Lightning is worse than The Blob

This week in Kapan I am the only volunteer around. My two site-mates have gone to Tsakhadzor, a winter resort town in the north that is approximately 8 hours away (errr…maybe 90 miles? Gotta love the developing world.) In any case, I have the city to myself, and therefore I’m forced to spend more time with my host family than I typically would. Without my host grandparents around (43 days and counting now), their granddaughters are staying with me and the gender rules here make communication and interaction somewhat difficult.
I was going to take a shower last evening during a thunderstorm here in Kapan. There was a lot of hand wringing and panic as I approached the bathroom at 6 PM, one of three one hour windows for running water here in the city. It turns out that, in much the same way that sleeping with your window open makes you sick, or how rubbing vodka on your chest makes you well, there is HORRIFIC scientific theory on showering in a storm in Kapan. They gestured to the faucet and explained by making explosion noises and by flashing the lights that maybe, just maybe, this was something I should not do. Apparently lightning travels through the water or metal pipes during storms. Lightning is evil. It’s worse than the Blob.
Secretly, I've always wanted to be struck by lightning. Yes, I know it can kill you. But there's also the possibility that the lightning could electrify my blood and give me the power to shoot lightning out of my fingertips and power unplugged appliances simply by touching them. It's almost worth the gamble. After I can get my own apartment in Kapan I will ALWAYS shower in a thunderstorm.
On another note, I had a four-day weekend due to Armenia’s 19th Independence Day on September 21st. I got to go hiking and camping with two good friends, including an overnight stay in a 10th century church. We met with several Armenian families on picnics and we shared food and homemade vodka throughout the afternoon. We stayed up as late as we could, playing ridiculous music on an Iphone. In the morning, we badly scared a group of Belgian religious pilgrims who were at the church at dawn. When they entered our dark secondary sanctuary, my greetings to them in Armenian simply served to chase them from the church. I can’t imagine how far they’d come to get to this random spot by 7:00 AM, but I couldn’t help but be amused at their hasty retreat and failure to return. Just one of the many ways that speaking Armenian has its perks. We negotiated with the one-armed groundskeeper for permission to sleep in his 1100 year old church. The Belgians? They were so spooked by our Armenian greetings that they didn’t even get to see the cool secondary sanctuary. America – 1, Belgium – 0.

*Note – There is no actual way to know that these were Belgian pilgrims, but it’s funnier to me that way. And I do know they weren’t Armenian or Russian, so Belgian seems like the next most likely nationality for them. Don’t question my logic.