We had little expectations for Armenia, while there were a few sights for us to visit on a walking tour we knew we wouldn't be needing a huge amount of time here
as we didn't plan on travelling out and around the more rural areas of Armenia. Armenia is a city in the mountains and as such it is fairly cool, although the sun
had come out for us since moving on from Turkey.
Upon boarding our flight it was clear Armenia was a small country with everyone seemingly knowing everyone else on board. It was clear we were the only western, if
not the only foreigners on board. This would be something we'd continue to experience with passport control interrogating every page of our passports and asking us
questions about our full names, ages (who even knows this of hand), purpose of visit and generally why we had come. The passport queue itself took over one hour to
clear and then because we had arrived from Istanbul the entire flight was forced through "goods to declare" at customs. This wouldn't have been too bad but we were
late for our transfer and were being harassed and the customs agents only had one bag scanner for 200 people. We could see why they were forcing this though as
one woman was detected trying to smuggle in about 15 fake watches, we we'd later assume she was going to try and sell at the market the next day.
Yerevan is a typically ex-USSR country. Lots of the infrastructure, buses and metro system is of the old soviet style. Like Turkmenistan which had decided to modernise
and clad certain buildings Armenia looked modern from some streets, but as soon as you looked down alleyways, back streets or into central parks between tower blocks
you could immediately see the historic roots of parts of the city.
A lot of the sights in Armenia are fairly spread out and the public transport system is limited. While they do have a soviet installed metro it is comprised of only one
line and doesn't really serve much purpose from a tourist perspective as it mainly serves local areas getting to and from the city centre. So you do have to expect a fair
bit of walking to get around. Thankfully the weather was pleasant enough for our visit. Strangely enough during our visit every single fountain we came across which usually
adds some flair to the city had been drained. We weren't sure why, perhaps it was because of the upcoming colder winter.
During our time here we visited the Blue Mosque (Armenia's last active Mosque), Katoghike (Yerevan’s most beautiful church), Republic Square, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
October Revolution Memorial, Historic Moscow Cinema, rode the metro, visited a local crafts market and walked the steep steps up the Cascade Complex. Having finished most
of the sights in less than half a day and with Kat still having a bad back we set about visiting a local wine bar. We'd read Armenia had an up and coming wine scene, but
on further research it simply turned out one Armenian hadn't liked vodka and had set a wine bar 10 years earlier and a few more had simply popped up next to it in recent
years. Hardly a bustling scene and even and the most known wine bar we were the only ones sitting out drinking wine on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
It was also clear while we were here that Armenia is still very leaning towards Russia and despite the ongoing political situation with Ukraine at this time Armenia
seemed to be a place that was still accepting Russian tourists. In fact most of the languages we heard here was either Armenian or Russian.
We had another early start, but thankfully had a better taxi this time as we headed to the airport for our next flight to Cyprus, the fourth country of this trip.
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