Walking in the Streets

In front of the Opera House

After dinner on Friday I went out to a bar to have a drink and found an English language Lviv magazine. I settled in with my beer and was reading the magazine when I was approached by a man who said “It is very obvious that you are a foreigner. Ukrainian people don’t come to bars by themselves. You should sit at the bar instead of a table because you are drawing a lot of attention to your foreignness.” I don’t go to bars by myself at home, but when you get to a new city and your hostel is empty, as mine was on Friday night, it’s nice to go out and see the night life. It is interesting that of all of the things about me that are un-Ukrainian the one that stands out the most is that I am at a bar alone. The guy had spent some time in Arizona and his English was very good. He invited me to join him and his friends for the rest of the night, which I thought was very nice of him.

Saturday I walked around town some more and went to the Lychakiv Cemetery, on the outside of town where many famous Ukranian people are buried. I have included the Wikipedia link here so you can read more about it if you are interested. I walked around the cemetery for a couple of hours, it is very large, and it got me to thinking back about Auschwitz and if there were a proper cemetery there how big it would have to be.

Saturday night I met up with some Americans from my hostel and we went to an underground restaurant. By underground, I mean it was literally underneath a church in a cellar. It was a really nice restaurant with Quail and Rabbit on the menu. They even had a cage with a live rabbit in it, which I assume was like a lobster tank. We all had salads with our meals, I did not have the rabbit, and we split a bottle of Walnut Vodka and our bill came to less than $10 each. After dinner we went and sat on one of the hundreds of benches that line the square to talk and watch the people walk by. At night in Lviv that seems to be the thing to do and we had a really great time.

I was surprisingly not cold outside at night and I only had one of my jackets on. Lately I have been quite warm and have been wearing only one coat and often sweating underneath it. I’m not positive but I think I might be approaching menopause.

Sunday night my hostel was fully booked because of a large group coming from the Eastern Ukraine and so I was forced to decide to find another hostel or another town. There is a train ticket purchasing place very close to my hostel but the international counter was closed on Sunday so I had to walk to the actual train station. I could have taken a bus or a trolley but I prefer to walk and see things off the tourist maps. It was impossible to tell where trains were going because of the Ukrainian names of cities, I had no clue what any of them were. I looked at the times the trains were leaving, not wanting to leave too late, and the time they arrive at their destination, not wanting to arrive too early and came up with a couple of choices. I wrote down the letters as best as I could and then went to the ticket window to find out what cities they were. Of the cities the only one that I had any interest in was Budapest and I bought a ticket for there. I am taking a train tonight from 9:20pm to 11:17 am to Budapest, I hope I have a better overnight train experience this time.

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10_24_09 Lviv small