I have been wanting to come here for a long time. Whenever my Armenian friends had the chance, they compared Yerevan to Moscow, and it wasn鈥檛 in favor of the latter. So, I decided to visit this city. At the end of February, I caught myself constantly reading the news and not doing anything useful. After talking to my friends, I realized that this problem wasn鈥檛 unique to me, and the solution was to go somewhere....
The gathering of the newly emerged Russian diaspora in Armenia was divided into two camps. The first planned to leave for Georgia, while the second was simply trying to figure out what to do next, from Armenia. I, however, had no intention of going to Georgia. Troubling news was coming from there. Some banks refused to work with Russians altogether, while others demanded a scary document condemning the Russian state to be signed....
I ended up here not by chance, and not even as a tourist. I came to meet new relatives, a family that took in my sister. Wonderful people, with whom I am sincerely glad to be acquainted. Probably, without this reason, I would never have ended up in this state. Certainly not as a place for a first visit. A small town where I spent a month, even smaller than my hometown of Podolsk, but instead of the oppressive impression of an aging province, a lively city with its own life, people who are trying to start their own business and complain about the difficulty of finding workers....