Lost on the Way to Armenia

Tomorrow we board a Cruise Ship for a slow trip back to the US. Roughly speaking, we’ve spent a month on ships, two in Turkey, two in Armenia, and two traipsing through Georgistan, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Italy and a day in San Marino. Lots of languages, religions, food, transit systems, AirBnBs, and hikes.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to returning to the US, with its tremendous uptick in corruption and state-sponsored violence. We’re also headed for Massachusetts in winter, which leaves me cold. But it’ll be very good to see family and friends and familiar places. Other countries have their corruption and violence too. Since we left Turkey, they’ve started a crackdown on LGBT activity, and two freighters were sunk off the Black sea coast of Bulgaria a week after we disembarked from our crossing. But the US has such a long record of being a beacon of hope that it’s sad to see an empire commit suicide.  Somehow we’ve managed to travel half a year without boardi...

  From Armenia we took a train across Georgia to Batumi, and a freight ship across the Black Sea to Varna Bulgaria, and a train to Brasov, Sighisoara, and to Cluj Napoka, Romania. Another first class city in Eastern Europe, somewhat like Tbilisi or Yerevan.  But we also have connections here. Unitarian connections. While we’re Unitarian-Universalists from the US, and I’ve visited with Unitarians in the Khasi Hills in India, the Transylvanian Unitarians are their own branch.  So let’s back up a few centuries. In the year 0 CE, Christianity begins. In 301 CE it becomes the official religion of Armenia. We visited the church where that started. We call this the Apostolic Church, after the twelve apostles.  Next came the Council of Nicea in 325, which was centered on figuring out just what was meant by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, a.k.a. the Trinity. This marked the first major split between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox.  Skip ahead several centuries, and thi...

Three days on a cargo ship. We spent 3 days from Batumi in Georgia crossing the Black Sea to Varna in Bulgaria. This wasn't so much a ferry as it was a cargo ship that took passengers on. We watched his endless trucks loaded onto the ship and truckers Gathering their things and heading to the purser's office to obtain keys to a large assortment of very plain cabins.. The coast of Turkey as seen from the ship And arriving at the ship was itself an adventure, being dropped off by an Uber at the entrance to a cargo ship terminal meant that we had to walk through past trucks and security guards and actually walk onto the ferry ultimately using the ramp that the trucks used. There were four Suites on board and we took one of them. It was a trip back into the late 1980s. This cargo ship, built in 1989 for service originally in the Baltic Sea based out of Lithuania had been repurposed late in life to this cargo ship run back and forth across the Black Sea. We were determined to be co...