After Work

So I'm on my way out of work, it's pretty late, I return the key to the security office. It's pitch black in there, and the radio is on, but no one is there. I then look at the front door and there's a bar across the handles locking it.

I walk back to the kitchen to ask for them to unlock the door, or rather come with me so that once I unlock, they can lock the place back up. They're sitting around a table eating and drinking so of course they ask me to sit down. I try to resist, but then, why not, I was hungry. So we did some toasts, and they gave me some bread, potatoes, and this dish called Harissa which is an interesting dish made up of chicken and barley-stuff to make this sort of porridge/soup.

I actually just looked it up online for that handy dandy link to and as is common here in this part of the world, there are all sorts of harissa equivalents throughout the Middle East. The article is even marked that it should be merged with two other articles that deal with the same type of food.

The same can be said for a lot of foods throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, whether it comes to the coffee, or the desserts like Baklava these dishes are from a time before nation states and nationalism. Many dishes exist across many different cultures within whatever empire was in ascendancy at the time, and before any of the modern states that exist today. It's probably more complicated than that, but I'm not a food historian, or even a historian at all for that matter.

One of the guys was a history teacher at the college in the same building as my work place, and we got to talking about names, how they are in Armenian in English (Joseph and Hovsep, George and Gevorg, for instance). This then got me thinking about Georgia, the country, and it's name in Armenian, Vrastan. -Stan is the suffix for 'land' or 'country' in Armenian, taken from Persian, which is where we get the names of all the so-called 'Stans throughout central Asia. Persia had an empire on-and-off for thousands of years. They're the only civilization to be in both Age of Empires I and II. Pretty impressive. (And if I didn't lose you with that, congrats to you). So actually Armenia, is called Hayastan. Yep, I live in a 'Stan.

But back to the point. So I want to ask, what the hell does vrastan mean. It was explained to me as an a term for north. More specifically, I think it comes from the post-position (just like a preposition, only . . . after) vra which means sort of, on, or 'on top off' like, you know, grab a map and Georgia is 'on top off' Armenia. Go figure. And another one I asked about Hunastan for Greece. Huna is a form of Hellenes the old name for Greece, or Greeks way back when.

Another thing that struck me while talking with the security guards was that they kept bringing up Japan, and the horrible tragedy that as happened there recently with the earthquake. It seemed like typical small talk at first, but then I realized, this is something very real for them. Armenia had a horrible earthquake in 1988 that leveled the town of Spitak, a half hour drive from Vanadzor, and severely damaged Gyumri Armenia's 2nd largest city. Vanadzor had some earthquake damage but was largely spared. So earthquakes are something very real to my co-workers and so when hearing about the earthquake in Japan they could relate, and were telling me that they really felt for the Japanese right now.