Food and More Food 6/26/16

Today I walked into the lobby with my dad to grab a map and see if we could get anything to eat. I turn my back for ONE second to go to the front desk and when I come back I see my dad sitting among 5-7 very Armenian men and a priest. He said he had met one of the guys in the elevator earlier and that they were recommending a place for dinner called "Bantok Yerevan" meaning Yerevan Tavern. Within 10 minutes of the suggestion we were sitting at the restaurant with food in front of our plates. The taxi drove us like a madman (which is normal here), the ordering was fast, and they had the food on our plates within 5 minutes of ordering. We ordered lulu kebab, dolma, and rice and the menu was only in Armenian and Russian so I was very thankful that I knew how to read Armenian. If not, we could have ended up with a fish head and eggplant (not that there's anything wrong with that...). The food was the best meal I have hands down ever had in my life. It could have been because we had just come from walking around the city for hours on end or it could have been the special chef recipe or something. All I know is that I would eat it for the rest of my life if I could (even though I would end up dying of a heart attack at 32).

This food along with the rest of the food on this trip has been "finger-licking good" as the KFC slogan used to say. We would have at least a loaf of bread in front of us at every. single. meal. I don't believe I went a single meal without having a piece of bread, which is very, very sad for my health. I also ate a LOT of hard-boiled eggs, so much to the point that I couldn't eat the yolk anymore because it would be an excessive amount of cholesterol. The last but not least staples of the Armenian diet were cucumbers, tomatoes, cherries, and apricots. The cucumbers and tomatoes were served with every. single. meal. and the the cherries and apricots would always come as a dessert. I would bite into the apricot until a person next to me gasped and told me if I didn't split it in half first then I might end up eating a worm or two. That scared me into their little procedure, and it was a good thing, too. A few apricots later I found myself staring a tiny little worm in the face (or was it the tail?).

Most of the Armenian food we ate didn't reflect the kind I had eaten back home, but that was mostly because we were eating in the smaller villages where we were working. In the city of Yerevan itself, kebab, dolma, boreg, and baklava are pretty much on every street. Ice cream is one of the foods I wasn't expecting to be as popular as it was. Pretty much every block had some sort of ice cream vendor and i was overwhelmed by the number of options (not that I didn't appreciate the sheer amount of ice cream I ate in a 12 day period). The food journey I went on was just as interesting and exciting as the mental and physical one I partook in.