Yerevan, itself, is a strikingly unusual city, constructed almost entirely of pink stone, and dominated by Mount Ararat, which looms on the horizon, just over the border with Turkey. There was something weird about the sun there as well; just as the light seems somehow thinner in northern cities such as Gothenburg or St Petersburg, so in Armenia it seemed thicker, as though what I were seeing was not the city itself, but the city as it would look in an over-coloured postcard from the sixties.
