Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again

Last week was Fall break in Armenian schools. Teachers got a week off to have a rest, as they like to say here. Staying in Spitak for a whole 9 days with no work to be done, wasn’t exactly on my list of fun ways to spend holiday, so Ashley and I decided to have a road trip! Wooo Road trip! Only a little bit different because neither of us can drive here. Instead we took a Marshootni for a 5 hour long trip to…. Malishka!
Now Malishka is not a place that if mentioned to Armenians most would recognize. It’s not a big city, and actually it’s not even a town, it’s a village. So what was the attraction? Well Ash and I just so happen to have a best friend living there, a Peace Corps volunteer named Chad! Chad is pretty much awesome and after a few hard months at site where he barely ate and lost 25 pounds, PC decided it was ok for him to get a place of his own. And let me tell you, not only did he get a place of his own, but he pretty much scored the sweetest Armenian mansion one could possibly have in a village!
So me and Ash and another friend of ours Scott decided this was perfect region to visit for our first Armenian vacation, I was going to say adventure, but let’s face it, every day here is an adventure!

The next few blogs will be dedicated to our first big trip. I will try not to over-explain things, as I have a tendency to do, but instead to tell a few short stories about our journey and a whole lot of pictures.

That being said, here is a picture of us on day one of the trip, we all met up at a central location and went to a coffee/bar where tons of Europeans hang out! It actually was a really cool place, and our waitress was amazing, by far one of the coolest girls I have met in Armenia. She talked with us the whole night and her English, which I learned was self taught, was almost perfect! Turns out she also speaks German and will begin study in Germany next month, shat Apsos! It’s always good to make new friends! We bought her a shot of Tequila to celebrate our new friendship and had the perfect beginning for our excursion. That night I really did feel as if I had traveled back to the U.S and was in one of my favorite places to hang out in Long Beach, where everyone knows my name!

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life" Jack Kerouac