Internet cafes and computer stores have been popping up in Yerevan at lightening speeds these days. I have checked a few of them out and found it interesting. The internet cafes seem to have pretty slow connections, which is quite distressing when you are paying by the minute. This is ArmenTel's fault, as they need to bring internet line prices down to international norms, but of course they have a monopoly and could care less. The computer stores really surprised me when I saw them popping up in such large numbers... I realize some people now have a decent disposable income, but I didn't think enough to support so many computer stores. Well when I walked into one a few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were selling simpler old Pentium 100Mhz or 233Mhz computers for well under a hundred dollars and monitors for 50 bucks. Why not? These technologies which are a few years old now and dirt cheap are really just as good as the new ones for anyone who is simply e-mailing, word processing and playing solitaire, which is about what 90% of computers in this world seem to get used for. So for $100 you can have a complete system, and that is affordable for a decent number of people here apparently.

Aside from that I met a guy who is going to shoot some interviews of some of the diasporans living here, and am giving him some background and tips. He hopes to make a little documentary out of it, which would be nice. It was really fun discussing it in a group last night because the conversation was so animated and in the end the whole group was pretty agreeable on just about everything. It is hard to get that many people to agree on where to eat, let alone such heavy topics, so that was cool.