There have been a couple of things I keep meaning to write about, but then forget to when I am logging. First, I noticed that they have started the "Northern Blvd" of Yerevan. Now, I thought this was just a bunch of baloney when I read all the articles about it in the news... but this massive pedestrian blvd stretching right through the heart of Yerevan, from the Opera to Republic Square is excrutiatingly slowly started. It has been part of the city's original plan from the 30's I believe, and that entire stretch of land is primarily one storey high shacks (which you can easily see from the rooftop of the Yerevan Hotel). The govt has never allowed real development, and yesterday and today I have been watching as they started to dismantle a very long, historic building on Tumanyan Street. It is a very beautiful building and like most of the historic buildings along the route, the stones have been numbered for reconstruction of the facade somewhere else. That is the sad thing... much of the city's really old, historic beauty is in this neighborhood and much of it will be lost. The carved wooden veranda's and mud/timber constructions will be gone for good. So we'll have to see how all this turns out, but it promises to change central Yerevan in a huge way.

The other thing that I wanted to write about is books again. I got some really great books a week ago at vernissage which were printed in Soviet times (The mid 1980's). They were the first to volumes of a 5 volume set. The next two have been printed in the nineties and the last is still being worked on. Anyways, the cool things about books printed here is that the last page gives you every kind of information you could possibly be curious to know about the book. The date it was submitted for publication, the date approved, the number of copies, price, number of 'mamuls', the fonts used, the size of the paper, the quality of the paper, etc, etc. So the two used books I bought at vernissage for about $1.50 each said that 30,000 copies of each were published. I went to the bookstore to get the third and fourth volumes, which cost about $10 each new. Now I finally get to the entire point of this paragraph... there were only 1,000 copies printed! And those were sponsored by the Gulbenkian foundation. There is just no money around for the publication of books here. Yes, of course a part of the decrease can be attributed to emigration, but NOT a 30x decrease. And even the printing of a thousand copies was out of their budget, they had to get sponsorship. So sad....