Yerevan, Armenia

This morning my phone said the temperature was 3C with a feels-like of 8C. I have never seen that before. We stepped outside the hotel, and yep, with the sun and lack of wind, it was definitely a warm 3C.

We walked up the pedestrian Northern Avenue towards the Cascades. The buildings in the centre are mostly built from the same pink-orange stones and give a nice look to the avenue (and the rest of the centre).

The Opera House sits in the middle of the pedestrian avenue, surrounded by busy road. Took a few crosswalks to get back on track (pedestrians tend to follow the signals here).

The Cascades is a ginormous marble staircase, 572 steps with five open terraces, ascending 78 metres. It includes the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, which has both external and internal art galleries. Most of it was built starting in 1971, the last 20% or so near the top is still under construction.

We walked up the stairs, admiring the art and the view. It was a clear day and we could see Mt Ararat in the distance. On the way back down, we took the escalators and checked out the interior art collection. It’s really well curated and presented.

We were ready for lunch by the time we got back down to the bottom. Ate at the Green Bean café, a student hangout (there’s a number of universities nearby). It hit the spot.

Next up was Matenadaran, a manuscript museum. This didn’t show up on any of the travel blogs I had read, but the Rough Guide raved about it. It sounded cool to us so there we were.

The Armenian written language was invented in 405 AD by the monk Mesrop Mashtots. Armenian didn’t have a written language at the time. He evaluated different alphabets and decided none of them worked for the Armenian language; and created a brand new alphabet (originally 36 letters, now 39).

The museum has both international ancient scripts, and historical scripts in Armenian. It’s quite well done, we both enjoyed it. There were a few school groups visiting while we were there, they seemed quite excited with the exhibits too.

Walked back into the centre towards the Puppet Theatre. We bought tickets to a show on Tuesday afternoon. Possibly we’ll be the only adults, surrounded by school kids.

Across the street is Katoghike Church, a 13th century church that survived various gentrification cycles. It’s okay for a pic.

We walked back to the hotel via a laundromat near the hotel. We sorted out the machines (it took tap) and I returned later to wash some stuff. I’m not sure why it took us this long to start using laundromats, it’s way easier.

That was it for our day. We had dinner at the hotel. I tried an Areni wine, a local Armenian varietal which was quite good. Armenia is one of the oldest wine producing regions in the world, going back as far as 5000 BC. As expected, it went well with all the dishes we had at dinner.