2013 Travels: Lviv
A few years ago, I came across a statistic that showed the world’s top tourism countries, by number of visitors. The top ten was pretty much what you’d expect — Spain, France, the US, Turkey, UK…big countries with lots of stuff and a very low degree of difficulty. What sat at #11 surprised me, however, because while it is a big country I wouldn’t have said it had a low degree of difficulty — Ukraine. But we were on a mission to explore the place from where Sunshine’s great-grandparents had come over to America.
Why was I anxious about going? Maybe the stupid guidebooks and web sites that tell you the train from Krakow to L’viv is a den of iniquity, full of scurrilous smugglers, which would no doubt lead to all manner of stern border guards, barking dogs and possibly some gunshots in the direction of escaping smugglers. Oh yippee, right? We had some good times with smugglers before, crossing from Russia to Mongolia, so that was sort of what we had in mind.
Nuts to that, we bought a first-class ticket. It was an overnight train, so we wanted the beds and the quiet compartment of our own. We also got a toilet of our own. If you’ve ever taken a long-haul train in Eastern Europe, you know how valuable this is. The only pee on the floor is your own! Smells like victory to me.
Of course, we didn’t get to enjoy the train much. We hit the border around 2:30am, and spent about 1 ½ hours farting around with the various procedures. It was entirely mundane, as there were no smugglers on our train anyway. Or they were so good at smuggling you didn’t know they were smugglers, which seems like the correct approach to smuggling. And with that, we were off at 5am local time. The problem is that the train was due to arrive an hour later. Good luck with that sleep.
The arrival in L’viv was pure ex-Soviet goodness. The station is a bit cramped inside, and there were people and bags everywhere. Many of them scoundrels, surely. Outside was just as bad, with all manner of ancient buses, clapped-out minibuses and assorted questionable train-station loiterers. After running the gauntlet of sketchy-looking taxi drivers we failed to find the tram stop, and walked way further down the street than we needed to. Let the adventure begin!
Once we figured out where we’d gone wrong, it was pretty straightforward to get to the tram, and then to our guesthouse. At that hour, we couldn’t check in, so we dropped our bags at the hostel and went to explore the old town.
It was really special, to be able to see the old town of L’viv with nobody around. There were some cleaning ladies sweeping, and some early morning churchgoers. The rain picked up, so we took shelter under a giant umbrella with some chairs a café had left out, tied up, but set up where we could sit. A local cat came by, a fluffy one with a flat face, and it hung out with us for a long while.
Over the course of the morning and right into the afternoon, the whole city came to life. This part of the world has seen a lot of different ruling nations, and this has left L’viv with a rich history and architectural heritage. It is very European from the Austro-Hungarian Empire days in the old town area, and other parts lean more towards the Soviet.
The lifestyle is a healthy mix of Austro-Hungarian coffee culture, central European beer culture and Ukrainian food. The coffeeshops are numerous and fun, and the quality of the coffee far exceeds what you get in most of Europe. No burnt stuff here, just great, balanced, flavourful coffees, usually roasted on site. (NOTE: beer info is from 2013, so totally out of date). There’s two big breweries and four brewpubs. Of the latter, Mons Pius makes the best beer, a pilsner, and has a pleasant courtyard adjacent to the Armenian church. Stargorod is more of a Russian place, all big and focused on nighttime entertainment, but their beers are Czech. This includes deliberate, controlled diacetyl, which nonetheless was too much for me. Next door is Kumpel, with kit beer. Lastly, Robert Doms Beer House is connected to the L’vivske Brewery, with one house beer, and it demonstrates none of the clinical (neutered) nature of the big brewery’s product. Instead, the Doms beer is the worst of the brewpub beers of L’viv. The best stuff we found was actually from another brewery, Mykulyntsi, an independent brewer whose beers have a really minerally character. They are listed on the handy Ukrainian independent brewery map.
As food goes, we had some boring and/or questionable breakfasts, but did alright for dinner. There’s a place there, just an unmarked door down a hallway. You knock on the door, and a guard with a machine gun asks you for the password. You tell him, and he lets you in. Then he gets you a shot of honey vodka, you go downstairs into the bunker and fill up on blood sausage with buckwheat, green borscht, millet with sheep cheese, stringy smoked mountain cheese, and cabbage salads. Then you pose with guns of your own as you join the Ukrainian resistance movement. Apparently, if you speak Russian in here, they’ll kick you out. The western parts of Ukraine are very nationalistic, and the population of Russians is very small, and this area is considered a heartland of Ukrainian culture.
L’viv certainly is unique. This is a city very comfortable in its own skin. It isn’t trying to be anything else. It’s one of those places where there aren’t a lot of sights to see, per se, but you just hang out and soak up the vibe. A very writerly type of place, where one can gain inspiration in a cellar café or drinking beer in the main square. This makes it pretty low on the degree of difficulty scale, especially once you’ve mastered Cyrillic, which of course I did a long time ago for my first trip to Russia.
So if the first part of Ukraine is easy, what’s the rest of it like? The strong capital of Kiev, the historical Crimea, the evocative Odessa…that we’ll find out soon. First up, nothing less than the Carpathian Mountains and a homecoming 100 years in the making.
