YEREVAN, ARMENIA! First impressions in 2022 🇦🇲

Welcome to Armenia. Behind us is Yerevan city center and above that is the incredible Mount Ararat, the symbol of this country and apparently the spot where Noah's Ark once sat. Big Ararat, the one on the right, sits at 5137 meters above sea level. We're starting our day here on the cascade which is basically a massive staircase that takes you above Yerevan. The views from up here are just so beautiful and it's best to come here early in the morning or late in the evening. But we want to get down there into the city so let's do it. There's actually two options to get down the cascade. You can walk it or you can take the escalators that are underneath. We're going to take them. I think going down is for the issue but pretty tough. When you get to the bottom of the cascade you can see all these weird art installations and I'm not sure about all of them but this one looks like Matt. I told you, he's even got his camera out. So for those of you who didn't know, Armenia was actually the first country on earth to adopt Christianity as its religion. And actually Armenians are very religious and you can see churches like that spread out all over Yerevan and Armenia in general. So just like in neighboring Georgia, the Armenian script is completely unique to anywhere else in the world. Throughout the years the Armenian people have been persecuted all over the Middle East and it's been their religion and their language including their script that's helped them maintain that sort of sense of identity throughout the generations. So we're walking through North Street at the moment which is like the main walking street that cuts through the center and Yerevan itself is really walkable. There's like really large avenues everywhere, walking streets and also a load of parks around the whole city. So by the way it's not usually this quiet. At the moment it's like eight in the morning. We came out really early to start filming because it gets really hot here at the moment. And actually it does get very busy. It's really like walking culture here and throughout the day especially like we walked out last night and it was super busy. Literally the streets are packed. Yerevan is actually 2,802 years old and we were here in 2018 when it turned 2,800 and there was like a big celebration with fireworks and everything going on. We're just walking through the park and we've just seen there is some sort of a market. Let's go and check it out. So this is Republic Square which is the very heart of Yerevan. It's home to a lot of the government institutions. With over 300 days of sunshine a year it's the perfect place to grab a coffee or an ice cream and just chill out. The first thing that many people notice here in the city is that the capital shines in like this pink red shade and that's because most of the buildings are built from a pink lava rock as found here in Armenia. It's actually really interesting but here you get like a soviet middle eastern vibe. There are fountains with drinking water all over Yerevan and apparently there are over 1,500 of them and they're called Pol Polaks. So Armenia has been controlled by different empires throughout its history and a throwback to the Persian era is the Blue Mosque. Since 2015 it's been loaned to the Iranian embassy and it doubles as both a cultural center and a place of worship. Right we just had a stop to start filming our food video in Armenia and now let's go to the market. So the Goum is basically split into like four different parts. You've got the meat section we're walking through now, you've got the section that sells mainly like fruits and dried fruits, vegetables behind us and then cloves up on the top upstairs. So it's all really organized. That was lovely wasn't it? So we've just arrived at the Armenian Genocide Museum. It would have been wrong of us to do a video about Yerevan and not include this place because it makes up such a big part of the modern Armenian psyche and such a big part of recent history. In 1915 over 1.5 million Armenians died in the genocide and millions more were displaced. Nowadays the diaspora that is all around the world is made up of victims of the genocide. We've been speaking to a lot of people here in Armenia whose families came to what is now modern Armenia from the areas in eastern Anatolia. The tragic scenes that unfolded during the middle of World War I are etched into the memory of millions of Armenians all around the world and it was only right for us to come here and pay our respects. We're back in the center and we didn't want to finish this video on the sad note of Genocide Museum. We were planning to walk around some more but it is incredibly hot today and we feel like we're melting and the camera's died a couple of times so we're going to leave this video here. Make sure you check back for lots more videos coming from here in Armenia and thanks for watching. See you in the next one!