Lost on the Way to Armenia

It has been three weeks since we arrived in Yerevan, Armenia.  During the first week, I made an appointment to secure a passport at the local immigration office.  A week later and I was pledging allegiance to the Republic and signing my name on my new passport as an Armenian Citizen.  Dual citizenship has its privileges and provides me with many more options in a politically unstable world. New Citizen and Very Happy     Taking the Oath of Allegiance   And then there were now two passports   With paperwork out of the way, we decided to engage in a few tours around the country using a tour operator.  Renting a car is out, for now, as I do not have my international drivers license and that is definitely required in Armenia (and Georgia).  Surprisingly, Turkey did not require an international drivers license.  Tours in Armenia are super cheap and I would highly recommend them to anyone visiting for the first time.  We never spent more ...

  Reflections on two months in Armenia.   Language. Armenian is a very, very distant cousin to Latin, so trying to apply any words we know in English, French or Spanish to anything Armenian doesn't work.  And their written language was invented in 405AD and is used only inside of this country. Their neighbor Georgia has their own unique spoken and written language.  Another neighbor,  Turkey,  used to use written Farsi but changed to the Latin alphabet about a century ago and saw their literacy rate explode from 10-20% to 80-90% in a generation.  Another neighbor,  Russia, has their own written language,  but it's based on Greek, which Latin is also based on,  so that's not quite so strange.  Proto-Indo-European began just north of here around 4500 BCE between the Caucasus mountains, the northern shore of the Black Sea, and the Asian Steppe. From here it spread southeast and became Farsi,westward to become Latin and Germanic, a...