Three Random Items

I hate it when something funny or ironic happens to me, and it’s just too ephemeral to put on the weblog. So, I wait until the little tidbits collect, and, voilà, we have ourselves a post. Of at least three paragraphs, anyway.

The lacklustre professionalism in Armenia – especially in customer service – is no secret to anyone. The other day, a good friend and I were about to take the metro. Naturally, each one of us wants to pay for the other guy’s token. So, we casually walk up to the “jeton”-selling lady, finally breaking into a run, only to be confronted with an anti-climax: the poor thing was asleep. (Mind you, it was a bit past lunchtime in the afternoon.) What to do, what to do…? I decide to sneak in a coin through the little window, and drag out a couple of tokens, but before I manage to do anything, she gets up, takes the money, passes on the tokens… and promptly falls back to sleep.

Now, this next bit is something I have been DYING to write about for ages now. My family has lately taken to visiting supermarkets, as opposed to taking advantage of your classic shouka. Personally, there is "the East" in me, and I really like the atmosphere at bazaars. All the hustle and bustle, various smells, people calling to each other, shouting about, haggling, threatening even... The supermarket, on the other hand, has smooth tile floors, pop music playing lightly in the background and air-conditioning. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, anyway.

The quintessential aspect of the supermarket is the shopping cart. They mostly all have them now, many even furnished with little, miniature versions of the same, for the kids. My sister-in-law, over for a week from the States, thought they were adorable, and said they don’t have any where she lives. “Maybe it’s a European thing.”, was her conclusion.

Well, I don’t know how European it is seeing full-grown adults pushing those about. And I swear I have borne witness to this on countless, countless occasions, every time cursing myself for not being the kind who goes about with a camera everywhere. I mean, what is with that ?! There are some who probably have less items to buy than others, but you can still use a regular shopping cart, or just get one of those baskets to carry… Wow, it’s just, so amazing, I can’t begin to explain what a jaw-dropping sight it is, seeing a strapping Armenian man hunched over to push his wittle shopping cart all the way to the check out counter…

Sigh…

And, finally, ladies and gentlemen, I read in the news today, quotes and excerpts from President Kocharian’s recent interview to the renowned German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, but I wanted to check out the original. It’s only available in German, it seems, so I went and made use of AltaVista’s Babel Fish Translation.

None of these online translators are perfect, of course, but they do give you a rough idea of what it’s all about. They make for some interesting translations, though, and I just thought it hilarious to share that Babel Fish thinks “Kotscharjan” – the German transliteration of his name – means “Excrement crowd January” in English. Like I say, machines cannot translate properly, although some may disagree in this case. At least, in part. :-P