These are my two favorites of the pictures I took today on a hike in Birtvisi Canyon southwest of Tbilisi. Getting out of the city to hike more often in the last few weeks is doing wonders for my physical and mental well-being.

A post of few words. I took this picture today during a hike near Rkoni Monastery in the Shida Kartli region, Georgia.

The subtitle of this book is A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia and that is precisely the red thread throughout the book – the mountains more so than the walk, but I will get to that shortly. This walk was undertaken in the late 1990s, the book first published in 2003. Consequently, the narrative takes place before the Rose Revolution that brought current president Mikhail Saakashvili to power  and started a wave of reforms and changes in Georgia. Bread and Ashes portrays a rural Georgia that is by now often already changing. Since Anderson undertook his walk, the mountains in northern Georgia have become more accessible, though Svaneti with its attempts to turn Mestia into a top-notch European mountain-resort more so than Tusheti in the eastern part of Georgia.

The book starts with a chapter set in western Azerbaijan in the area northwest of Sheki. The next chapter, however, finds the author in Georgia on his way to Omalo in Tusheti not far from the border with Dagestan. It never becomes clear what the point of the excursion to Azerbaijan was, if the original plan was to hike from northwestern Azerbaijan into Georgia and, if so, why they didn’t stick to their plan. However, this chapter makes for entertaining reading (as does the rest of the book) and within the first few pages the tone of the book is set: the first page brings us guns, and on the second the inevitable alcohol and Caucasus hospitality are introduced.

I was immediately sucked into Bread and Ashes, not least because of Anderson’s writing. Early on, Anderson visits a ‘natural hammam’ somewhere in the mountains with his Azeri friends: “Here was my perfect fantasy of the Caucasus, high in the mountains, floating with this kind Azeri in his underpants.” Though obviously taken out of context here, this quote is one of the many that made me smile, because it reminded me of the many unexpected meetings I’ve had and unexpected situations I’ve found myself in in the Caucasus. Anderson writes with a sense of humor, but also with obvious interest in and love for the Caucasus mountains and its people and he is not afraid to laugh at himself.

The walk through the mountains in fact only covers part of the book and part of Georgia. Anderson and his companions walk from Mount Diklos in Tusheti in Eastern Georgia to Mount Kazbeg about half-way along the northern border of Georgia. They then have to skip South-Ossetia because of unrest and pick up the hike to the west of South-Ossetia, where they hike through the Racha region into Svaneti. There they have to give up before they reach Ushguli because their group is robbed, likely by locals from the neighboring village. Anderson later returns to Svaneti, where he uses Mestia as his base for some hiking in the area, though they don’t really cross long distances through the mountains anymore the way they did in the first part of the book. The book also covers a side-trip on foot into Chechnya and a trip (by car) visiting remains of Georgian churches in north-eastern Turkey in the area between Kars, Erzurum and the border with Georgia. In between, some parts of the book are set in Tbilisi as well.

Often, Anderson and his hiking buddies end up staying with locals they meet along the way and who invite them into their homes. As I mentioned above, and as anyone who knows the region will know, hospitality is a big and sacred good in this region, often expressing itself through tables filled with food and drinks. The consumption of these huge quantities of food and alcohol is accompanied by toasts delivered by the tamada or toast master. Commenting on this ritual of toasting, Anderson says:

Friends from the city, from Tbilisi, often say that the whole tradition of the tamada and the rituals of toasting have become degenerate and fallen into decay, a mere drinking by rote. Indeed, it can be incredibly tedious with the tamada rambling on for hours and making all conversation impossible. [...] But this was not my experience in highland Georgia. At its best the tradition established a kind of intimacy among friends and strangers, re-affirmed custom and family ties, ties of friendship, and drew all together in a common bond. The table, with its heaps of food, became a sacred space, a pool of light and warmth set against the darkness outside. The alcohol consecrated the communion.

Along the road Anderson meets many characters such as the curator of the museum in Ushguli who “was quite bonkers and expounded at length his theories linking the Svans with ancient Sumerians who, as far as I could gather, had made their way up into the high mountains to preserve their culture, threatened by an early and virulent outbreak of feminism. Apparently the desire to preserve their patriarchal customs had driven them to Svaneti. Well, they had certainly managed this, though men from slightly lower altitudes do not seem to have suffered much in this regard.”

The account of the hiking trip itself is interspersed with lots of background information about the history, traditions and culture of Georgia and its mountainous parts in particular. In these digressions, Anderson focuses very much on culture and pre-Soviet history and hardly on political developments or the Soviet era. Current events at the time of Anderson’s travels find their way into the book occasionally, especially in the chapters set in Tbilisi and Svaneti. The fact that Anderson hardly touches on current events and mostly focuses on the past, makes that most of the book doesn’t feel too dated (though some parts do).

As an example of these cultural digressions, Anderson extensively discusses the many tiny languages spoken in the Caucasus mountains, providing them with his own typical commentary:

Bats, spoken only in one village in Tusheti, really does have eight genders. Goodness knows what for.

And:

[O]ne analysis of Tsez [a language spoken by about 15,000 speakers in the mountains of Dagestan] detected forty-two different locative case markers which can describe precisely which kind of space someone or something is in, at, under, by, near, away from: a hollow space, a flat space, a space that might be a trifle uncomfortable or sadly lacking in alcohol.

Anderson has this to say about Georgian: “Words are often formed by accreting suffixes and prefixes and fixes in the middle and so grow alarmingly. Clusters of consonants hang together like mussels on a rock, though far more difficult to swallow.” Something I can agree with, having started to learn Georgian in the past seven months.

Throughout the book, Anderson also touches on the eternal discussion of whether Georgia (and the entire South Caucasus) belong to Europe or Asia. He quotes one Georgian calling his country “the belt that holds [Europe and Asia] together”, an image I quite liked. While much of what Anderson writes in this regard is specifically about Georgia, I think many of his comments are valid for the entire South Caucasus:

Every myth or legend, every fragment or fraction of history in Georgia (and throughout the Caucasus) is clung on to passionately, used to shore up or add weight to the national story, to throw hooks into the past so that they might anchor the people more securely, more tightly to the loose sands of antiquity.

Watchtower in Mutso, Khevsureti

And elsewhere in the book:

They [a group of Georgians in whose company Anderson is at that time] all agreed, Azerbaijan was a waste of time and the mountains there nothing to compare with their own mountains and the people dangerous and not to be trusted. (Everyone in the Caucasus said this about everyone else.)

I borrowed a copy of Bread and Ashes from a friend. Before I returned this copy, I regularly found myself going through the book’s extensive index to see if one thing or another I had come across elsewhere was mentioned in the book. I read Bread and Ashes and started writing this post shortly after I visited the remote villages of Shatili and Mutso in Khevsureti (both mentioned in the book). At the time I never got around to finishing the post; that often happens – I have many half-finished posts saved on my computer. It took another walk in the mountains for me to return to and finish this blog – a beautiful hike I made yesterday not far from the village of Sno near Mount Kazbeg in a remote valley surrounded by high peaks and slopes covered in the season’s first snow. That hike also made me realize once again that I miss the mountains and don’t leave the city often enough to nourish that longing for the outdoors. Yesterday’s hike also made me want to pick up the book again to check whether Anderson passed through that area (I’m rather sure he did). Not for the first time since I returned my friend’s copy, I am considering buying my own copy.

All in all I very much enjoyed Bread and Ashes and I recommend it to anyone who wants to read up on the South Caucasus and on Georgia in particular, though for me the second half of the book falls flat a bit and a few parts feel somewhat dated. Despite that, Bread and Ashes is among my favorite books about the region.

While I am working on a fresh new blogpost, here is a quick post pointing you to an article I wrote for Waging Nonviolence about the protests against torture in Georgian prisons that have been going on in Tbilisi for almost two weeks now.

For more than a week now, the Georgian capital Tbilisi has been the scene of daily protests, which started after two TV channels released videos of prisoner abuse on September 18. The videos showed inmates of a prison in the Tbilisi suburb of Gldani being beaten up, humiliated and abused by prison guards. Since then, several other videos of prisoner abuse from other prisons across the country have surfaced. One of the videos contained images of a male prisoner being raped with a broomstick, providing the protesters with a symbol as they started carrying and burning broomsticks during their demonstrations.

Immediately after the first videos were shown on TV, people started to gather in a spontaneous protest near the State Concert Hall in the center of Tbilisi, which has remained one of the main locations for daily demonstrations and gatherings. There have protests near Tbilisi State University, outside of Gldani Prison and in other Georgian towns as well. The demonstrations usually attract thousands, although the numbers seem to have dropped since the weekend.

Read the full article here.

A lot has happened since I wrote my last post slightly over a year ago. I cried many more tears over Dibar’s death and had other personal issues to deal with as well. Meanwhile, I continued to teach Dutch and had more students than I ever had before. There were weeks when I was exhausted from teaching 36 hours of classes, but I also immensely enjoyed my students’ successes when they passed their language exams. I taught some great young women who have become not only my friends but also each other’s. And I decided that teaching Dutch 36 hours a week was not what I wanted to do even in the near future. So about six months ago I took up again a plan I had been playing with off and on for almost two years. Shortly before Dibar’s death I started turning it into reality, but I put it on hold when Dibar passed away. As a result, several months ago I left Yerevan and moved to Tbilisi to make room for new things.

Ever since I moved, people both in Georgia and Armenia keep asking me which city I prefer, Yerevan or Tbilisi. The point of this post is not to compare both cities. I am merely trying to sort out my own thoughts. Both cities are very different, but more than that, my relationship with both cities is so different. I lived in Yerevan for almost eight years, I’ve been in Tbilisi barely four months and I got off to a rocky start to boot.

I am still learning to navigate Tbilisi. I am learning to navigate the Georgian language. I am navigating meeting new people and making new friends (which doesn’t always come easily for an introvert like me who doesn’t like crowds and for whom any group over two or three is a crowd). I am trying to get unstuck. I am trying to find work that is more up my alley than teaching Dutch as a fulltime job. I am trying to start writing again. I am trying to make my little corner in Tbilisi.

I didn’t fall head over heals in love with Tbilisi like so many other foreigners did. Maybe it’s because I am not a city girl. I enjoy living in the city, but I’m not a city girl. Never have been, never will be. I don’t take to cities the way I do to the countryside and nature (and yes, I am falling head over heals for the Georgian countryside).

Maybe I just don’t get attached to cities or places where I live. Home isn’t the town I live in now, nor is it the village in Holland I spent the first eighteen years of my live in. Home is my current apartment, the place where my things are and where my two cats greet me when I open the door.

Maybe it is because Tbilisi wasn’t some new and exotic place for me the way it might be for others and because living and working somewhere is different from visiting a place as a tourist. I moved to Tbilisi with almost thirteen years in the region under my belt. I am used to the chaos, dysfunctionality and unexpectedness that is the Caucasus.

I can see why people prefer Tbilisi over Yerevan, though. For one, Yerevan’s center isn’t nearly as visually attractive as Tbilisi’s is. Tbilisi feels more European than Yerevan. Georgians seem to have a somewhat more joyful and upbeat outlook on life than Armenians have. Yerevan (and Armenia) feels like it is looking inward, Tbilisi feels more open to the outside world. Armenia feels so much more isolated than Georgia is. Tbilisi seems more easily navigable if you don’t speak the language (though both Georgian and Armenian use a script that looks completely unlike Latin or Cyrillic script), probably because English is more widely spoken.

Since I moved to Tbilisi, I’ve been back in Yerevan a few times. I don’t regret leaving Armenia as I was stuck in many ways and I needed a change. On the other hand, being back in Yerevan feels like slipping back into old, comfy clothes, where Tbilisi still feels like new clothes. You know when you buy a new pair of jeans or shoes and you need to wear them a few times before they start taking the shape of your body or feet and feel comfortable? That is how Tbilisi still feels to me: I need to wear it a bit longer for it to feel comfortable.

There are things I like better about Tbilisi because they function better there, there are things that work better in Armenia. I don’t think I ever liked Yerevan as a city, but something I do like about Yerevan is that it’s more compact than Tbilisi is. And I definitely miss my apartment in Yerevan.

In Tbilisi I feel like I am hovering on the outside of things, while in Yerevan I had my own little corner where I was not on the outside. In Tbilisi almost all the people I spend time with are foreigners, while in Armenia, especially in the last few years, I didn’t really have any friends who weren’t Armenian, most of them local Armenians plus a few Diasporan-Armenians. I notice I have to get used to the different dynamics in both environments.

In the end, for me, Yerevan is so much more, still.

Yerevan is where my Armenian colleagues were amazed that I knew the minibus routes much better than they did. Yerevan is where the woman I buy my vegetables from tells me: “I missed your smile,” and where another vegetable seller once tried to hook me up with her son who was more than ten years my junior. Yerevan is where, when I run into the mail delivery woman three streets away from where I live, she tells me to wait a second, grabs into her plastic bag filled with mail and takes out a postcard my parents sent me. In Yerevan I spent countless chatting and laughing with kids at a dialysis ward in one of the hospitals and being amazed at their resilience. In Yerevan I took care of a friend after he’d been in a car accident. Yerevan is where I’d go to my regular bar on my own, knowing that sooner rather than later a friend would show up to hang out with. Yerevan is where a good friend fought and won a ten month long battle for me over a closed down water pipe (a long story of arrogant neighbors, uncooperative civil servants, a hole in the law, and no one willing to take any responsibility).

I have a history with Yerevan that I don’t have with Tbilisi (yet). In Yerevan I loved, I made a fool of myself, I laughed, I cried, I danced, I argued, I made mistakes, I found myself in situations (both good and bad) I’d never thought I’d find myself in, I made friends, I lost friends, I changed a few people’s lives, I grieved over the death of my best friend.

I don’t have that history with Tbilisi yet. Give me time and I am sure I will. Then I can give you a more honest answer as to which city I prefer.

Today a month ago, my best friend died. Dibar wasn’t just one of my closest friends, for three and a half years he was also my boyfriend. Dibar had been with me almost literally from the very first day I moved to Armenia six and a half years ago, first as my boyfriend and after our break-up three years ago as one of my closest friends.

Dibar died suddenly – of a heart attack. He was much too young, only 41 years old. He still had so many things he wanted to do in life. For years he had dreamed about opening his own bar and recently it looked like he might finally make that dream a reality. He wanted to go to Europe, go back to Holland, where he lived long before we met. He was looking forward to seeing his sister and niece and nephew again this summer. The last time he saw them was when he and I went to Lebanon together six years ago, about two weeks into our relationship. That trip together was the beginning of an unusual and rollercoaster relationship.

We were very different, maybe too different. We had lots of fights about lots of things. That’s why we broke up about five times during our relationship (although some people will say that these break-ups weren’t even real break-ups). But we also had good things together, we found something in each other that we needed. That’s why we got back together again and again. That’s why I had patience with Dibar. There was something that kept us together for so long, despite the difficulties. Over the years he made me laugh at least as much as he made me cry.

Being Dibar’s girlfriend wasn’t always easy. But then, I am sure that being my boyfriend wasn’t either. Sometimes I hated Dibar for always being late and for having to clean and organize everything (though the cleaning thing had its advantages!). We had so many fights about him always being late, about him always having to “fix” everything, put every utensil in the kitchen in a specific way and place, a system I tended to find not very usable. Whenever I was abroad and he stayed at my place to take care of the cats, after my return I would always find things in a different order: the towels in the kitchen, the silverware in the drawer, it had all been rearranged in my absence. Dibar had always changed it to his “system”, which invariably wasn’t mine.

One day, fairly early in our relationship, I waited for Dibar for one and a half hour. He never showed up. This was before everyone in Armenia had a mobile phone, because phones and numbers were still too expensive for most people. Dibar and I shared a mobile and he happened to have it with him that time so I couldn’t contact him. After one and a half hour of waiting I finally went home. Dibar was not there, so I called him on the mobile. Turned out he had been carried away in one of his cleaning sprees and completely forgot about time. He had left the house only ten minutes before I had arrived back home. Of course I was raging mad. Looking back, I don’t know who was more of an idiot: Dibar getting lost in his cleaning spree or me waiting for a full hour and a half before calling it quits.

I remember Dibar sleeping on the couch. I remember Dibar sleeping. Period. For years he would usually sleep during the day and work or go out at night or spend the night playing computer games. That was largely due to his work as a bartender, but he was much more a night person than a day person anyway. At times, I hated him for that, because I am not a night person at all. He would go to bed when I’d get up to go to work and he’d get active and wanted to go out by the time I was ready to go to bed.

The irritating habits, those were very typically Dibar. His close friends and his colleagues will confirm this. But no matter how annoying they were, you couldn’t stay angry at Dibar. He was too good, too kind and too crazy a person for that. Dibar was social, interested in other people, ready for a chat; he was intelligent, had an inquisitive mind; he was caring and had a big heart; he was passionate, both in his love and his hatred for things.

In the end our love turned into friendship. We managed a lot better as friends than we did as a couple. After we stopped living together and, later still, after we broke up, Dibar’s annoying habits became easier to deal with. Our friendship was definitely less of a rollercoaster than our relationship had been. There were things about my life I no longer shared with Dibar and there were likely things about his life he no longer shared with me. There were a few periods when we didn’t see each other very often, but no matter what, we were always somewhere in each other’s lives. I don’t have a lot of good friends, and Dibar was the person closest to me. Dibar was one of the very few people who I trusted 100%. I’ve always felt fortunate that we stayed such good friends. Even more fortunate is that I actually got to tell him this more than once. We even talked about this the last time we met. I’m glad I got to tell him then how happy I was that we were still good friends.

Yerevan holds so many memories of Dibar. These days, when I walk through the city, there are so many places that bring up memories: there’s the bar he worked at at some point, there’s the hotel he worked at, there’s where we met for the first time, there’s the place where he told me he was in love with me, there’s the place where we met when he organized the suprise party for my birthday, there’s the restaurant where we had dinner the last time we met, on the street I run into people he introduced me to.

It’s not just places, it’s other things that bring up memories: suddenly hearing a mobile go off with the same ringtone as Dibar’s, his apartment appearing in the background of some pictures a friend took of a totally unrelated event, something someone says.

And then there are our cats, also known as The Kids. When I moved in with Dibar, he had two, Yin-Yang and Nirvana. I remember Dibar woke me up one time in the middle of the night: Yin-Yang had fallen from the window sill and had hurt herself badly on the way down. She was wounded. For about a month we took care of her before she eventually died. Nirvana was kind of shy, not a very social cat, but to Dibar’s surprise Nirvo took to me almost immediately. Eventually, I took Nirvo from Dibar, because I was leading a slightly more regular life and better able to take care of him. He has been living with me for the last four years or so.

I remember how Dibar came home one day almost four years ago. He knew I was thinking about getting another cat. He told me relatives of a friend had the cutest little kitten and they were looking for a good home for him. Dibar had fallen head over heels in love with the kitten. So did I, once I’d seen it. We took home the cat. That’s how Archy came into my life. Dibar was crazy about Archy. Dibar was always the one who would take care of Archy and Nirvo when I went abroad (By the way, Dibar, you do realize left me with a big problem to solve: I’m going to have to look for a new cat-sitter). Archy and Nirvo will remind me of Dibar every single day.

The past year and a half were not easy; I had and still have a lot on my plate, issues I have to deal with, decisions I have to take (now you also know why I am not blogging very much anymore). Partly as a result of this, I decided many months ago that it is time for me to move on, to leave Armenia. Now that Dibar is no longer around, the step to leave Armenia has become so much easier. I may not leave Armenia today or tomorrow, but I will leave. Sooner rather than later.

Dibar was such a big part of my life in Armenia and his death leaves a very large empty space in my life. He was always there and now he isn’t anymore. I miss Dibar, the Crazy Orange Dolphin.

It’s already been a week, that I made my latest contribution to Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s (aka Wereldomroep) program Wereldnet. Time passed so quickly and I only now realized I hadn’t posted the link to the podcast yet. So here it is.  This time I talked about the Genocide Memorial Day on April 24, about cyber granny who disrupted the internet in a large part of the Caucasus, about how a new shortage of eggs in Yerevan was avoided before Easter and about the plan to introduce mandatory chess classes in Armenian schools. You can listen to the entire podcast here (in Dutch).

I have taught Dutch to private students in Yerevan for almost five years now. I am not a (language) teacher by profession and teaching languages is definitely not my calling in life. I don’t see myself standing in front of a classroom full of pupils or students, for example. I taught German and English for a while, but I decided to quit, because I am not finding nearly as much satisfaction in that as I am in teaching Dutch. You might be wondering: are there so many people in Armenia who want to learn Dutch? There aren’t masses of people, but there’s a steady trickle finding me. Ninety percent, if not more, of those who want to learn Dutch are women getting married to someone in Holland. Since 2006, citizens of most states need to pass a language exam to get a residency permit for Holland with the purpose of marriage. I will write a separate post about the sense and especially the nonsense of this exam, but in this post I will focus on my students, because they are the reason I enjoy teaching my native language.

So who are these students? In the five years I have tutored, I have yet to help one male student prepare for the language exam; all my students so far have been women. In fact, in all those years I have heard of only one Dutch-Armenian couple where the woman is Dutch and the man from Armenia. With one exception the women I taught were all university-educated. Some were still in university, some had a job or had worked until they decided to prepare for the exam and their move to Holland. Apart from these similarities, my students fall into two categories. One is the group who met and fell in love with someone from Holland, whether Dutch-Armenian or native Dutch. The other are the women who are getting married to a Dutch-Armenian guy who wants a wife from the motherland – in Dutch they are called ‘importbruiden’, imported brides. As far as I know, these men were all born in Armenia or Baku and ended up in Holland as refugees, either for economic reasons or because they fled the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Either way, these men all hail from this region; they don’t have roots elsewhere in the Armenian diaspora.

The following are my own observations, but they were confirmed by others who teach or taught Dutch in Yerevan. There are some differences between the two groups. The women in the first group – the ones who fell in love with someone who happened to be from Holland – are all in their mid to late twenties and they all visited Holland at least once before they decided to move there permanently to be with the one they love. Some met the love of their life while they visited friends or relatives in Holland. The second group, the ones I call the “Armenian brides”, are younger, in their early to mid-twenties. None of them has ever been to Holland before: when they board the plane to live with their new husband, that will be the first time they go to Holland. From what I can tell, these marriages all follow the fairly typical Armenian pattern (especially outside Yerevan) where dating doesn’t happen and the wedding follows the engagement fairly soon, generally within a few months or whenever the bride-to-be has received her residency permit.

In my experience the women in the first group seem more independent, want more out of life than just to be someone’s wife and mother, they are much more set on finding a job in The Netherlands. The women in the second group seem more modest, more reserved, quieter maybe, probably more ready to fulfill the role which they’ve been brought up to fulfill, that of wife and mother. I have to state very clearly, though, that none of the women I taught from that second group come across as if they can’t fend for themselves or won’t manage (there has been one exception of a girl who is worthy of a blogpost of her own, but that’s one I’m not going to write for privacy reasons). There’s just something in the character and behavior of the women in the first group that those in the second don’t seem to have, a certain independence, feistiness, readiness to think out of the box – I don’t know what to call it. I have a huge amount of respect for every single one of these young women, who are prepared to start a new life in a different country, where they don’t speak the language (quite a few of my students don’t know English either). I’ve been there, done that. It isn’t easy. In a way, I have even more respect for the ‘import brides’, because they are off to build a new life in a country they have never been to before with people they might not even know that well, they usually haven’t spent that much time with their future husbands and might not even know (all) their in-laws.

Invariably, at some point during the classes my students and I start talking about things not related strictly to the exam and to learning Dutch. Usually, my students start asking me questions about Holland and about life there or I have to explain something ‘typically Dutch’ that comes up in the teaching material. With a few of my students our discussions went way beyond migration and I more than once I found myself discussing not just life in Armenia or the position of women in Armenia, but also much more intimate topics like differences in dating and relationships, and even sexual education and the use of birth control.

Throughout our classes and conversations, I can sense how all my students are each in their own way mentally preparing for their move to Holland: they are thinking about building up a life there, how to make friends, whether it is easy to find a job. Sometimes I share something relevant about my life in Armenia or my students will ask me questions about how I learned Armenian (I now teach all my classes in Armenian), what it was like for me to move to and start a new life in a different country, though I didn’t move to Armenia to get married and chances are big that I will leave Armenia sooner rather than later. In fact, I think one of the reasons why I am successful as a Dutch tutor is because I know what it is to move to a different country, to build up a life there, to have to learn a new language. I know where my students are coming from and where they’re going to – in more ways than one. I put my own experiences into my teaching.

Two of my students became especially good friends and, after both moved to Holland about a year ago, we are still in touch through Skype and Facebook. I met both since they moved and plan to see them again during my visit to Holland later this year. I am so proud of them when they tell me about their big and small achievements, how one of them had an exhibition of her paintings recently, how they only speak Dutch now when they go shopping, how they feel comfortable taking public transport from one town to another on their own and ask the way if necessary – in Dutch of course! They may seem small and insignificant things to you, but, believe me, when you just moved to another country and are only just learning the language (and you don’t speak English either), these are significant steps. I am talking from experience.

My students don’t know this, but they give me so much more than just the money they pay me for their classes. I get a kick out of talking with them and observing the steep learning-curve they go through in the two-three months that we work together. I am still a bit nervous when one of my students takes the exam, though at the same time I am confident she will pass. By now I know the teaching material by heart, so in itself teaching those exam prep classes is not very exciting. It is my students who make my classes. I learn from them as much as they learn from me.

My students rock. Every single one of them.

This morning I held my regular talk for Radio Netherlands Worldwide radio-station (Wereldomroep). One of the topics I discussed was the recent change of mayors in Yerevan and changes new mayor Karen Karapetian pushed through that are not necessarily increasing his popularity with everyone, notably firing district heads, setting up language classes for the townhall’s staff and banning street trade.

You can listen to the talk here, but it’s all in Dutch.