Wildlife, Asphalt, and Elections

On this last day in May, a few more observations about life in Yerevan...

Wildlife

The black and gray crows (or maybe they're ravens?) are out in force of late, and they are obnoxious!! During the day, it's not such a big deal, but when they wake you up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday by squawking right outside your window?

Also, the cats seem to have given birth and kittens abound! Two of them were sitting right on my porch for most of the day yesterday, and for a little while one was hanging out on my windowsill! They're really cute and were I staying here for another year I'd be so tempted to adopt them...but...then again as cute as kittens are, I'm not really a cat person...

That's pretty much it for the wildlife stories so now moving on to the second part of the title...asphalt! (and elections. because they're related.)

Asphalt and Elections

This weekend are the mayoral elections for the city of Yerevan, and as far as I can tell, at least from the people I interact with regularly, they're being met with a whole lot of...eh. (indifference and/or cynicism). Maybe I just don't spend enough time with the politically motivated, but as far as I can tell the sentiment seems to be that the elections are more or less rigged, it's a foregone conclusion who's going to win, and they're all just a bunch of crooks anyways so why bother. (Disclaimer--I don't have a TV and thus don't watch the Armenian news, and this observation has been formed based on an extremely unrepresentative sample of people.) But no one I've asked has really been able to tell me much about who's running or what they stand for etc etc. (So if you want actual coverage of the elections...don't look here. Try A1+ or something.)

But there does seem to be universal agreement about the fact that the roads are being paved now (as quickly as possible, it seems) due to the elections-- i.e. so the ruling party can be like "look what we're doing for you! we're paving your roads!" and then after the elections, they can just sit there and line their pockets and be like "what? we already paved your roads. we're done now til the next elections." (Thanks to Inna for those observations.)

They really are doing a pretty awful job of paving too. Essentially it looks like they're pouring a dumptruck-ful of black gravel on the road, squishing it down, and calling it paved. It'll be potholed again in the space of a few months. One argument as to why this is, is that the pavers want to do a bad job paving so that next year there will be work for them when they have to re-pave again. And on the surface this makes sense...but Yerevan is a big city. And paving roads properly takes more time. So if you do fewer jobs in a year but do them well (thus taking longer, so still getting paid), and then the next year do some more roads, the next year some others...by the time you finish with all the roads in the city it'll be time to repave the first ones again. Thus ensuring the workers a perpetual source of income and the residents a decent set of roads. Is there any reason why it doesn't make sense to do this?