Translations, soldiers, water meters...

I have been having some interesting books about Armenia digitized for Armeniapedia.org, but most of them are not in English, so I thought that at some point I would work out getting them translated. Someone suggested online sites might be able to do the trick, even if the initial translation was coarse. I didn't think it could possibly be good enough, especially for texts with technical terms, or Armenian terms, but now that the entire text of a book on Soviet Armenian architecture is online in Russian, I thought I'd just see what's out there. Well can I say I was blown away by the translations done by Altavista? I tried Russian to English and French to English, and both were incredibly readable and useful. You can see the results of the architecture book translation here. It will be much more interesting when I get around to adding the photos, but it is already quite a cool resource to have online. The next book that will get an online translation to English is Zeïtoun: Depuis les origines jusqu'à l'insurrection de 1895. Sadly, and not surprisingly, there is no Armenian to English option - leaving the vast majority of Soviet Armenian materials out in the cold.

This morning I saw something I don't think I've ever seen on the streets of Yerevan, at least not since the military parade in 1999. There were well over a hundred soldiers walking in formation down Pushkin towards Mashdots. I don't know what the deal was, but it was unusual.

Now that pretty much everyone has water meters in Yerevan (there was no such thing in Soviet times), there are water meter guys coming around to read them. Unlike California though, where the meter is outside and the guy can come and go without bothering you, here in Armenia the meters are in the apartments where the guy cannot read them. I doubt you could even have them outside your apartment if your piping was redone, since that would leave the pipe prone to exploding from winter freezes. So they come by your apartment or call you (always seemingly at an inconvenient time). Over the past year I thought if I could get a folded clear plexiglass paper holder by my door, where I could write the amount of water used each month, and he could come by at his convenience and read it would solve this problem for both of us. I saw just the plexiglass thing I'd imagined while wandering around in Barcelona, and brought it back, but didn't get around to installing it until yesterday after my neighbor was telling me about the meter guy hunting for me during the winter. That was quite a detailed explanation about something unlikely to interest many of you, but I'm quite a happy camper and maybe someone will decide to follow suit.