The Week Begins, The Work Begins

The good news - there is an Apple support center in Yerevan. I took my computer there and they said that they could fix it. I have an iPad to use in the meantime, and the Peace Corps computers, and other options. The bad news - they said they would call yesterday with a quote, and they didn't. As my counterpart said, Welcome to Armenia. I hope it is fixed soon.... About all I can do is hope! I'm thinking that at some point I can post the blog entries that I wrote before my computer (literally) crashed; so what if it's not in chronological order? I'll add photos, too. In the meantime, my back is bruised and feels more sore than it did on Sunday, but I think it's nothing serious. It snowed yesterday - unusual for Yerevan, they say, with several inches on the ground - and I was very careful as I walked!

Monday was our first day at the office. The Norwegian and Finnish Consulate, where we work, is actually our counterpart's apartment. But a nice place it is - vintage on the outside and modern on the inside. The apartment block was used by artists, composers and other cultural figures during the Soviet era. Tim bought it from a Bolshoi ballerina. Our first morning was spent listening, asking questions, taking notes - lots of information! The business has grown organically to this point, and now it is time to set a mission, vision, strategy, plan for the future. We spent the rest of the day and most of today putting together product and packaging for a big airport order that is due tomorrow and also for a Valentine's Day trade fair. Valentine's is one of the big gift-giving holidays here. I sewed together sets of crocheted hearts into bookmarks - I'm quite proud of how they turned out, since I don't think I'm much of a seamstress! I also tied ribbons on packages of frames, glasses and boxes filled with chocolates and decorated with artisan-made foam roses. And Brian and I set up a workspace for ourselves in Tim's former guest room. It's quite nice!

Last night my host sister and I did laundry. She describes her machine as semi-automatic. You put the clothes into the machine along with soap and then fill it with water from a hose. You agitate it with a stick, and when it's all stirred, you plug it in and it automatically agitates for 12 minutes. You move it to the other basket and send it through one spin cycle, to remove excess water (which goes back through the hose into the sink). Then you hand-rinse in a bucket in the shower corner (with warm water - so much better than the ice-cold hand-washing I did in Morocco; in the Philippines, I had brought it around the corner for women to do by machine - wash, dry, iron, fold). Another round in the auto-spin cycle and it's mostly dry. Hang it (we put a clothesline in my room for the unmentionables) and voila! I didn't have a lot of laundry, but what I had turned out to just about fill the machine and the space for hanging/drying.

We also made the front page of the Peace Corps web site with a link to its Facebook page and twitter feed, celebrating the swear-in of Armenia's first Response volunteers. Earlier versions referred to Brian and me as the married volunteers rather than Gordon and Jeanne! Oops.