All posts tagged Armenian Food

  • October 26, 2015

    Happy Birthday to Me!/La cheville qui enfle

    A few weeks ago, I celebrated my 24th birthday. In Armenia. I had a great day.

    My birthday eve, something managed to get into my boot and sting or bite me on the ankle through my thick wool socks and pants. Many suggestions about what it might have been were forthcoming, including spider, bee, and scorpion.

    Whatever it was, it was poisonous. The epicentre of the bite was a mere centimetre across, but by the time the thing finished swelling it was about 15 centimetres across. The pain radiated even further up my leg and it could not bear weight. I spent the day hopping around my hostel on one foot and texting friends things like, “Woe is me, it’s my birthday, a bug just took out a chunk of my leg, and I might die. Just kidding. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. The swelling is only six inches across, and I can’t walk. But I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” Most of the texts back said, “You should go to the doctor” but since the only words I knew how to say in Armenian were “no,” “wood,” “eggplant,” and “beans,” this was easier said than done.

    Lest you think this small detail derailed my birthday, think again. On the train into Yerevan, I met an Armenian woman. When I told her it was my birthday the next day, she immediately offered to help me celebrate it. The night of my birthday, she showed up in a cab with a group of her friends and they carted me around town, helped me shuffle in and out of restaurants and cafés, bought me shawarma and cake and got the restaurant staff to play a happy birthday playlist in Russian and Armenian as background music the whole time. They even arranged candles.

    The best part of the night, however, was how genuinely interested they all seemed in me. One of my major self-improvement goals is to learn to ask better questions. It’s something that I’ve actively tried to work on improving this year, and I still have a long way to go before it will be truly easy for me.

    But I’ll be darned if these people didn’t ask me loads of good questions. Things like, “What dreams do you have for your life?” and “What are the most important things you’ve ever learned?” and “What do you think about God?” When I answered the questions and returned them, they were game to engage as well. Their serendipitous sincerity and interest completely eclipsed the bug bite as the main detail of my birthday. At the end of the night, they all said things like, “Wow, you’re a really good person, we’re really glad we met you.”

    I had worried about celebrating alone or with people I would turn out not to like. In the end, I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday. Not only was I really impressed by these complete strangers, I felt totally loved by them. They had no particular reason to do something so nice for me or to be interested in my dreams, and they still were.

    They also offered to take me to the doctor if the bite got any worse. Thankfully it was visibly better the next day so I didn’t take them up on the offer. I am now walking around with ease, although I can still feel a bump where the bite was two weeks later.

    P.S. To all my other friends who sent me birthday wishes, I love you all too.

    1 Comment / Armenia /

  • October 20, 2015

    Noah’s Ark, Mount Ararat, Drunkenness, Rape, Incest, and Armenian Pride

    Mount Ararat from Armenia

    The snowy peak of Mount Ararat rises imperiously above Yerevan and greater Armenia and, despite being officially on the Turkish side of the border, it is a major symbol of Armenia and has been on the Armenian coat of arms since at least the Soviet period.

    Armenian Soviet Coat of Arms

    Please excuse the checkered background and focus on the hammer, sickle, mountain, and grapes.

    But in this post, I don’t only want to talk about the mountain. See the grapes on the bottom of the coat of arms? Well, those have a special significance for Armenia. A delicious, intoxicating, darkly comedic significance.

    On my way to Armenia, I met a woman on the train. “Armenia’s very famous for its wine,” she said. “It all started in the Bible. After the great flood, Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat, and when he came down off the ark he planted vineyards and made wine. And then . . . well, we don’t have to talk about what happened after that. But wine is still being made there today! It’s delicious. It’s a really great thing about Armenia. You should taste some while you’re here.”

    It’s true. We don’t have to talk about what happened after Noah made wine on Mount Ararat. But we can, because the black humour of this story turning into a source of Armenian national pride is too good to pass up.

    So, as my train-buddy said, tradition has it that God sent a great flood in antiquity to punish a world rife with evil. Noah was the only good person in the whole world, so God let him in on a little secret. “I’m going to punish everybody,” God said, “and send a great flood. Everybody’s going to die. Except you, because you’re righteous. So in order to prepare for this event, build a vast ark and take animals from each species so that they might repopulate the earth after I’ve finished making it rain.”

    So Noah did. Everybody looked at Noah like he was utterly crazy as he was building the ark, but when it started to rain everybody drowned except Noah because Noah was better than everybody else.

    When the waters did go down, the ark landed on top of Mount Ararat. General scholarly opinion holds that, if the flood story is based in historical fact, the biblical Mount Ararat was probably not located in modern-day Armenia. This is not important, however, for the traditional signification of the mountain. In order for the story to take on the trappings of reality, all that has to happen is for people to believe.

    So, let’s say for the sake of argument that Noah’s Ark really did land on top of the Armenian/Turkish Mount Ararat. Noah and his sons climbed down off the snow-covered summit, God sent them a rainbow as a sign that he would never again send such a great flood, and then Noah got down to the business of planting the vineyard that would become a symbol of a small landlocked country called Armenia several millennia later.

    After the grape harvest, Noah made himself some wine and got so drunk he passed out, naked. His son Ham entered the tent and “saw” Noah lying there. Ham went out and told his brothers Shem and Japheth about Noah’s nudity. Shem and Japheth, rather than going in to “see” for themselves, went in backwards with a blanket and covered their father up.

    After Noah woke up from his drunken state, he cursed Ham and Ham’s descendants. Why, you ask? Just for seeing him naked? Well, my heathenistic friends, the general consensus is that “to see” functions as a euphemism for sex. So Ham raped his father.

    If I were told this story about a major landmark of my country, I would be like, “whoa now. We should just get rid of grapes. Like, all grapes. Can’t have things like that happening. Rape is bad. Cursing descendants who didn’t do anything wrong – also bad. Let’s just. Uh. Yeah. No. Okay, if we’re going to continue to have wine in this place, we might just want to keep it on the down-low. You know, because of that terrible bad thing that happened. Which probably happened on another Mount Ararat. Yeah.”

    And yet the Noah’s Ark imagery seems to be everywhere. A major wine and brandy company in Armenia is called “Ararat.” I went to their factory, which contained prominent signage about the origins of winemaking in Armenia being when Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat.

    Ararat Brandy (Distilled Wine)

    Ararat Brandy (Distilled Wine)

    I like to imagine that Armenians, when told this story are all like, “well, that sucks but . . . wine.”

    And so wine and brandy are a great source of Armenian national pride, and nearly every Armenian I meet finds a way to tell me about how good they are. And they’re right – they are good. Just . . . enjoy responsibly and make sure you educate your children to know that drunk means no and …. incest also means no.

    photo by:
    No Comments / Armenia /

  • October 19, 2015

    Honey, I Trusted You

    Real or fake?

    Real or fake?

    A few weeks ago, I found myself in the east of Turkey, quite literally on the road to Damascus. And while I wasn’t struck blind and motivated to turn my back on Phariseeism, and while the readership of these epistles remains quite miniscule (alas!), the road had at least one thing to teach me.

    I discovered fake honey.

    One of my travelling mates got stung by a bee as we were buying fruit by the roadside. We were far away from any pharmacy, so I suggested she put a bit of honey on it to reap the anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory benefits.

    The owner of the stand by the road got wonderfully excited that his services were being called for and said, “You need honey?! I’ve got all kinds of honey! Real honey, fake honey, whatever you need!”

    Fake honey? This was the first I’d heard of the thing.

    The Road to Damascus

    The Road to Damascus. The fake honey stand is barely visible on the right.

    I assumed that fake honey was another word for syrup, which can be made by dissolving large amounts of sugar and flavouring into water. But I turned out to be mistaken.

    A few weeks later I met a guide at a Georgian monastery. As he was leaving, the guide told me, “The tour group and I are going to buy honey now. They make the stuff they’re selling here, so it’s guaranteed to be the real thing. Not that fake stuff you get all the time in the stores.”

    And again, I thought, “fake honey? Really?” So I said, “Fake honey? Really? How do that make that?”

    “They put sugar out for the bees, so the bees make the honey out of the sugar and not out of pollen.”

    I didn’t know you could even do that. Was this common knowledge? I’ve never heard anybody in Canada or the United States talk about this. I would even have gone so far as to say that we don’t have this in Canada. So I said, “Wow, really? I’ve never heard about that in Canada.”

    And the guide, bless his heart, shook his head ruefully and said, “You guys are so honest.”

    In Armenia, I asked a Russian woman from my guesthouse if they have fake honey in Russia. She said, “Of course! Actually, I was talking to a guy who made it once about how he did it. They mix different kinds of honey to get different flavours and sometimes they add different things to flavour or colour the honey. In Moscow, we have honey stores where you can buy all kinds of honey – even eucalyptus honey, which is impossible because eucalyptus doesn’t even have flowers [actually, eucalyptus trees do have flowers, according to google, but the point stands – she knew way more about fake honey than I did.] It’s impossible to have two different-tasting honeys that come from the exact same region, so if you see something like that, you know at least one of them’s a fake.”

    Beehives in Northern Armenia

    Beehives in Northern Armenia

    Ah, but how to tell whether one of those hypothetical types of honey was unadulterated? Now that I knew honey could be faked, I had to know how to tell the real thing from its fake counterpart.

    The Russian girl didn’t know. The Georgian guide told me something about real honey and fake honey reacting differently when set on fire, but when I googled it to verify, all the sources seemed to indicate that this is pretty much a myth.

    When I googled “fake honey” in North America, almost all the information I found was about honeys containing additives such as corn syrup, and very little about feeding bees sugar. Is this something that North American beekeepers do as well? What actual effect does it have on the honey? Is the honey less healthy because of it? Or is the process by which the raw sugar is converted to honey similar to the conversion of pollen, rendering the sugar-based honey at least calorifically similar to pure honey?

    I’m assuming that we also have fake honey in North America, considering the fact that much of our honey is produced in other countries such as China, but would like to know more.

    Does anybody know anything about this?

    1 Comment / Armenia, Georgia, Turkey /

  • October 12, 2015

    The Armenian Sparkling Water Machine

    This is a picture of a sparkling water machine.

    S;

     

    A sparkling water machine is an immensely satisfying device that provides instantaneous sparkling water in a variety of flavours from plain to fruity and sugary.

    To operate a sparkling water machine, simply insert a small coin worth approximately 25 cents, and press the button to choose what kind of sparkling water is tickling your fancy. Change is not possible, so if you don’t have a smaller coin, prepare to either drink lots of water or pay one forward to the next thirsty traveller.

    Once coins are inserted, press one of the buttons. A cup will fall into the bottom of the machine with a satisfying “plop” and then begin to fill with a delicious spray of sparkling water. The sparkling water is plentiful, and the cup will runneth over for a while before the machine decides it’s fulfilled its sparkling water machine duties.

    A friend and I thought the sparkling water machine was novel and very funny, so he took a picture of me in front of it. As he went to take a second so that the part that said “sparkling water” (or rather, gazirovnaya voda) would be visible, we heard a rather sharp “nielzya! (don’t!)” as an unsmiling official stared daggers at us, simply for the crime of being delighted enough by a sparkling water machine to want to preserve it for posterity. We quickly shuffled over to the train platform only to watch her motion for two young men to come over. The two performed a thorough inspection of the sparkling water machine and even opened it to have a good look inside. They then appeared to confirm to the original official that we were not terrorists who’d had the novel idea of planning an attack via sparkling water machine, or thieves who hijacked the sparkling water machine in order to dispense ourselves sparkling water whenever we so pleased, but just bizarre tourists naïve enough to think that a sparkling water machine was worth writing home about. Nonetheless, this officious official continued to give us dirty looks until we boarded the train. How dare we overstep the boundaries in this way? Sparkling water machines are very serious business.

    No Comments / Armenia /