Austin City Limits '09

For my birthday this year, Jeff Clark, a.k.a. “Lev the Lion,” bought me a three-day pass to this year’s Austin City Limits. This wildly fantastic music extravaganza has been an annual production of the weird and spectacular city of Austin for 30+ years. I flew into Wichita from LA, and Jeff and I road-tripped it from there. We joined thousands upon thousands of fellow peace-loving music worshippers in a celebration of life, liberty, and the pursuit of rock ‘n’ roll. The concert lineup included headliners Pearl Jam and the Dave Matthews Band, as well as phenomenal festival rockers such as Flogging Molly, Ben Harper, DeVotchka, Blitzen Trapper, !!!, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and State Radio, among many many others.

Turns out though, in spite of our excitement for this event, Jeff and I are terrible concertgoers. Austin weather pulled a fast one on us and, needless to say, we were completely unprepared. The first day, we both got completely burned from standing out in the sun all day. The next morning, as we were lining up to board the shuttle, we laughed at the pansies buying ponchos from vendors. An hour later it was pouring, and it didn’t stop till late in the evening. We seemed to be the only ones without some kind of rain gear and after spending most of the day soaking wet and cold, we eventually begged a trash collector for some extra bags. Still, Flogging Molly in the rain and mud (pre-trash bags) was awesome.

I have to say, ‘though the fish tacos were amazing, as far as number one highlight of the weekend, Dave Matthews Band takes the cake. Their performance absolutely blew my mind. I heard one guy say he’d seen DMB play 17 times and this was hands down the best set he’d seen them do. Jeff’s also seen them play a couple times and he said the same. As a first time witness to the live brilliance of a truly incredible jam band, I can’t imagine it any better than it was. They played plenty of their good old material and threw in a cover of “Burnin’ Down the House” (someone told us afterwards that David Byrne is from Austin, but our sources tell us that's a lie and that Dave just played the song 'cause he wanted to). It was the final show of a long tour and they were just so on. Tim Reynolds tore it up, Dave was in a super dancey mood, and Carter wowed the crowd with a five-minute drum solo as they wrapped up their set with a twenty-minute version of “Two Step.”

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The Month of June, Part V: Yerevan

Emilie and I spent our first day in Yerevan exploring the city, which really just meant boarding random city buses and finding ourselves lost over and over again. Mostly, we spent the day reveling in the fact that we were finally in Armenia. Just by chance, we ran into some LDS missionaries on the street and were invited to attend the 10-year anniversary celebration of LDS missionaries in Armenia and Georgia, which was taking place that afternoon. It turned out to be a very spiritual experience. We met some amazing local people, watched a few presentations on the history of the country and the Church, and ate lots of cake.

Almost every morning in Yerevan, I took a walk across the aging Victory Bridge over the Hrazdan River in the shadow of the city’s renowned Ararat cognac factory. Aside from a few rainy moments, the weather was awesome, and the bridge offered an unobstructed view of Mount Ararat on the horizon. The city of Yerevan has been rebuilt nicely over recent years and can be very charming in certain areas. But, of course, it was out in the countryside where we experienced the stunning beauty of Armenia.

The purpose of the Armenia trip was to do a story for LDS news outlets on LDS Charities’ clean water project in the region. The current project, once completed, will provide clean water to about 40,000 people in 14 villages. (I’ll post the article I wrote here as well.) During the week that Emilie and I spent in the country, I was able to spend three days with the Blotters (the LDS humanitarian missionaries overseeing the project) and Nshan (the chief engineer involved in the project, a local Armenian) out in the countryside visiting the various villages involved in the project, and meeting the mayors and people of the villages. It was such a fantastic experience, and to be able to interact in that way with these people living in the remote parts of the country made my stay in Armenia one of the definite highlights of the entire summer.

Plus, never, till this summer, did I know that I had never tasted a real apricot before. The difference between an Armenian apricot and the imposter fruit we get here in the States is like the difference between tiramisu and a twinkie.

One of the highlights of the Yerevan stay was our visit to the Armenian Genocide memorial. I had never learned much about the Armenian Genocide until I read Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell a couple years ago. Between 1914 and 1918 at least 500,000, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, Armenians were killed by the Turks. The museum was very informative and the reverence of the memorial grounds was moving. The beautiful monument stands on a hill overlooking the city, a giant spike piercing the sky. In my mind it stood as an ominous warning of man’s inhumanity to man, a somber reminder that this vicious tendency towards malice and barbarity has played itself out on such a large scale time and time again, even in recent history.

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The Month of June, Part IV: Akhaltsikhe to Yerevan

We awoke in Akhaltsikhe to find that the majority of the buildings in the town had electricity again. I ran across town to a bank with an ATM and was able to withdraw some local currency to pay for our hotel and the bus ride to Yerevan. We called the old cab driver from the day before and made our way to the bus station, where we boarded an 18-passenger van for the four-hour drive to Tbilisi.

Forty minutes into the ride, in the middle of the Georgian countryside, the driver began to yell loudly at no one in particular and we pulled quickly to the side of the road. Most of the passengers filed out to stand on the curb and light a cigarette. Emilie and I sat and watched as our driver pulled out the spare tire from under our bags in the back.

We didn’t have too much time to explore Tbilisi, as our main objective was to get to Yerevan by the following day. But we did see quite a bit of the big, bustling city through bus windows, although Emilie and I quickly found that getting around on buses is more difficult than it should be. The ticket machines on the buses cost 40 tetri (the equivalent of cents) and only take exact change. We had a really hard time trying to find anyone who would give us change for the big bills the ATM gave us, and ended up mostly riding around town without paying.

We finally found a van at the train station that was making the trip to Yerevan in a couple hours, left our bags on our seats and ran to find some food. It was then that I remembered that I didn’t yet have the required visa for Armenia.

At that point a little bit of panic set in. Emilie was better prepared and had purchased her visa online before she left the States. The electronic version of the Armenian visa can be printed and stapled into the passport. We ran down the streets of downtown Tbilisi, stopping anyone willing to speak either Russian or English, to ask for the nearest internet café.

After growing more and more frantic, as our time was growing short and no one seemed to know where we could access the internet, we stumbled upon a small sign no bigger than a single sheet of paper, that said “Internet” with an arrow pointing to the building’s entrance. We climbed the stairs of the seemingly abandoned building with some trepidation, doubtful that an internet café was hidden somewhere in its concrete rooms. But sure enough, behind an old wooden door, rows of preadolescent kids sat playing violent video games while yelling across the room at each other. We asked the woman in charge if we could print something from the internet and she agreed to let us use her personal computer.

Our next wave of panic came when we realized that the visa was not issued for five days after the application was submitted. I had paid the $60 fee, but would have no visa until four days after I had agreed to meet the Blotters in Yerevan. I decided to print the receipt anyway and try my luck with the Armenian border guards.

The six-hour bus ride from Tbilisi was hands down the worst bus ride I have ever been on (that is, the worst comfort-wise. The 36-hour bus ride from Chisinau to Prague takes the cake as far as length of misery). That includes a ride through a jungle in Ghana, cruising at 70 mph down a road riddled with potholes. That drive, which left every passenger covered in a thick layer of red dirt, was the equivalent of a pleasure cruise compared to this route. And Emilie and I did it twice, to Yerevan and then back to Tbilisi a week later. The roads are so bumpy that there is never a moment when you are not bouncing several inches off your seat. And there are moments when you unavoidably hit your head on the roof of the van. There is no way to hold yourself down, take a nap, or do much of anything besides stare out the window and try not to become carsick as the vehicle winds its way up the perilous mountain paths that seem all too precariously built into the side of the cliffs. That aside, the scenery is gorgeous.

Emilie and I decided that our best chance at my technically illegal entry into Armenia was to claim ignorance. We would pretend like we didn’t know each other (really an absurd trick given that we were the only two foreigners on the bus) and I would go through the customs line well before she did to have a chance to plea my case and claim the website to be unclear and ambiguous. It was neither, but the electronic version of the visa was new enough that it caused some confusion among the border guards. They liked that I had the $60 receipt and that I spoke Russian, and after 30 minutes of debating amongst themselves and sending me to different booth windows, they finally let Emilie and me both through.

The driver of our van agreed to take us to a cheap motel he knew of on the outskirts of Yerevan. We pulled down a dark alley at about 1 a.m. and the driver pounded loudly on the door until the motel owner woke from his sleep and led us to our concrete room. The facilities were Spartan, but sufficient. We adjusted the rabbit ears on the black and white television in the corner until we could hear CNN broadcast through the static, and fell asleep happy to feel connected to the outside world, yet excited for the adventures of Yerevan.

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