This is NOT the Tropics!

I checked into my room at the Hotel Congress in Yerevan. This hotel is only five years old, and even though it is a small room, it is very clean and well maintained. I will like it here. I have only been able to connect to the internet for a brief time. My hotel bathroom has an interesting device to warm the towels. I noticed a ladder like device made of tubular steel hanging on the wall adjacent to the shower stall. It actually had a plug in the bottom with a power light. I turned it on and I did not notice it blink or emit any sounds. Later, I found that it had heating coils in the contraption that gently warmed the two towels hanging on it. I like this idea.

Of course, due to the 12 hours of jetlag that I am experiencing, I awoke bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 2:30AM. It will be Wednesday before I am close to adjusting to a normal circadian rhythm. I spent Sunday resting and making the final touches to my introductory Power Point presentation and training plan. I also took the opportunity to continue work for my visit to our Save the Children Country office in Malawi. I will depart a week from Wednesday and fly down to that small country in Africa. I will need to connect with a flight to Kenya through Heathrow airport in London. Even then, I will not be able to fly directly to the airport outside of the capital city of Lilongwe. I will arrive there via a brief stop in Lusaka, Zambia directly to the west of Malawi.



It is very cold here in Yerevan. During my meeting with Irina Saghoyan, the Armenia Country Officer Director, she mentioned that it was unseasonably cold even for here. I do not feel that it is very bad, but I think it is -10 degrees centigrade overnight. I brought along plenty of warm clothes so I will be fine.



My driver Karen (a warm friendly man about my age) picked me up promptly at 9AM. I have just finished my 1st half day of training. I found that I needed to adjust my training schedule. Delightfully, the PDA’s that I scattered throughout the conference room table came quickly into the hands of the team. I had to give them a good ½ hour just trying the PDA’s out and inputting data in the test forms that I provided. We then agreed to a schedule for the next six days which included a field visit on Friday. Margarita, whom I met during a Design, Monitoring and Evaluation (DM&E) conference in Istanbul back in October 2005, offered to take me to the crafts market here in Yerevan this weekend. The Armenia culture is rich and the people very friendly.