Wednesday morning, and it has been a long week already. Sunday was quite interesting indeed, a little too interesting perhaps. We met a guy named Antranig who helped us find the border gates, which are not alway so easy to find. When we got to the military base, we could already see a huge Armenian church on the Turkish side of the border, it was so close you could reach out and touch it. From there the commander (who was Armenian, though maybe from Russia, I dunno) got in our car with his cute little girl and we drove off to the Armenian church on our side of the border. Well when we got there, we were in for a bit of a surprise, it was quite a hike to get to. I was not at all prepared, wearing slick soled sandals, but we had come so far, it seemed silly not to. So we hiked off with a different Russian commander who had met us there, and the Armenian guy and his daughter waited for us under the hot sun... nobody had thought we would want to hike when we saw the distance. It took an hour and a half to get down there, right on the edge of the river, and just on the other side was a Kurdish village, which we were not permitted to photograph. We could hear the kurds talking to each other, see them, their eshegs and the Turkish soldiers. Their architecture was so different it really surprised me. The flat roofed, hillside kind of village you see in pictures of western Armenia. Anyway, the church was tiny, but so beautifully sited and quaint that it was well worth the hike. On the way down, we washed our faces in the Akhurian/Arax to cool off, and ate some wild apricots from the riverbank.

This was another rounded, eight-sided church, but was in worse shape than the previous week's. The side facing Armenia had flat and smooth walls, while the side facing Turkey was completely full of bullet holes. They obviously just like to shoot at the church now and again. After taking lots of pictures of the church, we headed back, and towards the end of the hike decided to take a shortcut straight up a cliff of slick rocks (can you see where this story is going?). Well my slick sandals finally did their thing with not 5 minutes to go on the hike and I went down pretty hard. I was all scraped up and one gash was quite deep. So we headed back a bit worse for the wear to visit a hospital. I went to the one in Shengavit, near Garegin Njhde Metro since I know people there and it was very clean and pretty normal. So they cleaned out the worst wound and after assuring me it was absolutely necessary, stitched me up. Yekh. I hate needles and hospitals. I finally got home at around 10pm.

At 8:30 Monday morning we headed out to Lori on a two-day work visit. What sorts of things did we visit? All kinds. Computer/internet classrooms, a drinking water project, a handmade wool thread factory, some tv stations, a handicapped organization, a potato seed multiplication project, a journalism school, a medical clinic, a maternity hospital, a small cannery, some Peace Corps school projects, the breathtaking Kober Monastery and some government officials. It is quite nice to see the projects that the US govt is implementing first hand, and the people they help. The trips are long and hard though, and I got home last night again quite late and tired and had trouble sleeping. So now it is time to get ready for my day, and hopefully the week before my next trip allows me to catch up with everything...