Wednesday April 29 - Yerevan

Wednesday, April 29. In the morning, before departure we meet with Andrei Andries, President of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Moldova. He apparently heard of our visit and wanted to reiterate the importance to Moldova of foreign scientific publications. The most useful information I can relay is connected with the AAAS initiative.

We depart by air to Kiev. The direct flight to Yerevan no longer exists, so we must transit Kiev. Since we arrive in Kiev relatively early in the day, we spend the day in the city viewing various sites (no business). At one point in Kiev I receive coupons in change for my rubles. By reflex action I object. The vendor says,"oh, you want MONEY!" Also by reflex, Levner and I scout out the newspapers in the kiosks. We buy a Belarus newspaper that we did not see in Belarus. Then we fly to Yerevan. This flight (on Air Armenia), despite being in the middle of the night, is completely full. Arriving in Yerevan we do not expect anyone will meet us, but we are wrong—Nerses Hayrapetian of the Armenian National Library is waiting for us. (However he was waiting in the "International Section," which we were unaware of until we were paged. The Intourist system, by which foreigners travel with separate ground services from natives of the Commonwealth, is still in place in all the countries that I visited.) There is a certain amount of procedural foolishness in getting into our hotel rooms at the Hotel Armenia, so agree to meet Nerses in the afternoon the next day.

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We flew into one of the two airports in Kyiv, the older one that is closer to the city center. I remember we rode a tram into town.

With today's airport security, it is hard to imagine, but I recall that this airport had effectively no security even though it was now sort of an international airport (but only for newly independent former Soviet states). We left our luggage at some bag check location and I remember walking through a hole in a fence around the airport - no one was even slightly concerned.

The flight to Yerevan was completely crazy, I remember that. A group of Armenian men took over the area behind the cockpit area and sat on the floor playing cards and smoking. When the plane landed at the poorly lit dark Yerevan airport (there was a national power shortage at the time) a mobile stairs unit took quite a while to show up, so the passengers opened the front door and dropped down to the runway! Never saw that before, or since.