Alright, so my women's day was great. I worked in the garden for hours, making a lot of progress. Then in the afternoon I went to have a bite with Lena, and was telling her all I had to do that afternoon was meet up with Ashod to transfer 35 gigs of scanned files from my computer to his new hardrive. Lena said all she had to do was buy some floppy's to get Ashod some digital pictures... so it sounded like he was working like crazy to fill up his 160 gig hardrive as soon as possilbe. After eating we went into my favorite computer store where who do we see but Ashod. Lena says "HEY, TALIBAN" (his nickname) and of course everyone in the store stares alternatively at him, then us. We got everything we needed, then Ashod and I headed to my place for the big transfer. It took a couple of hours, and was interrupted by a half second power outage (all too common) which rebooted my computer, but I got him everything necessary.

Back to the restaurant. As I was saying, a lot of people seem to be keeping the traditional lenten diet (vegan) this year, and I am seeing businesses actually respond to this. A few restaurants I have been to have had seperate lenten menus, with items especially added for this season. It is great to see, and I am sure that next year there will be much more, since businesses here tend to copy each other a lot. So maybe next year I will give the full diet a shot - but so far this year it has been easy to give up meat. Yesterday I took a hard to find chocolate to work for the girls keeping lent. It does not have milk, and uses cocoa butter, so it is perfectly alright for them. They were quite happy!

Next week will be the USAID "retreat", although after office-wide voting, we decided to have our retreat right here in central Yerevan and stay at our homes rather than go off to Sevan. I have never been to a work retreat, so it should be interesting.

Another bit of news I meant to write about, but keep forgetting is the student protests. A couple of weeks back the government was introducing a new law on the military draft, which would remove exemptions for grad/phd students. There were relatively large student protests (a few thousand protestors), and believe it or not the bill was withdrawn. The officials said it had not gone through enough public scrutiny yet to be considered. That is a big step for democracy here. A new precedent has been set. I know, some people only like to focus on the negative, so sorry for spreading the good news :-)

Tonight I will play RISK again, lets see if I fare any better...