- If an establishment of any kind offers to let you pay in anything but the local currency, leave. It is a tourist trap.
- If a restaurant has a tout outside stopping passers-by with pick-up lines, do not go in. It is a tourist trap.
- If a vendor of any kind calls you “my friend,” leave. The truly friendly ones will never say that, and probably don’t speak English.
- If a restaurant does not know how to spell the name of a Western dish, leave: they don’t know how to make it, either, and you are at a tourist trap.
- If someone asks you for a tip, and you are surprised because you weren’t aware that people performing that service are normally tipped, do not tip them. They are trying to take advantage of you.
- If you are a male foreigner walking around by yourself, you will be moderately harassed. If you are three male foreigners walking around and speaking in English, you will receive about 1.5x the harassment. If you are a male foreigner walking around and talking with a female foreigner, you will receive about 18x the harassment.
- If a business or vendor ever provides you with any information of any kind about any other business or vendor of any kind, it is probably false, and they are probably either badmouthing competition or trying to get referral kickbacks.
- If you ever feel that you have bargained particularly well for something, you haven’t. The initial price was just that much more inflated than usual and the vendor is laughing at you.
- Do not speak with carpet salesmen.
- If you see a group of old men playing board games, stop and watch for a bit. It’s probably a more authentic sampling of the culture than anything that your money will buy you, and it makes 1-9 worth putting up with.
Category Archives: Site
In my defense
You try keeping a blog updated while being on a Watson and applying to graduate school. More fascinating, enlightening, enriching content coming soon, I hope.
About a block from where I live. Late Ottoman architecture.
Housekeeping note
I decided that having a landing page at jschu.org and the actual blog posts at jschu.org/watson was…dumb. So I’m not doing that any more. The blog is now at jschu.org and jschu.org/watson is nothing. So if there are one or two people out there who have bookmarked this site, you might want to change your bookmarks to plain old jschu.org.
-The Management
Genesis
My Watson year begins Monday, August 1st when I will be flying from Raleigh-Durham International Airport to Yerevan, Armenia.
Over the next twelve months I will be spending roughly two months apiece in Armenia, Germany, Ghana, India, Hungary, and Greece–probably in that order unless India is awarded hosting rights to the 2012 World Chess Championship in the spring of 2012. My purpose on this project is twofold: to study the cultures of competitive and leisurely board game play around the world and to study the games themselves. Each country on my list has some board game with which it has a unique affinity that, I trust, will make my time there fruitful. I will be devoting some amount of attention to studying chess in each country, but it is the primary point of focus in Armenia and Hungary. In Germany I will be studying so-called “German-style board games,” in Ghana I will be studying Oware (a Ghanaian derivative of Mancala), in India I will be studying Pachisi (the game from which Parcheesi was derived), and in Greece I will be studying Backgammon.
I will talk about the other countries in turn. For now, why Armenia?
In April Armenia passed a law mandating formal chess education in all schools after the age of 6. The explicit aim of this was to further the country’s status as a major world chess power. It is worth noting that this comes in the context of the country’s already being rather remarkable in terms of its success on the international chess scene. (Roughly a week ago Armenia won the World Team Chess Championship.) Despite having a population of only three million, Armenia has thirty-three players who have achieved the rank of Grandmaster. That’s roughly 1 in 91,000 and combined with other factors is good enough to make Armenia the #6-rated chess country in the world. Russia, by comparison, though the #1 chess country in the world has only 208 grandmasters amongst its population of 142 million–that’s only 1 in 683,000. The two primary questions I hope to answer in my time in Armenia are 1) how is the country so exceptionally successful at chess, even compared to its fellow former Soviet peers? and 2) why is the country so fixated on furthering its chess dominance?
I will be spending the majority of my time in Yerevan, the nation’s capital and home to about one-third of the country’s population.
If this sort of thing interests you then you ought to take a look at this excellent article from a few years ago describing Armenia’s national obsession with the game of chess.
Welcome
By popular demand I have created this website to chronicle and document the events of my Watson year. If you follow my blog I guarantee that you will see beautiful and fascinating pictures, watch engaging and intellectually stimulating videos, and read witty and beautifully-crafted posts about my adventures, which are sure to be of only the most interesting sort. In short, you ought to follow this site obsessively.
If you want to know a bit more about my Watson project you should go here.
If you want to know my itinerary you should go here.
To contact me you can make a comment here, send me a message on facebook, or email me: my full name at gmail dot com.