So you think you can dance, and by "dance" I mean "tell me where Armenia is"

It's 11 pm here and I should be packing for a conference tomorrow in a little town in Kotayk Marz (Marz is just the Armenian word for region/state/district) but instead I want to post because I don't know when I'll post again because I'll probably be at the conference and I'm trying to make these short and often, rather than long and intermittent.

Okay this is something I should talk about: Where is Armenia?

That's a pretty common question, and one that each of us (PCVs here) almost certainly asked ourselves when we opened our letter and looked at (skipped to) the bolded letters at the bottom.

I think I did pretty good by at least knowing the region, immediately below Russia, though I wasn't sure which country was Armenia and which was Georgia or Azerbaijan. I just knew it was one of those three. I was late for a meeting at the time with a professor so had to pull out my laptop from my backpack and immediately look it up online.

But knowing the spot on the map, you still go: Where is that? Where is that? Where is that?

Europe? Central Asia? The Middle East?

My answer: All three. It depends on the day, the moment, its ambiance, its music.

Sometimes I swear this has to be what Eastern Europe is like. Then I'll be riding in a Marshutka, winding through a valley swallowed up by mountains in the distance, Marshutka music blaring that sounds like something out of a Bollywood movie, but not quite, and I am certain that this must be somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula or the Levant.

I'll be honest I don't have a specific instance of Central Asia, this perception is very much a work-in-progress and one that I'll fine-tune and better understand the longer that I am living here, and will probably never be able to render perfectly.

The easiest answer I could give to the above question, Where is Armenia, and I'm talking about the deeper one, not just merely in a geographical sense, is the Caucasus.

This answer simultaneously can mean so much and so little. The area is really a quite unique place but one that is hard to pin down exactly what it is and what it isn't and so you have people like me trying to just label it as all three remotely close geographical regions simultaneously.

I have asked Armenians, so is Armenia part of Europe, and most of them from the villages just shrug. And now I find myself coming back to the idea that Armenia, really is an approximate country. And I don't mean that in any derogatory way. It's just a good metaphor that I see working on so many levels that I like to keep using it.