Khorovats

On Friday, we had a going-away party for Magnus, who, sadly, is leaving us on March 6. And at this party we had khorovats, or Armenian-style barbecue. It was big pieces of pork and slices of potatoes, all grilled out on the balcony over an open flame (all the more impressive because it was raining!) Those of us not involved in the cooking alternated between watching the grilling and playing endless ping pong. Magnus is the studio's champion, and he usually wins. But it's fun to play with him!

Then we all sat down to our feast. The food was absolutely amazing--normally I'm somewhat indifferent to pork, but this was absolutely delicious. Poor Inna--she is Lenting, and in the Armenian church this entails a vegan diet for the entire 40 day duration of Lent. So she filled up on potatoes. Additionally, there was lavash and bread, a cabbage salad, the salad that looks like sort of liquified pickled tomatoes and peppers, wine (of both store-bought and homemade-in-a-Coke-bottle varieties), vodka, Jermuk (carbonated water) and oddly, Diet Coke.

There was, of course, the obligatory series of toasts, which occasionally I understood parts of (I've got to hand it to my teacher...as irrelevant as the texts on Matenadaran, the linguistic origins of the Armenian language, and Mesrop Mashtots might have seemed, I did actually learn some useful words from them!) Vahe translated some, but his translations were (understandably) directed at Magnus so I couldn't always hear. But I still got the sense.

After a fairly significant amount of alcohol had been consumed (for the record, I was drinking wine, not vodka), the singing started. Mher, our gruff security guard (who was also the one who grilled the khorovats), has quite a good voice! I don't know what the first song was about, but it had tears running down more than one person's face. Then there were some other songs that were happier in tone...one of them, I gathered, was a patriotic song that the soldiers in the Karabagh war would always sing when they saw Vardan coming with his camera...I also gathered that this song got on his nerves!

As the meal was wrapping up, Magnus, Nelly, and I started cleaning up a bit while the heavy smokers went outside and some of the other guys stood around toasting more. Then followed a highly entertaining drunken ping-pong game, in which I was by far the most sober (having only had 2 glasses of wine and no vodka), and which therefore my team won.

It was a good evening. But we're all sorry to see Magnus go.