Day 15

We made it down to breakfast rather late on Day 15 as our training had been pushed back a couple of times so that we didn't start until half eleven.  Really not a problem and a chance to catch up on sleep!  Breakfast was the now-expected bread-jam-cheese combo but with the surprise addition of an omlette!  No milk, but given the yumminess of the eggs, we are prepared to overlook this.

The trainings went well and the participants were enthusiastic; we feel that there is some real promise for the future of Guiding in Armenia and that really inspires us to deliver better and better training.  One of the challenges the participants had was to create a game or craft using just balloons, just string or just newspaper and we've come away with some ideas we may bring back to our own units.  We played a rather terrifying (and therefore ideal for Guides and Brownies) game involvng popping balloons and the group with string designed some lovely friendship bracelets and let us keep them.

We also had an epiphany.  A rather precocious ten-year-old on camp named Nane had taught us how to introduce ourselves in Armenian.  We thought she had taught us to say "My name is..." and then we would tack our names on the end to get "My name is Kirsty".  It turns out actually she taught us to say 'My name is Nane" and so we have all been cheerfully introducing ourelves as "My name is Nane Kirsty".  We have proudly been showing of our Armenian for the pas fortnight...

AND NO ONE HAS CORRECTED US.

This explains the indugent smiles and sniggering.  We only worked it out (yours truly in an act of stellar detectivism) as one of the participants introduced herself in the session and didn't say the Nane bit.  Siranouche and Marianna found the whole thing hilarious.  We are somewhat humbled.  And yet amused.

After training we walked into the centre of town and were guided to another branch of the pizza restaurant we visited in Gyumri.  We have in fact eaten more pizza in Armenia than most of the rest of our lives put together.  But it was yummy and we made short work of it.

After lunch we shambled along to see the town square with the obligatory and very pretty fountain and then we strolled down to the park.  There's a funfair in the park and we debated some of the scarier rides.  While we were pondering the inadvisability of being flung upside down straight after lunch, Siranouche appeared with candy floss all round.  Sticky :D

However, once we laid eyes on the dodgems, there was no pondering necessary. At 400 dram a go, it was definitely worth our while and we cheerfully ousted our pent-up frustrations in the same way we Ousted our hoodies to get rid of the eau-de-camp.  A few spectacularly thrilling head-on collisions later and we emerged new women and pottered back to the hotel.

We were too full to have a proper tea but we did chase the candy floss down with some apricots and plums to cancel out the naughtiness.  We then spent a quiet evening in as all the town-hopping and training (and sugar-crashing) is making us weary.   So we undertook to catch up on our journals and reading and postcards and the like.  Siranouche and Marianna joined us later and had a birthday cake and balloons in tow for Amy.  We all sang again and had cake to round off the evening.  The cake perked us up somewhat and we mirthfully bemoaned our poor Armenian language skills and our depressingly multilingual translators mocked us mercilessly.

Alas, I am become more and more loquacious and yet more again.  I shall endeavour to arise tomorrow morning with a more finely attuned sense of all that is proper in my mode of address and with a keen eye for the whimsical.  And above all, I will try and be concise.

GOLDies over and out xxx