At Calumet on Pushkin Street. A kind of trendy-hippies-bourgeois bar in the capital of Armenia.
I went for the local “Armenian Cognac” – five stars they say – and it’s quite a big deal for a bit more than two euros. The room is over-packed with customers and deadly volutes of acrid fog. I can only compare that to the worst student bars of Paris, in the 80s, before the first French smoking ban attempt.
You could guess the crowd quite privileged for the Caucasus region; the local middle upper-class, from kids to 30 something, the Armenian diaspora on holiday – we are mid August -and a few improbable lost westerners. I would just hope not to be a typically representative of this last category.
Coming from Finland, Paris or even Riga, the mood is wild and much less coded. I might have even described it a bit positively crazy, but I’m too new here to really know. The practical change is that fewer people have a good knowledge of English. Well, it’s obviously much better in this sort of bar than in most places of Yerevan.
I left Finland mid July and I don’t think I could return; so even if I loved the former name, “Kymmenes Linja”, the blog had to be renamed and a bit reorganized.
Stone floor, a handful of small round wooden tables, old carpets on the wall; music instruments, African cheap masks and improbable Indian symbolic objects hanging; cheesy small flags of all countries near the entrance; the venue is welcoming but not extraordinary. I suspect that its most successful selling point is a foreign-but-not naive equilibrium. The dancers start to be very uncontrollable after 2am and it doesn’t seem like there is any kind of legal closing time here. I should inquire about that later. On the door or somewhere else, I can read the place has been voted best Yerevan bar of whatever year before. Maybe this says more that I could write tonight.
Utmost Pointless 