A fancy birthday in mountain clothes

About two weeks ago, I had a pretty crazy armenian birthday experience. Ruzan invited me to her mother Siran's birthday dinner and mentioned that I had to look like a 'titis', which means that I was supposed to dress up according to armenian standards. However I completely forgot this detail and I imagined that we would just casually go out to the restaurant with Siran a couple of her friends. As I was hanging out with Joel, a peace corps volunteer, right before I was supposed to join the celebration, I asked him to join me. We got a present and found the restaurant; it was large and fancy, and mostly empty. When I said that I was coming for a birthday the waiter imediately knew who I was coming for and lead us to the second floor. There, we realised that not only we were 30 minutes late, but also that everybody (about 50 people) was dressed like for a wedding (I was dressed like every day and had an aweful face rash and Joel was wearing the usual peace corps volunteer mountain clothes). We had landed right in the middle of a fancy armenian birthday party totally underdressed, unprepared, sick for my part, and late!

Luckily, people's enthousiasm to see me and another foreigner intruding on this all armenian ground diverted the attention from our appearence, and all we could do was to laugh at ourselves and join the table. I always say that these kind of things are great for streching your self-confidence, maybe that's why I end up regularly in these kinds of situations! Joel made up for everything by making good conversation in armenian and later doing some crazy dance moves on the dance floor (which Siran happily followed ;)).

The party unfolded in an unusual way, if I compare some the average european birthday party (if there is any!). People would eat a little of the abundance of things that were placed on the table, interrupted by the toasts made by the toast master (the tamada) about subjects from grandmothers to friendship and armenians living abroad (I often get that one hehe!). And about every 10 minutes, the band would start playing VERY loud music (needless to try and follow your conversation at this moment) and most of the people would get up and start dancing. A particularly cute old couple really touched me, so I tried to catch them on my camera. Check out the movie!