Yerevan, Armenia

It was raining when we woke up, the first rain we’ve had on the trip. Luckily today was just a transit day, a four hour drive from Goris back to Yerevan.

We had another nice breakfast, with the best fried eggs ever. Our driver, Hamlet, (same driver as yesterday) was at the hotel at 10am and we left for Yerevan.

It was a bit foggy in the passes getting out of Goris. After we passed the high point, we dropped below the clouds and it was better visibility. It didn’t feel like Hamlet was driving fast, but he was way ahead of Google Maps estimates. Maybe that was due to the smooth ride of the older model Mercedes.

We stopped midway for a coffee, one of the better Armenian coffees we’ve had.

We zipped into Yerevan around 1:30pm. Our room wasn’t yet ready so we left our luggage with the front desk and had lunch. We split a halloumi salad and a club sandwich, which as the waiter said, was not small.

The front desk in the meantime had upgraded us to the Executive Suite, which was really nice of them. The room is huge, with a balcony view over Vermissage Market and Khachkar Park.

We quickly washed up so we could squeeze in a visit to the National Gallery of Armenia this afternoon. Museums aren’t open Mondays, and by seeing the art museum today, we avoided bunching up museums on Tue/Wed.

We walked over in the rain, using our little travel umbrellas. The art museum covers seven floors, with floors 3-4-5 featuring Armenian artists. We started on floor 5 and worked our way down.

The museum was quite good. It’s interesting to see what national cultural symbols are featured. For example, the medieval city of Ani came up a few times. It’s now part of Türkiye and on our itinerary for later in the trip. Mt Ararat also appears in a number of paintings; it too became part of Türkiye in the Treaty of Kars in 1921, despite being a national symbol of Armenia.

Anyways we quite liked the museum.

It had stopped raining by the time we exited. Walked over to our hotel, and relaxed in our Executive Suite. I looked it up on booking.com, it’s 540 sq ft! That’s bigger than a floor in our house!

Heather was still full from the not-small club sandwich from lunch, so I just went down to the restaurant on my own. Had a small lamb soup and a glass of Armenian red, and caught up in my blog.