I saw Artur today... its been a year and a half. I met him online in my chat room soon before I was going on my trip to Israel for Y2K. He invited me to visit him on a Kibbutz as his wife is part Jewish and they had emigrated from Armenia to Israel. He could hardly believe that as he had left, an American had moved to Armenia... it was quite cool to stay on a kibbutz a few days which is a system that fascinates me although I had no desire to volunteer at one in Israel. We had a great time and then fell out of touch until I got an e-mail a week ago if I wasn't perhaps still in Armenia... he was coming to visit. So he is here unfortunately without the family, and he is trying also to look into some import/export possibilities. It is great to see that the locals who left 5 or 10 years ago also are coming back now that they are a bit established and want to do something good here. I rarely get to meet that crowd because if they do come back they usually stay with family (as he is) and are more interested in visiting people than sightseeing aside from the obligatory Garni/Geghard Echmiadzin/Khor Virab trips. Those can all be seen in less than 2 days... so now we are talking about what can be done and hopefully one or two things I have been thinking about for a while may finally happen.

So you know what observation of his I really liked? Aside from the standard reaction to how much things have visibly gotten better here and normalized, he said it was good to hear Armenian spoken everywhere. Yup, I love that too... and just looking around and seeing Armenians in every direction.