Chisinau-Yerevan
10/05/14 18:49
... since our originally planned route was over the Crimea Peninsula. Things change during the 9 months of preparation time! So we are cruising over the Black Sea towards the Turkish coast, from there East to Yerevan. So the flight is quite a bit longer.
Furthermore the authorities in Azerbaijan would not let us fly into Baku from Armenia since they are not best friends with each other. Therefore we have to change our schedule and fly to Erevan first, then to Tbilisi in Georgia and entering Baku from there. We guess that many of the people in our region are not aware of all these conflicts here - but we are now...
The landing in Yerevan is very smooth again (compliments to Captain Frey) and the handling is one of the best we ever experienced: we are out of the airport within 20 minutes with plane filled up and immigration/customs cleared. The webmaster realized that he informed the sightseeing agent her that we are arriving 3 hours later due to the detour; but he did not inform her that we are arriving a day earlier... So we take a cab into Erevan, check in at the hotel (which is quite nice) and go for a walk-about on our own. What a difference to Chisinau! The city is much wealthier, nicer and a lot of Western shops (from Armani to IWC). What impressed us the most are the street coffee shop culture of Yerevan! There are cool coffee shops in the streets everywhere and we never heard so much chill out music in public! We wander around the city center up to the Opera and back. It is very clean and there is an interesting mixture of old Soviet buildings (a minority) with modern buildings. People are well dressed, friendly and well educated. Later we learn that Armenia is actually like two countries: Yerevan and the rest.
In the evening we have an Armenian Brandy at the hotel bar (10 years old - to be drunk before dinner) before we go to an Armenian restaurant. There we have some of the best fish (sturgeon) we ever had!!! The vodka ( on the house) and the 20 year old brandy ( on us) is also very nice.
So after that back to the hotel; the first two days went really well!
Furthermore the authorities in Azerbaijan would not let us fly into Baku from Armenia since they are not best friends with each other. Therefore we have to change our schedule and fly to Erevan first, then to Tbilisi in Georgia and entering Baku from there. We guess that many of the people in our region are not aware of all these conflicts here - but we are now...
The landing in Yerevan is very smooth again (compliments to Captain Frey) and the handling is one of the best we ever experienced: we are out of the airport within 20 minutes with plane filled up and immigration/customs cleared. The webmaster realized that he informed the sightseeing agent her that we are arriving 3 hours later due to the detour; but he did not inform her that we are arriving a day earlier... So we take a cab into Erevan, check in at the hotel (which is quite nice) and go for a walk-about on our own. What a difference to Chisinau! The city is much wealthier, nicer and a lot of Western shops (from Armani to IWC). What impressed us the most are the street coffee shop culture of Yerevan! There are cool coffee shops in the streets everywhere and we never heard so much chill out music in public! We wander around the city center up to the Opera and back. It is very clean and there is an interesting mixture of old Soviet buildings (a minority) with modern buildings. People are well dressed, friendly and well educated. Later we learn that Armenia is actually like two countries: Yerevan and the rest.
In the evening we have an Armenian Brandy at the hotel bar (10 years old - to be drunk before dinner) before we go to an Armenian restaurant. There we have some of the best fish (sturgeon) we ever had!!! The vodka ( on the house) and the 20 year old brandy ( on us) is also very nice.
So after that back to the hotel; the first two days went really well!
TransAsia 2014