Yerevan

The Soviets built long one or two lane roads from the airport to the city. On either side there is nothing except maybe street lamps. As the Russian speaking driver that usually picks me up speeds fast at the strange hours of night that I usually arrive in many of these countries, I feel like this is the closest depiction of the road to the afterlife, if there was one. A calm dark straight drive under lamp posts into nothing but more darkness, just silent driving. It is calming because there is nothing to achieve, nothing to do but sit. It is also depressingly un-optimistic, there are no blue skies, green pastures, bright sunlight like in the plains of the US, or on the long drives in Nashville.
I feel strangely secure in that car, in all of those cars, with all of those drivers that have a sign up with my organization’s name on it when I exit the airport. I don’t know them, they don’t know me, but my organization has vetted them, and they have that sort of paternalistic feeling that the men in those countries have, that sense that has largely disappeared in the West, the sense of responsibility a man has for a woman. So I feel safe with those strangers, in their cars, Ladas, bmws, Mercedes, whatever they are, as we drive at 12 AM, 3AM, 7 AM through the long street to the hotel.
I lose my sense of responsibility and drift into the scenery, into the lamps that race past us as we drive. I melt into this world, this dark world, that, despite its recent consumerism, its recent Armani and Prada store fronts, is still marked by functional soviet architecture, grays, browns, and copper, so dark it can’t be cleaned anymore, so sturdy, it can’t be destroyed. I am only supposed to arrive here, for now, I am only a passenger, my illiteracy, my inability to speak, makes me impotent, excuses me from conversation, from engaging in the world, I only have to observe. I am a bystander. And so I stand by, or sit rather, and appreciate my driver’s complicity in this.
Of course the next day is different. I must lead, I must collaborate, discuss, idealize, criticize, create. At the overpriced breakfast in the hotel, I realize how comfortable I am in the western world. The hotel restaurant is occupied by 11 people, including myself. Ten of them are men.
The night I left LA, two days before, I spent the night at a business hotel near the airport. That morning I saw salespeople riding the elevator. It was also dominated by men, but there were, peppered among them, women. Aggressive saleswomen, with blackberries, blue tooth, carry-on luggage, laptop all in tow.

I felt, two days later, in the restaurant of the hotel, that I was in an old boys club, a culture of role playing and nepotism. Though they were innocent of all my claims against them, I still didn’t like them, collectively. I remembered a time when I enjoyed molding into a group like that, the challenge of charming and then intellectually conquering a group of chauvinists. Most of the time, though, in retrospect I don’t think they were ever really conquered as much as they were charmed and amused. I won a few over, taught a few that women were as smart and capable as men, but most were simply amused, I am sure.

But now, I had no patience to either charm or conquer. I just wanted to move beyond them, I knew they existed, everywhere they existed, in the US there were millions of them, traditional men that want traditional roles for women. They are everywhere, but I had found my bubble, my niche, my market, my world and they didn’t exist there. In my world I went as far as I could based on my merit. So I thought.

Later in the bathroom

Unlike the men, I missed the bathrooms. I went to the bathroom in the office after lunch. I sat there looking at the shower, the sink, the low ceiling. I missed the culture of the bathroom. The toilets are not as big as in the US, nor as sturdy, somehow you felt you were really shitting into the ground. The sinks were smaller, the showers, smaller. It reminded me of that year in Afghanistan.

The bathroom in this world, as clichéd and as trite as it is, seemed more authentic, more realistic. A bathroom should be a very small room with a simple toilet and sink, right? It was more Marxist in a way, sure there were fancy bathrooms and less fancy bathrooms, but generally there was much less differentiation than in the US. My Marxist side comes out.

But strangely, I am less compelled towards this world than I once was. I am less curious, less drawn. Its age I suppose. And comfort feels good now. Capitalism has a new place in my heart now. Luxury feels good. And I feel isolated here, far from innovation and progress. Far from strong social programs, liberal policies, from new technologies for heating and cooling homes, from new curriculum for teaching youth and children, far from strange new foods, new ideas that make millions, far from opportunity and experimentation.