partly because of how our professor would talk about it and partly because the author Diane Larsen-Freeman wrote another amazing book we read for the class, and she's just in general an awesome lady who is very smart.
That's the setup. So imagine my surprise when I'm at the 'American Corner' in the Vanadzor library and my team-teaching counterpart goes over to the reference section and sees this book on grammar. I walk over and there I see, in the flesh (in the bindings, maybe?) The one, the only, The Grammar Book by Larsen-Freeman and Celce-Murcia. In Armenia. In my library. I barely even saw the physical book in the US, having only excerpts from it. Amazing. The fact that this book is in Armenia at all (let alone in my city!) is something that I can mark down as a win. Now let's hope I can sell it to the teachers here. We'll see.
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