Day one
As the metal giant ascended from the heavens I looked out upon the land from a small hole, and witnessed how the darkness and the light had swallowed the houses and the people, and I knew this was where the struggle was, this was where life unfolded itself. The rubber tires touched down on the asphalt runway, shaking the cabin, and I remembered how the wing of the plane had blinked towards the pale moon in the skies above Europe. Now Armenia embraced me with rows of color.
Polished marble floors filled the white open space with the sound of scuffling, and I took out a piece of gum from my jacket. Eager taxi drivers waved at us beckoned us with opened doors and promises of cheap fares.
The weather was cool, the kebab shop was open at 5 in the morning and so we stumbled in with our trolleys, and backpacks, with greasy hair and faces. They pumped out obscure club music, songs that had been thrown into an electric cement mixer and that now poured down upon us from the worn down square-holed ceiling. I had a bite of some doughy scrotum food filled with soup. You could see the touch of iron curtain everywhere even in the faint light of the early morning. It had stained the buildings on the streets, the cars, and had lodged itself behind the eyes of the drowsy workers serving us tea as their heads were being blasted from a bass that had confused its mission and drowned out the depth of the beat with rattling innards. The first day was beginning, and Ed Sheeran was begging me to follow his lead from the black box attached to the wall. We were looking at maps and chatting casually as we fought through the feeling of 13 hours of traveling. I felt a sense of belonging, isolated from the people in Denmark in these strange settings. I leaned in over the table, resting on my elbows and scratching my hair.
The familiar didn’t have the same taste anymore. In the last couple of years the textures of the same old same old had changed. I could see the mesh rearrange beneath my hand as I placed it on my parents couch. We arrived at the youth organization in the middle of Yerevan. Here we could store our luggage while waiting for it to be evening, and to be transported to our hotel.
I took a walk in the city Yerevan were giant holes had formed in the ground. 30 meters deep workplaces were filled with miniature people and toy machines that ate away of the different sediments, putting it in trucks and hurrying it off to somewhere, were it would be used as a sacrifice to the new god of the growing urban environment. Old and new clashed as soviet buildings stood in the shadow of new shiny capitalist constructions. It seemed like growth had a place here, you could see the need for it in every worn down corner. The need had turned itself into a grainy filter covering the buses and the people. Dust clouds rose from the pit. I stepped onto the taxi bus with the rest of my co travelers, sat down and leaned my head against some drapes. In Denmark every line is drawn with a ruler created for the sole purpose of assisting that line to reach its destination without any deviations. Old furniture in an alleyway. I made a note on how impossible a scene like that was in a place where you didn’t exist if you didn’t hold on to a small yellow card connecting you to the kilometers of strings that runs from the core of the metal dome and to its citizens. I got drunk in a hotel room on pomegranate wine and talked for hours on end with Zane, whom I referred to as Cream, about love and our insecurities. She reminded me of myself. I could feel time gnawing at my 26 years old skeleton as the young girl spread out her hopes and dreams in front of us and invited me to dine on them. I recognized some of the dishes. The day ended when my head hit a king size bed as a guy from Belarus snored at me from the floor.
