My parents’ visit to Armenia came and went as fast as this year’s
meager apricot season – here one day, gone the next. But in the limited time we had together we still managed to
see quite a bit. In addition to a
few days in Yerevan, we spent four days traveling around the southern part of
Armenia and it was the first time I really just got to be a tourist in this
country. We explored some of my
favorite medieval monasteries, saw 8,000 year old stone carved petroglyphs, and
wandered the ruins of Armenia’s equivalent to Stonehenge. For me, the trip provided some sense of
closure to my stay in Armenia. It
reinforced the beauty of this country and everything it has to offer, from it’s
people, history, and nature. For
my parents it was a chance to sit back, relax, and enjoy, as I had taken the
travel agent role on this one, and their only responsibility was providing the
credit card. And for my mom, she
got to feel like she was back in her grandmother’s kitchen. I’d say the highlight of the week was
having both my parents and my host family in the same room together. Despite the language barrier between my
two sets of parents, we still found a way to laugh and joke over dinner and
make fun of Ali.
Now to the real topic of today’s blog. Puke. If there’s one thing I hate doing in life, it’s puking. For as far back as I can remember, I
can count on one hand the number of vomiting episodes I’ve had. But, I can now add another to the
count. The other night I returned
home from an evening enjoying one of Yerevan’s many outdoor cafes at which point
I realized something wasn’t quite right.
Waves of nausea started hitting me as hard as the cloud of trash chute
stench that engulfs you while walking in the stairwell of a Yerevan apartment
building. I worked hard to hold it
at bay, but at 2 am I awoke in panic.
I ran to the bathroom just in time to start heaving. Now I must acknowledge that it is quite
a wondrous thing that the human body can defy the laws of gravity and forcefully
shoot the contents of your stomach out back the way it came. The human mind is as equally
wondrous. The mind can remember
things, but it can also send you back to past moments in your life, in a way
that’s much stronger than a simple memory. As I knelt over the toilet sharing the floor with our
bathroom’s one resident roach, eyes closed in denial about my current reality,
my mind was back in the remote, coastal village of Shirazi, Kenya. I was back to the site of my last
vomiting adventure out behind my host family’s home, under the bright stars and
coconut trees, hunched on all fours in the sand. I felt the same calm and quiet I had felt that night,
sitting outside for hours in the fresh air to escape the stuffiness of my
room. That place felt better than
the stark white bathroom, so I let my mind stay there until the storm passed.
The puking was followed by a day of hard boiled egg burps
(haven’t eaten an egg in a week) and yet another case of explosive diarrhea
(unlike vomiting episodes I’d need way more than one hand to count significant
explosions out the other end). In
the wise words of Eve Hamlin, “Poop is always funny.” But there is a point
where poop is no longer funny. As
much as I’ve adjusted to life in Armenia, my digestive system never really
seemed to catch up. I’ve gotten
used to a new culture, a new city, a new language, but my intestines have been
very accepting of that. Sure the
likelihood of me picking up an occasional bug from food that spent a little too
much time in the back of a truck in the heat of summer is probably greater than
it is at home. But I like to think
that maybe this is my body’s way of saying it’s time to pack your bags and head
home. I’ll be doing so in two
weeks, but not until a quick trip to Istanbul and some serious souvenir
shopping back in Yerevan! For your
sake as much as mine, I hope the poop (and puke) stories are over for this
adventure.
Also, if you haven’t already seen it, check out this article
I wrote for the Armenian Weekly online magazine about our experience in Artsakh
on the Janapar Trail!
