I get out of bed, and my host mother gives me bread and jam to eat for breakfast, as well as tea. No cucumbers, no tomatoes; those things were plentiful last time I was in Armenia and served every meal. I put on my inner jacket, my coat, my scarf, my gloves and my boots. Ready to walk out the door.
The snow falls down, covering the ground to half a meter in height (and counting), except where some brave soul has shoveled it out of the way. My jacket also gathers snow as I walk to the bus stop, and from where i get off the bus to my building at the institute. A crazy dog barks at me along the way, on the inside of the institute's gateway. There is a heater inside my office, but it is not very powerful, and I have to keep my coat and scarf on inside. Welcome to the winter of Armenia.
My boss, Suren, had assigned me to program a chip so that it makes numbers appear on an LED display. This, being part of a bigger project that I'd be working on for the next 3 months. I had prior experience with micro-controller programming, so this didn't seem like a hard task. Suren and his colleagues seem to take an old-school approach to their programming (by using assembly language exclusively) however, with a simple google search, I was able to find the C compiler plugin for the IDE that they had been using, and Suren asked me how to do the same.
After work, I take the bus back to my neighborhood and walk to the birthright office for Armenian language lessons. Again, getting covered with snow. During lessons, I discover just how much I have forgotten since the last time I was in Armenia, and how my grammar has degraded.
After that, I get on my computer and, using the birthright office's internet, I Skype with my friend back in the states. Then, I have dinner with a few of my fellow birthright volunteers and walk back home, walk up to the fourth floor, knock, and my host mother opens the door, and i get ready for bed. The cycle continues…
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