Monday morning Briony and i woke up exhausted and decided to take a taxi to Stepanagert, the capital of Karabagh, instead of the usual Mashutni (mini-van). The 20 minute ride down the mountain twists and turns until you can see a scenic view of the city. Stepanagert is really spread out, even thought it only has about 35,000 people. The streets are clean and quiet, you can feel the old soviet architecture still remaining.
Briony along with Julia, who's in the states for a month, have been living in Shushi for about 7 months now. They started an english language center and have a radio show in Stepanagert. Today, as their guest, I joined in the fun. We had a half an hour show on music from India. I spoke about my travels and even read 2 stories from my travel journal...and educated Karabaghtzis on Indian music.
Then we made our way to the university where we taught an english conversation class to about a dozen university students. It's amazing how well they speak...and how quickly these people learn languages. Here, Russian is more of the language learned at school...most of their classes are in russian and armenian is spoken at home. English is the 3rd language, and German the 4th.
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