retiredmartin

I’m disappointed that I’m missing the 2026 UK heatwave;

don’t get many of those, do you ?

Meanwhile in Yerevan;

Oh. On our tours this week all that visitors from the Netherlands, Sweden and Kaliningrad wanted to talk about was the World Cup the weather, yet another thing the UK cultural export. Can we blame global warming on Keir Starmer ? Or A.I. ?

There was some sort of party going on in Yerevan,

but we clearly hadn’t been invited, so after just one night we set off for the train to Guemri, and I bet you can’t wait to hear about Armenia’s second city.

We got a quick look at Yerevan, a city of statues,

swan boats,

“but that’s a Canadian goose” screams A. Reader, and other stuff we’ll come back to, but if I had to describe a country in one word it would be COFFEE.

On every corner, a machine taking your 100 dram coin, often with Hi-Vis maintenance staff on hand, and once you work out how to tell the machine YOU DON’T WANT SUGAR you can have a quality (hot and chewy) espresso for twenty pence (20p).

OK, a cappucino is 50p, but what fool orders a cappucino from a machine ?

I’ve never seen so much strong coffee drunk, long into the evening. That 100 dram espresso is as much a human right as the 1 euro equivalent in Naples.

Except it’s just gone up to 150 drams in the newer machines in the city centre. The main difference between Yereven and the rest of Armenia is 10p on an espresso.

We never tried the tea machine*

Of course, some folk like an artisanal flat white at a table, and in Yereven’s many, many, cafes you could pay more than 10 times the price of that portable cup.

At Marush, an Armenian version of Pollen in Manchester, a coffee and posh lemonade cost £7.

But they did bring out a little table for my rucksack to rest on, so that’s OK.

*_{Yes, I know I raved about Bulgarian machines that produced Irish coffees, too.}