Armenia Dispatch: 12 – Chess Kids

by Erik Olsen on

I’m about a day behind, so I’m going to try to catch up here on what’s been happening during my trip to Armenia.

I left the Bambir guys and headed to the chess academy, where I hooked up with Aram, who works with the academy to promote chess in the country and abroad (and they offer expert instruction for young Armenian players…of which, you will read, there are many). At the Academy, Aram introduced me to two Grand Masters of the game: GM Karen Asryan and GM Tigran Petrosyan. For fun, Aram sat them down and asked them to play a “blitz” game for me, where they went head to head in a game that lasted (I kid you not) less than a minute. This is not to say that the game consisted of just a few moves. Far from it. No, they played a complete game, but played it so fast – moving pieces, taking them from one another – that their hands moved in a blur. Like I said, these are Grand Masters…some of the best chess players in the world (they’re also very nice guys).

I left with GM Petrosyan in his car to a part of town called the Cascade, which is a broad park where a series of staircases rise along a huge ramp towards the Mother of Armenia statue that overlooks the city. I was here because a group of organizations including the UN, the Armenian Chess Federation and the Armenian Chess Academy, were holding a major chess competition for young and old in the park. I wanted to see how big a deal chess is in this country. Suffice it to say, chess is a VERY big deal.

There were two events going on. In one, about 40 kids from all over Armenia came to play in a “blitz” tournament (very fast games) where they went head to head until a single winner emerged. These were some of the finest (young) players in the country (the best young players, I was told, were actually in Serbia at a major competition, but these kids were still incredible. There was also a Grand Master challenge match where three Armenian Grand Masters (Karen Asryan, Tigran Petrosyan, Ashot Anastasyan) took on fifteen competitors each, facing them from the other side of a long table.

I spent the whole day watching these two events, and really enjoyed myself. It grew quite hot, but the Grand Masters hardly seemed to notice and pretty much disposed of their competition without too much effort (there were a few draws, I understand, but several of the people playing against the GMs were chess teachers, so perhaps this is to be expected). Watching the kids, man, you’ve never seen such determination, such intellectual intensity. It was amazing to watch as both boys and girls played (and there were several girls) in vigorous, fast-paced competitions that lasted until one was crowned winner.

So that was my very full day…Armenian rock and Armenian chess…two very interesting sides of the culture here…in this endlessly fascinating place that I highly recommend you visit some day.

Armenia: Getting Here

by Erik Olsen on

All these dispatches under my belt, I suppose I should mention that getting to Armenia these days is pretty easy. With all the stuff I’ve been writing about it, I’d hate for people to think it was one of those awful destinations that take three days to reach. It’s not that bad (it takes two days coming from the states due to the time change), and in fact it used to be a whole lot worse. In the Soviet years, I was told, it could be nightmarish to get here. But now things are different. Several airlines fly into Yerevan on a regular basis, including British Airways and Lufthansa.

In fact, Lufthansa just started a new Munich to Yerevan Route in June that flies three times a week (Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays). For a while, they even offered a sweet deal to Armenian Disaporans…which I think is still going on. The Munich flight is the one I took, and it was fine. You know the Germans…everything was very efficient and like clockwork. Keep in mind the flight arrives late in the evening, but you can then whisk to your hotel without dealing with traffic, AND you get to awake to see Yerevan for the first time with new light and fresh eyes. And as I said, the airport needs some work, so maybe it’s better if you get there when it’s dark, anyway.

Oh, and while I’m at it, if you’re an American citizen (and even if you’re not) you’re going to need a visa in Armenia. The Armenian Embassy site allows you to buy this online as an eVisa ($60), which means you pay online and they email you a link to a page that you print out. While there are still some serious kinks in the system (I never got the link, but managed at customs to use my confirmation number to get my passport stamped), it’s a fine idea. They just need to fix the probs. You can also buy your visa when you arrive…and it’s cheaper to do so ($30). But if you’re like me, you like to have this stuff done before you arrive.

Armenia Dispatch: 11 – More Bambir

by Erik Olsen on

We left the market and headed to the house of the record producer I was talking about the other day. There, I met up with the guys from the band Bambir to talk to them about the rock scene and shot them playing and rehearsing.

We all gathered in the rather dark and cramped space, and the guys set up their instruments as we chatted. Bambir comes from Gyumri, the city where the 1985 earthquakehit the hardest. But as they told me, Gyumri is the city of humor, and so despite that tragedy, people who come from there are funny and warm. This was true in their case. All the guys, Narek (the lead singer and guitarist), Arik (the flautist), and Arman (the bassist) were upbeat, funny guys. (btw: the photo here is of Narek performing recently). They smoked and cracked jokes and were overall hilarious, cool guys. Their drummer, Ashot, was supposedly working at the local CD shop, and so couldn’t make it. We later learned this wasn’t true, that we was hanging out at home…I guess that’s rockers for you.

So the guys got their instruments set up and then started to play, and I’ll tell you, they were great. Really. Even in the cramped little room, that banged out some excellent songs. Narek played guitar and crooned like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Arik blew on the flute with great skill. These guys are the real deal. Real rockers from this little country in the Caucuses.Real musicians.

I asked Arik if he knew any Beatles on the flute, and he immediately launched into a cool little riff on Norwegian Wood, which Narek picked up on, and soon they were jamming on one of my favorite Beatles tunes of all time. These guys are great. I’ll try to post some of the stuff I shot when I get back to the states, but in the meantime, you ought to check them out. I’ll ask their producer if I can post a song or two, and you can download it to hear them. Side note about the band: They were voted Armenia’s best rock band like three years in a row (I’ll have to confirm this, but suffice to say, they are popular here…even if they’re not yet making enough dough to stop working at the CD shop…which makes for such a great story!). Tomorrow, I am going to catch them in concert, so I’ll tell you how good they are as performers, but my guess is they’re excellent.

So I wanted to shoot the Bambir guys walking around the city and so we took a stroll around Yerevan and I talked to the band and we did some shooting around the Parliament building and then around some of the old parts of the city. We ended up sitting and chatting a shooting next to a huge hole (and I mean huge) where they are building a new street here in Yerevan. I thought it was a cool spot to illustrate how much the city is changing. Anyway, we then stopped and had a couple of beers and I had to move onto my next project at the chess academy. But the shoot and the hanging with the Bambir guys went well, and so far the day was off to a good start.

Next dispatch coming up later….

Armenia Dispatch: 10 – Varnissage Market

by Erik Olsen on

Man I had an unrelenting day yesterday. Exhausting. But it was immensely interesting, and very productive. I would have written this last night but I was simply too wiped out to sit down and get it done, so I crashed instead and got the first night of solid sleep in a while. I’m going to break the day into a couple of dispatches, so here’s the first.

It was a working day for me, trying to get together interviews and doing a bunch of shooting for a couple of travel projects I’m working on. In the morning, after a cup of strong, thick, gravy-like Armenian coffee, I headed with an Armenian-American friend named Dork to the local outdoor market called the Vernissage, which only taken place in full force on the weekends. The days so far here in Yerevan have been beautiful. About 75-80 degrees, perfect sunshine, and yesterday was no exception. And so we strolled around the market, looking at all manner of crafts and junk that people sell there. I was shooting pictures, and really enjoying the vibe of the market. This place is an undiscovered gold-mine for E-bay sellers. There are all sorts of things being sold here from old auto-parts and machine parts to lovely hand-made table cloths and blankets. Every cool foreign place I’ve ever been in the world has a thriving local market where all the people come and sell things. Markets are the best place, oftentimes, to see what the people are about, to savor the culture of a place through the work and products people put on display. The Vernissage market is where that happens in Yerevan. While it may happen soon as Armenia, and Yerevan specifically, get more popular (and I’ve telling you, this place IS getting popular, and will be very different in five years) the stuff sold at the market is not yet the kind of tourist crap you find on some other city markets. And that’s very cool, I think. Anyway, I’ll post a picture of the market and you can get an idea of what it’s like. I bought a couple of nice hand-made table cloths which I’ll probably give out at gifts.

Armenia Dispatch: 9 Bambir

by Erik Olsen on

Well, it’s after 2 am and I am beat. These nights blaze by. I ended up tonight with a large group of local Armenians and some Diasporans at a restaurant high above the city in an area called the Cascade. The Cascade is this monstrous Soviet-looking cement staircase that goes on and on. And while I feel compelled to say it is ugly, like a lot of the places and monuments here…there is an extremely cool kind of retro, kitschiness to it that I really liked. They’re now building big flower beds around and in it, and there are fountains and they are sprucing it up, and I have to say, it is a very cool part of town. And of course, doing shots of vodka and gazing over much of Yerevan was also exhilarating and helped my mood immensely.

This morning, I took a long walk around the city today with a couple of friends, two Armenian American brothers who also happen to be visiting at this time and whom I’ve known for a long long time. Each of them has lived here before, and so it was nice to get their perspective on how much things have changed here. Things have changed a lot. Ten years ago, they explained, a blockade of Armenia by Azerbaijan left the country without fuel for much of the year, so the city was often in a near permanent black-out state at night and heating one’s home was pretty much impossible. The residents in the city and the countryside suffered terribly. And yet they held things together, built or rebuilt, and today you would never have guessed that it was so bad back then. The square where my hotel sits is this elegant, beautifully lit square where a large, stadium TV sits now, showing ads at all hours. People are out walking and coming home from a night on the town. Ten years ago, at this time of night, it was a gaping black space. Amazing.

Early afternoon, I went with one of my friends to the office of a record producer who works with an Armenian band called Bambir. This is another story I’m working on…the whole Armenian rock scene. And so he was a great connection. I spent most of the morning at his office, which was on the other side of town in a kind of grungy, but happening, space. There was recording equipment and instruments were strewn everywhere. A Jimmy Hendrix poster on the wall. CDs scattered across the desk. He is an older guy, but does a lot of work with up and coming groups. It was interesting to hear him talk about the old Soviet days when, he said, the one thing that made them happy, that gave him hope, was rock and roll. How cool is that?? I’m heading (hopefully) to a Bambir concert this week.

Anyway, we talked a bit about the popularity of rock here, how the scene is exploding with all sorts of bands making names for themselves. One band in particular, while not formally from Armenia, but of Armenian heritage, is called System of the Down and they’re making a big splash in the states and here as well. Bambir is kind of like a young Jethro Tull. They come from a city called Gyumri (sp?) where the earthquake hit the country hardest, and while they were pretty young when it happened, they write about this in some of their songs (in fact, I think their first album was called Quake…though I’ll have to confirm that). I got their recent CD and ripped it into my Powerbook. quite liked it. Eager to hear the concert soon.

So it’s late now and I’m hitting the sack. More from Yerevan and the Armenian hinterlands coming soon.