It's October already?

Hi everyone! Sorry for the long hiatus between posts--I've been fairly busy lately. It all started last week Wednesday, when I headed off for my very first academic conference.*

We drove out through the mountains to get to Arthur's Aghveran Resort--a pretty swanky new place in one of the few forested areas of Armenia. The landscape is really beautiful, but I didn't see a whole lot of it until Friday. On Wednesday after lunch, we had the first conference sessions. I won't give you the full play by play, because I suspect it would be interesting to very few if any of my readers. Suffice it to say that on the first day, the translation was only into Russian, and I understood maybe 1/3-1/2 of what was said. But I did get that the conference was being held in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of an Armenian statistician.

That evening, Gohar (the CRRC's librarian), Vahagn (the son of one of the conference organizers) and went for a walk, hung out, and played charades. (We were the youngest people there so we bonded). The next day, was my talk--I had, by this point discovered that pretty much everybody reads their presentation off a piece of paper. Even when presenting in their native language. This worked out well for me since I was giving my presentation in Russian, and I read Russian out loud pretty well...I just tend towards the incoherent when I have to talk about my work and worry about grammar, etc. My Russian grammar is rather horrendous, unfortunately. I will remedy this fact when I hit grad school. But anyways, my presentation went well, and I met a professor who was interested in my work and wanted copies of all of my papers, etc :) :) So combine that with the fact that I now have an actual legitimate publication to my name, and the conference was worth my time and money :)

Also on Thursday, a pair of demographers from France arrived, thus giving us English translation! Everything made much more sense then.

On Friday we had the whole afternoon free so we checked out the swimming pool and hiked down to the river. That evening, we all had a ping pong tournament--some of the conference attendees were really talented! Armenia so has the potential for a gold medal winning ping pong team...

And yes, as it turns out, regulation ping pong tables are in fact smaller than normal ones. Makes it rather harder to keep the ball on the table...

Then on Saturday we left Aghveran and headed over to Garni. I had been there already of course, but it's still pretty awesome. And I discovered some bits I hadn't seen before too. After Garni, we drove over to nearby Geghard, which is an ancient monastery and still functioning church. It is also one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life. My pictures do not even come close to doing it justice. We hiked around there for a while, and saw a baptism happen in the church. I'm uploading all my photos to facebook, so you can check them out there--my internet is being too slow at the moment for me to upload to both places. Maybe I'll upload some to here tomorrow.

Anyways, we eventually returned to Yerevan. This week has been a bit of insanity at the studio because everyone is getting ready for the Lamu trip which is rapidly approaching. I actually haven't had that much to do during the bulk of the day, but the last couple of evenings I've been employing my native-english-speaker skills to write numerous letters to Kenya Airways and various hotels.

Speaking of airlines and how I hate them, British Midland changed my flight back after Christmas. I was supposed to arrive at 1am on Dec. 31, thus having all of New Year's eve to hang out with friends, etc. Now I'll be arriving at 1am on Jan. 1, meaning that a) I'll have a 28 hour layover in London and b) I'll be spending New Year's on an airplane. So boo on that.
And there are no other flights to switch to. Transatlantic airfare is only $300! But you hit Europe and the prices go through the roof!

In other news, I bought a teach yourself Armenian book this week :) I now know how to say "How are you?" and understand three different answers--I'm well, I'm not well, and I'm so-so.
Still largely illiterate, though.

My research also seems to be on its way to getting started--I met with someone today who's going to help me find families to talk to...Gohar also said she'd help, as did the professor I met at the conference...so yay for that!

And now I'm going to go caption my photos on facebook. Stop by and check them out! :)

*Yes, I went to talks that were parts of conferences at NU, but at this conference I was actually an invited participant and gave a talk.