It looks quite impressive and futuristic on first glance — a hotel that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star from the Star Wars films. Remarkably, however, the hotel will not be built in Las Vegas or Dubai. It is instead planned for Baku, capital of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Fan IQ thinks that the project is an attempt to increase Baku’s chances of hosting the 2016 Olympic Games, and if so, the sports blog believes it might just have succeeded.

So although the 2016 Games are a long way off, if you’re a city that wants to host them, you better get your act together.

Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, officially has it’s #$%@ together. They’re in the intense running for the 2016 Games - which will be announced next year - and I think they just took the lead.

How so?

Well, my friends, they’re going to build a hotel based off of the Death Star from Star Wars for the Games.

The full post is available on Global Voices Online.

Raffi at Cilicia.com details a first hand account of the mayhem that occurred at Zvartnots airport this week when scores of visitors to Armenia who had hoped to pay the customary penalty for overstaying their visas found that the service had been withdrawn without anyone telling them when they first arrived. One of those visitors was my landlord, a locally born Armenian who has been living in Holland for the past 10 years and who travels on a Dutch passport.

As a result of what I can only consider to be a stupid decision on the part of OVIR (Office of Visas and Registration) and Zvartnots, he couldn’t board his plane on Wednesday and is still in the country.

[…] passengers departing at the lovely hour of 4:50am were informed that, the previous evening at 10pm it had been decided that OVIR (Armenia’s visa department) would not be open at the airport anymore, and that extensions would have to be acquired in Yerevan, at the disgusting mess of a run-down office building, with lines like a herd of wilderbeasts, before departing (meaning they would miss their flights which departed in an hour and a half). Just what we want tourists who are kind enough to stay longer than 3 weeks to experience and waste their time on.

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She might not look much from a distance, but up close I think she’s magnificent. Apparently facing Turkey, she stands overlooking Yerevan from Victory Park with a sword in her hand and resembles something more like a dominatrix rather than the [usually incorrectly stereotyped] gentle Armenian woman.

She’s somewhat fierce, for sure, but Mother Armenia is one of my favourite statues in the Armenian capital and is meant to represent “peace through strength.” Certainly, she’s part of the city’s recent [Soviet] history.

During Stalin’s reign on the Soviet Union, Grigor Harutyunyan, the first secretary of the Armenian Communist Party’s Central Committee and members of the government were carefully seeing to the construction of a monument for Stalin which was completed on November 29, 1950 and unveiled to the people. The statue was considered a masterpiece sculpted by Sergey Merkurov. Realizing that occupying a pedestal can be a short-term honor, Israelyan designed the pedestal to resemble an Armenian church - at least on the inside. In contrast to the right-angled shapes of the outside, inside was light and pleasing to the eye and resembled Echmiadzin’s seventh-century St. Hripsime Church.

In fact, Israelyan’s prediction came true as the Soviet leader’s time came to an end quickly afterwards and his monument was taken down. The monument was replaced in 1967 by the Mother Armenia statue which was designed by Ara Harutyunyan.

“Mother Armenia” statue stands to symbolize peace through strength. It reminds us of some of the prominent female figures in Armenian history, such as Sossé Mayrig and many others who never hesitated to take up arms to help their husbands who would clash with Turkish troops and Kurdish irregulars. It also represents the important status and value attributed to the older female members of an Armenian family. This is in sharp contrast to the treatment of women in some of the Islamic societies surrounding Armenia.

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Mastara, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

With the temperature soaring in Yerevan, you have to be mad to stay in the city by choice. It’s simply too hot and anyone with any sense gets the hell out whenever they can. This weekend that’s precisely what Garo (aka Christian Garbis) at Notes from Hairenik had in mind and I’m grateful he invited me along. After he mentioned a few possible locations for a quick visit I said Mastara was the most interesting on the list.

I first visited the village in 1998 and loved it. It has such a nice feeling and the people are wonderful. So, we set out yesterday and after checking out the church, which in itself is quite rare in terms of design and therefore quite appealing, wandered the village as you can see from the photos I posted here, here, and here. Thanks especially to the dadik that gave me some of her homemade tan (yogurt drink).

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Mastara, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

Villagers in Mastara say that the khachkar (stone cross) sitting atop a small mound in one part of the village is the largest in the country. However, I can’t find anything on the Internet to back this up and I’m not familiar with every stone cross in Armenia to offer an opinion on the matter. There’s no mention that it might be in Rediscovering Armenia or Virtual Armenia, and an albeit quick search on Google yielded no further imformation either.

Nevertheless, it’s pretty impressive and worth a look if you’re planning on traveling up to Gyumri and stop in Mastara, one of the most pleasant villages I’ve come across in Armenia in the nearly nine years that I’ve been here.

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Sevan Monastery, Gegharkunik Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

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Not one for those who haven’t lived in the U.K. for much of their lives, but while photographing Nikol Pashinian’s recent sit-in strike at Yerevan’s Liberty Square two tourists asked if I spoke English and could explain what was going on. After discovering that Norman, the father, now lived in Bristol where I spent a lot of my life as well, and that his daughter, Tamara, was half-Armenian from a former marriage, it didn’t take long before we were sitting at a nearby cafe, drinking a beer or two, and arranging to meet up for the next.

Anyway, interesting guys the both of them. Norman spent his time divided between the U.K. and India while Tamara was also a seasoned traveler who was making her first voyage to discover one side of her ethnic roots in Armenia. Interestingly, for many soap addicts in the U.K. at least, Norman was an actor and his most prominent role of recent years had been Frank Tate in ITV’s Emmerdale. There’s something about his career on Wikipedia.

Born on August 1, 1932 in London he became a member of the 1950s Soho set alongside such as John Minton, Francis Bacon and Daniel Farson, Norman Bowler played a variety of bit parts and single episode roles throughout the 1960s. He feaured in one episode of The Avengers and stared alongside James Caan in the 1968 war film “Submarine X-1″ about World War Two British midget submarines.

From 1966 to 1976 Bowler played Det. Sgt. and later Det. Chief Inspector Harry Hawkins for the entire run of the BBC TV police drama “Softly, Softly” (later “Softly, Softly: Taskforce”).

More recently, he is best known for playing the part of Frank Tate in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale between 1989 and 1997; when his character was killed off after suffering a heart attack, his TV wife Kim could have saved his life but chose to let him die as he begged for help.

Today, Bowler is very active in charity work and adult education in the Bristol area (where the original “Softly, Softly” series was filmed in the 60s)

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Referring to international tourism ratings, Azg says that Armenia ranks 74th place out of 124 countries in terms of popular world tourism destinations. Georgia and Russia are the only other CIS countries doing better with positions of 66th and 68th.

The World Economy Forum report says that the most popular tourist state remains Switzerland, then come Austria and Germany. The lest popular countries are Chad, Burundi and Angola.

The competitiveness of countries in the tourism sphere is defined by three main parameters – corresponding legislation, business are and infrastructures and human, culture and natural resources. Armenia has considerable advantage in legislation (rated 65), natural, human and culture resources (rated 62) and disadvantage in business area and infrastructures (rated 96). Armenia is attractive in sense due to high sanitary and hygiene conditions, the security of tourists and the native people’s welcome for them, as well as suitable prices.

Armenia’s competitiveness mainly suffers from visa regime with the states whose citizens go touring most frequently, problems with nature protection, lack of local air and vehicle transportation infrastructures, etc.

On the other hand Armenia is rated first by elementary education level and the last by naval port infrastructures.

Raffi Kojian at Cilicia.com’s Life in Armenia has an albeit short post on Armenia’s ranking by the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation which once again paints a rosy picture of the climate for investment. Still, it appears as though the rankings are more based on legislation passed rather than actual investment or indeed, whether the laws actually function.

Well the good news is Armenia ranks 32nd in the world in Economic freedom by The Wall Street Journal and the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, 2007 rankings. It tries to take into account Armenia’s corruption and poor property rights, but I don’t know if they were given enough weight. In any case, the laws in Armenia are quite good… now, they just need to be followed.

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Some great news for residents of Georgia and Armenia — flights between Yerevan and Tbilisi will soon be operating again. Instead of a 5-7 hour journey depending on your vehicle and your driver, it will now take 30-40 minutes in the air. Deduct the time spent in queues on the border and this is great news indeed. Georgia’s The Messenger has more.

By the end of December Armavia will conduct regular Tbilisi-Yerevan-Tbilisi flights. According to the news agency Novosti-Armenia the tickets price will be USD 50.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia has not had direct flights to Armenia. According to the Armenian Civil Aviation press secretary Jasmen Vilian the resumption of flights is a result of business partnerships between Armenians and Georgians. It is said in Armenia that after Russia closed its air space to Georgia, Georgians may visit its northern neighbour via Armenia.

The Armenian side sent a statement about introducing the flights to Georgia to the Georgian Civil Aviation Administration in the summer. The flights should have started in May but the process was postponed to the end of the year.

During his interview with Rezonansi the head of the Georgian Civil Aviation Administration Giorgi Mzhavanadze said that Armenian’s interest in operating flights to Georgia was a result of large numbers of Armenians visiting Georgia’s resorts last year. After the rehabilitation of the Batumi international airport Armenians might begin direct flights from Yerevan-Batumi as well.

Incidently, there have been direct flights between Yerevan and Tbilisi since independence. For example, the World Food Programme (WFP) used to run a commercial service for NGOs and diplomatic missions. Then I remember one Georgian airline trying something, but stopping when the 2003 Rose Revolution happened.

Anyway, the full item is here.

Alex over at Cilicia.com’s Life in Armenia says he caught one of the tourism ads being run on CNN by all three of the South Caucasus Republics. I knew that Georgia and Armenia were running ads, but didn’t know Azerbaijan was. Anyway, haven’t seen those, but the Azerbaijan ad isn’t bad.

Raffi had logged about the tourism Armenia ads that are now running on CNN International. The other night, I was watching a program on CNN, and this ad came on, and my friend and I were trying to figure out from the get go what country it was, because the images/dances/landscapes were oddly familiar. There was an Iranian tea cup scene (well made), dancers (very Armenian circle dance like), and you can’t tell what country it is or who it is–except the music is reminiscent of Kurdish string music–you get the point–and all of a sudden at the very end of the commercial, as the images are fading away, the words Azerbaijan appear on the screen. No voice over, nothing…I guessed Turkey, before Azerbaijan appeared on the screen. They’ve done well, presenting a collection of regional tastes and cultures under the banner Azerbaijan.

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