Paul Keutelian Online

Hey guys, I know I’ve been slow on these updates. I just uploaded a ton of pictures to the CYMA page: www.cyma-wd.org

You can go straight to them via:

www.flickr.com/photos/cymawd/sets/

also…
Things are winding down over here. We are all wrapping up our internship (tomorrow is the last day for most of them) and we leave next wednesday morning at 11. Many people are trying to get there tickets changed – my old friends who will be staying here longer asked me to change my own tickets, but I can’t. Already I will be late returning to school and with have to rush getting move-in preparations ready for new freshmen, as well as returning students. Hopefully I can get most of it done during the flight back. As cool as it would be to stay here a few days longer and spend some time with my friends without having to worry about the interns would be cool, but hopefully I will get to see them in a few months – in the mean time I’ll keep in contact through e-mail. It’s been a fun but fast 2 months here in Armenia. A bunch of new experiences to bring home, a bunch of new friends from the west coast, and new friends here in Armenia too.

Someone recently told me an entertaining little story:
We met a few people 2 years ago when we were here, and at the end of that trip they told us that they didn’t think they would develop the friendship they did with us Americans. Why? Because to them we weren’t truly Armenians (This is a ‘lost in translation’ case. What I think was meant to be said is that we/they aren’t the kind of Armenians they/we know and are used to). The person on our side said the same thing to them, again because to us they weren’t truly Armenians. Everyone ended the night with a laugh and we went our seperate ways…

Flash forward two years later, our two friends are married and want to introduce us to their spouses. This same friend was sitting inside with them having a toast, when their spouses during the toast said “Our wives kept telling us about how great you guys were and how you all became really good friends. We thought, ‘How cool could they be? They are only Americans.’ But now that we have actually met you, we know what our wives were talking about. We are very happy that we got to know you, and we are proud and happy to call you all our friends. We hope that next time you come to Armenia and visit our home, you do not say you are here to visit two of your friends, but four.”

I thought it was a very touching story, because as much as people don’t say it, we all start as foreigners to one another. As much as people begin skeptical that they will make friends with Americans, we start just as skeptically about making friends here.

Right now I’m  working on an instruction manual for everything I’ve been working on so that they can see my work and duplicate it and maintain it.  Hopefully soon you will see a new CRD website go online, thanks in a very small part to me, but mostly to the two women working hard on it.  One thing you won’t see but I hope will benefit this institute is the clock server I’m setting up.  It will hopefully make them more sure about their readings by helping line up events showing up on their detector.  Eventually they will replace the GPS clock I’m using with an atomic clock they are building.  This project will let them easily switch over their system to their own atomic time, so I know that this will definitely benefit them in the long run.

Well, that’s all for now, tune in next time for more exciting tales.