So tonight, my last night with my host family, I decided to once again watch Anna, the Armenian soap opera that I watched all through training, and could understand better than anything else on television. It's funny I would never watch anything like this in the states, but here it just seems like the right thing to do. I realized that I missed it. I had a nice conversation about the characters, what I've missed since then, and other things while the show was playing. It was relaxing.
Having been away from the show for upwards of three months, I came back, and despite Anna having a different haircut, and another character sporting a massive beard, everything just sort of fell into place, the same old characters, some doing the same old stuff, some doing random new things which didn't make any sense to me. Some observations:
1. Anna is in the car with some Armenian guy driving along, and then there's this flashback to Anna's crazy boyfriend. I had somehow seen an episode where they had this huge build up to seeing this same guy in a mental hospital and Anna being really freaked out by it, and then they locked the guy back up, and now all of a sudden he's back, and Anna is thinking about how crazy this dude was. So that's surprising.
2. The food in the show has changed since I last saw it, three months ago. They ate seasonal foods, I can't remember exactly, but I was watching today and I saw a character eating a little mandarin orange. You see, three months ago, I assumed I wouldn't be eating one of those until I got back to the states, but right now they're all over the place and are now in season here. So now we see the characters eating mandarins, where before they were not. I think as winter gets closer they'll just be eating a whole lot of potatoes probably.
And in my quest to watch this show, and get it on my computer so I can re-watch parts to really help improve my Armenian, I have finally stumbled across something about the show in English. There's practically nothing on this show in English, and I don't think they have DVDs of the show. I don't know if they ever will. I'm hoping to somehow find bootlegs someday, but anyways I did actually find something in English about the show! I found an article about the main character getting in a car accident a couple months ago, hurting her arm, and then I got the synopsis of the show on the main Armenian channel's English website. Some of the translations of various things are pretty funny.
Here's the synopsis of the show:
In the new multi-series movie of the Armenian Public TV once again the Armenian reality is exhibited: heroes struggle for their existence, their piece of happiness and justice. The main character of the film is Anna.
Her childhood memories are as much precious as they are painful, since it was in her early years that Anna lost her father in the Karabakh war. But Anna is not alone. She has her mother beside her, who always nurses and takes care of her… But is this everlasting? Nothing is eternal… And what to do when being only a schoolgirl you have so heavy a burden on your shoulders?
Friends, kind people and her boyfriend (who is also her classmate) will help Anna in her troubles. But even in school everything is complicated. Bitter and sharp remarks, insults which the heroine has to tolerate.
There's a lot in there that I could unpack, they specify her boyfriend (who might be that crazy guy) is also her classmate, her father died in the Karabakh war (I had no idea that was part of the back-story), the fact that they call it a film during this synopsis, though they do manage to call it a 'soap opera' on the website's schedule (at 21:35). In Armenian, my family would always say kino or as a way to describe the show when they would ask if I wanted to watch it.
Anyways, I think that's enough about my complicated relationship with my Armenian television, I move in to my new apartment tomorrow, it's 11 pm, and I haven't started packing yet.
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