Life in Yerevan

Life in Yerevan
page 2 of 6

Food.

In the fall, I returned home one day to find the kitchen overloaded with green tomatoes, carrots, eggplants, peppers, onions and giant cabbages that the mother of the family I am living with had bought. She pickled them all to make ttu ("tuh-too", translated as "bitter") so that there would be vegetables for the winter. In the winter, Armenia can't grow food, and it is expensive to important it, so many families do the most sensible thing and preserve what vegetables they will eat for the winter.

As you can see, she made a whole lot. This is after we'd already eaten one tub of ttu. This is right next to where my bedroom was, the hallway always smelled of pickling vegetables.

This is the butcher at one of the local supermarkets. He was using a cleaver to butcher beef (I think that's a cow) on giant block of wood that was obviously once the trunk of a tree.

I was hanging out with my friends once and was sent out to buy some beer and candy bars, but when I was at the store I was drawn to this giant pink cake and decided to buy that instead. When I asked the lady at the store if the cake was fresh, she said they just got it that morning. Once we bit in, it was obviously stale but no more so than the average Armenian cake and was above average for an Armenian baked good.

We invented a reason to celebrate that I now forget and then gathered everything pink in the room together for a photo shoot.

This is my friend Maro modeling a bag of ice-cream.

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