PHOTO DUMP! PHOTO DUMP!
The following are pictures from our tour of churches and monasteries in the outlying countryside near Yerevan.

This was in the Turkish/ Armenia border. It was an old ruins of an ancient pagan civilization from 2000 years ago, before christianity made it to armenia.

Lunch in an Armenian village. Pickled carrots, pickles, mashed potatoes, a kind of quiche with sweet peas and some delicious kind of meat with a sweet pepper sauce on top. Lavash, which is Armenian flatbread and a glass of homemade cherry juice.

The full spread.

The crazy thing is that these beautiful pictures don't come even close to capturing the breathtaking panoramas of mountains and natural beauty. This was an ancient monastery, out in the mountains, handbuilt by one guy as homage to the king some 1300 years ago. It was so serene, so still out there...

This was cool. The mongols were invading, sweeping across the Russian steppe, sacking villages. The monks decided that their best chance of not having their monastery raided and pillaged and burned by the mongols was to make a carving in which Jebus was portrayed as looking like a Mongol. That way the mongol hordes would dig it and leave the monks alone. They did. It worked.