By Samuel Armen

I walked into a particular room of the AGBU YSIP house: The terrace. As always, it was surreal. Tհis is a room with two modern picnic tables aligned together, creating a communal. Two girls rested down on the ledge, with appropriately lazy voices, and speaking Armenian with interspersed English.

The view ahead, when one sits with their back to the wall, is extraordinary: The terrace has two huge semi-circle openings like eyes which overlook northwest toward the Cascade, the Ferris wheel, the statue of Mother Armenia (Mayr Hayastan), and the faded mountains far, far in the distance.

But what was truly surreal was more immediate. The buildings directly in front of us varied from ancient to brand new, from large and ashen to small and built with tan stone. There were sheds with aluminum roofs in pebble-throwing distance down the hill our house stood atop.

Further down the hills, moving closer to Mother Armenia’s statue, was the real city, far enough for nostalgia, but close enough to see the wheels of the Taxi’s spinning by.

And from the moments that the sun lowers, and the time reads 19:00 (7PM) and the sky fades from blue to pink before midnight and then purple and black afterwards, thousands of orange lights beam below the setting sun until the sun vanishes below the mountainous horizon and Yerevan itself becomes the light.

“Isn’t this place incredible?” I asked.

They turned to me then turned to the view. I was aware that both had looked out from the huge terrace at least three times, but both stared with an expression similar to bewilderment. I felt a synchronization of thought; we were almost intimidated with the poetry of the panorama. It was about 2:00 (2AM) –the city, structures, roads, and vehicles glowed with bursts of light that illuminated everything else.

The girl that turned back to me first responded with a very gentle, “Yes – it is incredible, Sam.”

This is where we interns lived; this would be our view for forty days in the place we called home.

Even on the twentieth night one could catch an intern facing out toward the city - with the expression it is incredible written in their eyes.