The lack of customer service in Armenia is often blamed on the Soviet legacy. But where there so many cafes and restaurants in the Soviet Union?

While in Armenia earlier this month I could not but dislike the bad customer service almost in all cafes and restaurants (with the exception of an entirely unknown cafe within a gift shop, “Treasures of Armenia,” on Abovyan street in downton Yerevan where customer service is the best in the world; “The Club,” “Art Bridge” were not bad either). In the gorgeous Astral cafe, for example, during our third visit my friends and I had to leave it because no one approached us to help in 30 minutes. In Jazzve, another famous place, I had to ask the manager to send a waiter to help us. And on Princess Marianna, a ship-cafe in the Hrazdan gorge, I had to give “tips” on how to be nice to customers to their waiter. And I’d better not talk about the funny waiters in Harsnaqar resort at the lake Sevan.

It feels like waiters in cafes are about to start a fight with you. Yes, WAITERS and not WAITERS AND WAITRESSES because for some reason 99% of cafes have male waiters only. On one hand, it is good that Armenian women don’t have to go through the regular sexual harrasment by working in cafes*, on the other hand I felt like I was in an Arab country where men serve in bars and restaurants. And I am pretty sure this new “fashion” of having men serve comes from many Armenians’ beloved Dubai, the place on the Earth I hate perhaps the most. Too bad that places like Dubai have become many Armenians’ model. But for some reason many like going to Dubai; well, those eastern Europeans are taking their introduction to capitalism/materialism obsessively.

Ironically, capitalism – I think – can help us understand the lack of customer service in Armenia. I was surprised to find out, for instance, that bills in Armenia’s many cafes include the “service charge.” This means you are not supposed to tip the waiter because they already charge you for it. For the customer, it may be a good deal because the “service charge” is usually only 5% in contrast to the 15% charge in the United States and other places in the world. Sadly, most waiters don’t even get this 5% because many cafes are said to keep a percentage from the “service charge.”

No wonder waiters don’t care about the customer. No matter how they serve, they are going to get the same paycheck which is very very little money to survive with in Armenia. And since they make so little money, all they can think about is what to do to make more. This was best observed in the beautiful Parvana restaurant complex in the Hrazdan Gorge, where the waiters – again all males – would gather in groups once a while and I guess talk about saving food from customers to later resell them or take them home. A former barman, who is now involved in the entertaiment industry, told me he would sell his own products at the bar in order to make money.

Capitalism may not be the only explanation for Armenia’s common lack of customer service. Still, I am pretty sure if the culture on tipping based on service replaced the precharged service fee there would be some improvements. And ordinary Armenians should also learn to tip. I understand that money is scarce in Armenia, but if they afford going to a cafe they should anticipate leaving something for the waiter. And the waiter should be a helper and not a headache.

And yes, I was looked at as a fool when I tipped 15%. But hey, I do it in the West and why not do it in Armenia?

*The other thing I noticed that the direct manager of the male waiters is often a lady.

It has been two days since I have returned back from Armenia and all I can think of is going back again.

This is not to say that everything was great there – especially the absence of customer service.  But overall it was a wonderful experience that cannot be fully explained.

The 17 days I spent there went so fast that by the time I realized I hadn’t visited 20% of the places I planned to see I was on my way back to the States.  I only managed to visit some places I had been to before – Geghard, the incredible medieval church built from one stone, Garni, the pagan temple that I didn’t enjoy much, St. Echmiadzin, the Holy See of the Armenian Church, and Sevan, the lake that Armenians use like a sea.  I had the best time in the latter by spending a day at the most expensive resort – Harsnaqar.  It was sooooo cool and I am glad I went there; my 5-year-old niece enjoyed it the most.

There are so many things to tell and so many photos to post.  I will just continue writing about some experiences in later entries.

One important thing I want to mention, and perhaps this deserves a seperate post, is that Armavia – an airline in Armenia – SUCKS!  Don’t ever get on their service even if that’s the only option.  Not only the crew is absolutely stupid, rude and unhelpful, but they may take you somewhere else.  That’s what exactly happened. 

My Yerevan-Paris fligt (Armavia, August 15, 5:30 a.m.) made a stop in Lyon to drop off some passengers – something that had not been announced before the plane took off.  Lucky me, I still managed to get on my Atlanta flight in Paris but at least two people I know of missed their other flights thanks to Armavia’s trick. 

Another suggestion on traveling.  Avoid Paris’ CDG airport; it sucks to death.  Armenia’s airport is wonderful, but Armavia needs to be banned.

Renting a car in Armenia may cost you more than buying one. Since I am planning to do lots of traveling within Armenia when I visit her at the end of this month, I have been looking into renting a car so I can drive it all around the place including to Artsakh.

Renting a car for my 17-day stay will cost me more than my expensive airline ticket. I am not kidding.  The rates of car rental in Armenia are absolutely ridiculous.

I am not sure what is the reason for the rocket high prices, but it seems the fact that locals don’t rent cars contributes to the problem.  But even so, it seems the local rentals want to do nothing than rip off Diasporan Armenians and foreign tourists.

Rates at http://www.kayak.com/?tab=cars&location=Yerevan&gclid=CMH4j7KEnI0CFQqgYgodvw-A6A, for example, are scary.  But not as scary when you check out the Hertz prices.

Actually, I first learned about Hertz cars through www.hertz.am, their local website in Armenia.  I was happy to find out that they rented Nissan Pathfinder, for example, for $20 a day! Actually my sister (you can tell she is an investigative journalist) happened to visit the location in Armenia yesterday to double check the availability, prices and conditions. 

She was told there that hertz.am is out of date and that it is not $20/day at all!  For 17 days, she was told it would be a little over $1,800.  Can you imagine?  Over $100 for a car per day?  When I first heard of this I thought they were ripping off.  I ended up playing with the main Hertz website – www.hertz.com – and found out that actually the price my sister was quoted was $200 less than what hertz.com had it listed.  Yes, over $2,000 for a car for 17 days in Armenia!

This is ridiculous.  How do they expect people to want to travel to Armenia? 

Anyhow. I am making an offer.  If you live in Yerevan and have a normal autmomatic car WITH air conditioner I would like to rent it from you for a total $350, ok maybe even $400 for 17 days.

If you don’t live in Yerevan but will do everything to help me :d send me a check of $1,800 so I can rent a car – or maybe even buy one. 

If I had won the lottery (which I don’t play in the first place), I would buy one of these Infiniti SUVs, ship it to Armenia then leav it for my sister there after my visit.  Especially that she wants to move to a remote Armenian region to develop the local media there, this would be a great investment toward her efforts.  As the Russian saying goes, “Doesn’t hurt to dream.”

It took me several weeks to buy tickets for my upcoming Armenia trip.  Before reading on, please be advised that the tickets are REALLY expensive.  But there are still ways of getting the least expensive.

I have been on every website you can imagine, and here are the three that you should really look into if you are buying a ticket to Armenia.

Start with checking out www.airfrance.com.  This will be far the most affordable deal any other airline website will most likely offer.  Especially if your dates are flexible, you will be good to go.  A month ago, for example, there was a round trip from Denver to Armenia available for $1,630 only (trust me this is really cheap) leaving on July 24, 2007. I can imagine the prices have gone up, but airfrance.com is worth a try.

Don’t think of checking out www.travel.yahoo.com and the other big websites. They are going to cost you a fortune.  The famous LEVON TRAVEL is not the best way to go either, although it still offers tickets for less than Yahoo Travel. 

The next website after www.airfrance.com you want to check out is http://aatravelinc.com. This website will let you search flights with limited options but will get for you some of the best tickets out there.  In fact, many people traveling to Armenia are buying now from this website.

http://aatravelinc.com/ is still not user friendly and the flights it offers come with very long layovers.  Some people like layovers and actually come out of the connecting airport to see the city.  So if you like seeing as much places as you can, go for a layover.

If you want to work with an actual person who you can really trust, go to http://simatours.com and get in touch with the lady named Shake’ through her e-mail or the phone number listed on that website.  Shake’ is a wonderful travel agent who will answer your every question and get you the cheapest tickets possible.  I learned about her from a senior friend in New York City whose son Armen just lost $200 by NOT using Shake’s service.  Armen had purchased tickets for $1,600 while his first cousin had purchased the same tickets for the same place for $1,400 from Shake’. 

I actually did get my tickets from Sima Tours.  It cost me $1,690 but with the shortest layovers possible.  One thing I didn’t like about their service was that they posted my payment at least four business days after they received my check.  But still, I would recommend working with them. 

Now I want to hear from you guys.  If you know of better deals PLEASE let all of us know! And if you don’t mind spending a few extra dollars, just go for any travel agency (sometimes the stress is not worth the few bucks you save).

A letter from Canadian Doctor Berge Minassian who is visiting his ancestral Armenia:

Yerevan is ALIVE.  The traffic of cars and people is
unbelievable.  And everyone is Armenian!  Tonight I
sat on the steps of the hotel in the main square and
watched the flag across the circle on the other
building.  A slight breeze was making it fly about
tricolored and such a source of pride.  The moon rose
above, the smiling happy people strolled about, the
beautiful young girls and couples with smiles that we
simply do not see in Toronto…  We had a bite, walked
on Abovian.  Spoke for half an hour with a T-shirt
salesman on the street.  Of course he knew someone we
knew from the old country, and we almost went to his
place to carry on the conversation, a perfect
stranger, yet a feeling as if he is an uncle.

Saturday, we will see Gayaneh Ballet at the Opera
house, and each night this week we could have attended
a different play, had we had time from all the
meetings and kef.

I wish I could live here.

Artsakh, the unrecognized Armenian Republic of Nagorno Karabakh and de jure part of Azerbaijan, is more free than Azerbaijan.  The newly released 2007 Freedom House report says the Armenian enclave is partly free while Azerbaijan is not free.

The Republic of Armenia has also been rated as partly free. Particular attention is paid to the troubling state of women and human trafficking in Armenia:  

Domestic violence and trafficking in women and girls for the purpose of prostitution are believed to be serious problems. Representation of women in the current Parliament is low: at year’s end, only 7 out of 131 seats in the National Assembly were held by women. According to the election code, women shall now comprise 15 percent of a party’s list for the proportional election and hold every tenth position on party lists, marking an improvement from the 2003 parliamentary elections.

The Freedom House report failes to take a note of the growing institutionalized anti-Armenianism in Azerbaijan such as the government sponsored destruction of Armenian monuments.

Armenia Tree Project is alarming yet another government decision to eliminate a rich and unique forest in Armenia:

Teghut, with its thousands of acres of virgin forest and rich ecosystem in Northern Armenia, is home to hundreds of species of birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and plants, including many that are registered in the International Red Book of Endangered Species.

Armenian Copper Program (ACP), with approval from Armenia’s Ministry of Nature Protection, plans to clear-cut over 1,500 acres of Teghut’s forest in order to establish an open pit strip mining operation for copper and molybdenum ore. In addition, ACP plans to create a “tailing dump” in a nearby pristine gorge, where heavy metals and other toxins from mining waste will leach into the ground and into the river flowing through the gorge, ultimately contaminating the local water supply.

An online petition is available for your signatures.

Today I received my tickets to Armenia from July 27 – August 15, 2007.

This is the first time I am going home after I moved to America in 2003, interestingly on July 27.  So I am visiting home exactly four years after I left.

I can’t describe how happy I am.  I will be very busy but if there is a blogger conference or something around that time I would like to meet some of our pen pals.

I will post about buying cheapest tickets to Armenia later.

Hetq informs that “Since 2002, entry into Armenia has been prohibited for French-Armenian ontologist and genealogist Alexandre Arord[i] Varbedian.”

In August 2003, the Department for Pardons, Citizenship, Awards and Titles, within the President’s staff, refused Varbedian’s application for a ten-year paid residence permit in Armenia. Since then, Varbedian’s three electronic tourist visa applications have been refused and, on two occasions, invitation letters from his son, Artur Varbedian, have been rejected without a reason cited.

Varbedian, a natural born citizen of France raised in Armenia, has been reportedly refused extension for his Armenian visa due to allegedly belonging to a sect, writes Hetq.

Having read most of Varbedian’s writings and attended one lecture by him in Yerevan before 2003, I know he considers himself Aryan, hence his made up middle name – Arordi (Son of Ar/Sun). 

I guess the good news is that Varbedian is surprisingly not anti-Semite (as far as I can recall).  Just the opposite, he considers Jewish culture Armenian-Aryan and apparently has no hate for them.  But the off-shoot he has supported, such as the tiny Armenian-Aryan organization, is largely anti-Semitic to an extent that, as we revealed last year, one of their leaders particpitaed in Iranian president Ahmadenijad’s infamous Holocaust denial conference.  Varbedian’s tone is still moderate and not too rhetorical. 

But I question Varbedian’s scholarship, and especially his mystic writing style (such as “…” after almost every paragraph) can get annoying.  I also don’t support the school he has created in Armenia that basically is along the eurocentric hierarchial view that western (Aryan for Varbedian) means progress and that the source of every good is in the Aryan culture.

I don’t think it is right for Armenia to blacklist Varbedian because of his beliefs.  These blacklists actually give more credit to his work by creating the mystic environment of exile that the Aryan genealogist is facing. 

I was just talking to one of my best friends in Yerevan and he was saying how the vallue of American dollar has dropped in Armenia.  After an economic affairs discussion, we started talking about girls and he joked that with this financial dollar crisis keeping a girlfriend is difficult hence his single status.