Big City-Small Town: Yerevan

I don't know what it is like to live in a small town really, but living in Yerevan, a town of over a million residents (1989 census?) feels like one to me. The layout of Yerevan provides for a compact center of town, with lots of parks and wide sidewalks, and on the outskirts are areas of detached homes as well as highrise housing. So if you live in the center of town (pokr gentron) you get to know a lot of people and everywhere you go, you run into them. On the street a minute ago I ran into a volunteer I worked with 2 years ago, at lunch Nigol and Zabelle, at Arminco, the chef from a restaurant I went to all the time... Although the city in California I lived in had only 100,000 people, and I lived there most of my life, I knew far less of them, and almost never ran into anyone by chance. Perhaps it is because I drove everywhere I went, perhaps it is because you do not spend more than 1 minute on transactions and don't talk much over there, or it could be that everything is just sooo spread out. Once I was speculating that at any given moment when you are out on the streets of Yerevan, there is someone you know out there... whether you can see them or not. Within a minute we ran into one of our first friends in Yerevan, sitting in front of the Opera, who had just bought a house in the homeland.