Tsaghkadzor Counterpart Conference

This weekend was our counterpart conference in Tsaghkadzor, at a really nice resort. I got to shower every single day with hot water! And saw all of the other TEFL volunteers. We had a working weekend with conferences during the day, but still worked in some time in there to relax.

The rooms were incredibly amazing, by any standards. But what I am unsure of is whether the room would seem strange to me, or rather me from four months ago. The room seemed normal, just nice, but I was curious whether a tourist might think, nice, but weird.

I'm talking about the little things that don't really bother me anymore, that I really come to expect. The bathroom light is on the outside of the room, always. Though my last place in Pittsburgh was also like that, so maybe that isn't so strange to me. There is at most, one socket in a room, maybe with a couple in the same place, but usually just one. The windows open completely and there is no screen a liability nightmare in the US.

Those things don't phase me, but I'm not sure if they would have been strange before I came here or not, it's too hard to tell.

We had satellite television, so I got to watch BBC News World Edition, which was great, hearing English on the television. And there were tons of sports channels. I saw cricket, European football, American football (Notre Dame and someone else, but then it went completely black after about 5 minutes), snooker, and weight lifting. Pretty much all sports that Americans don't understand or don't like.

We were watching weight lifting and a friend pointed out the regions represented, which basically stretched from the Eastern Mediterranean towards central Asia, Kazkahstan, which seem to dominate this sport. There were a few outliers, some people from Germany, Poland, and even Korea, but for the most part all the countries were clustered into that region.

There was one instance where the guy almost did his lift (I was told that the names of some of them are "The Snatch" and the "Clean and Jerk." I'm not even kidding. I checked wikipedia and those are the actual names) and the guy botches the ending and falls down. Then out of nowhere comes these five guys, probably in their late teens early twenties, stand in front of the guy facing the camera, creating a wall of people, exactly like when soccer players line up to block a kick only instead of a kick they're blocking the spectators line of sight, and then doctors run in behind them to help the guy. It was such a bizarre moment, I just started laughing.