Ahhh, Monday morning, and the weekend's not over! Friday evening was spent with the travel writers and my father. Saturday I got some excersize, then had a greasy hamburger, then napped in the afternoon. At night it was a dinner party - which a few of us left to watch the Armenia v. Spain Soccer game. What a riot it was (almost literally!). As we got close to the stadium, we got a cell phone call that they were not letting anyone into the game from another friend. We decided to try anyways. When we got there there were cops and soldiers and we pushed and argued a bit and people from the crowd were telling the cops to let the foreigners in - it was funny. We passed about 4 more lines of police/soldiers in the same manner, until we finally made it into the stadium. Apparently, a big crowd had forced its way into the stadium, and they were not letting anyone else in -tickets or not. So we get to our seats, and there are a row of kids there. We squeeze in and start watching the game which is already 1 to zero against Armenia. It stays like this for a good while before Spain scores again. Well it starts to get close to the end of the game and just as we decide to leave Spain scores yet again and now even as we leave early, we are not really beating the crowds. So we head back to the dinner party before going home.

Sunday was a rock hunting day. I hadn't gone on a real "rock hunt" since the school field trip in the 6th grade, and was lured by promises of "semi-precious stones". Well the place was about 3.5 hours north, almost approaching Georgia, and our rock expert who had not been there in 20 years remembered the place exactly. Now again I did not have a good idea of what to expect, but it was quite cool, the floor was littered with Agate, Heliotrope? and some other stones whose names I forget. Big ones, little ones, and all sorts of colors. Obviously they are not terribly valuable, but they do use them for jewellry. After an hour and a half I decided I had more rocks than I could possibly want, even after getting much pickier towards the end, and took a nap on the ground while the others continued. I woke up as they were finishing up and we went through our loot, tossing the not so great rocks.

On the way back we picked up a bunch of huge pumpkins, so that the back of the car was really low, and stopped a couple of times to photograph the changing colors of the leaves near Stepanavan... very nice indeed. I got back an hour late for a fancy party, and debating whether to go as a bit of a slob slob just back from a rock hunt, or go dressed nice and two hours late, I went with the former. It was quite fun, and our table was by far the loudest. The singer was just a peice of work, with a cut-off red spiderman t-shirt, a vest, slacks, a beard, dark sunglasses and some kind of felt cowboy hat. There was a big fireworks show in Yerevan that everyone went outside to watch at one point, celebrating Yerevan's 2,785th birthday. So anyway, another packed day.

Today, with everyone else at work, I will celebrate Columbus day by running some errands, relaxing, and maybe see some friends who do not care to be reminded that I have the day off :-)