It's hard to leave L'viv
Trip Start
Apr 01, 2011
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40
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Trip End
Jan 26, 2012
L'viv, Ukraine
Saturday, August 13, 2011
The city of L’viv is one of the locations in Ukraine and Poland that will be hosting games next year for the Euro 2012 football tournament, so in order to get ready for the influx of players and fans, there is a lot of construction going on in the city. Due to this construction, the tram line that runs past the train station was not running and the only directions we had to our hostel required taking the tram. We were trying to ask a lady running a magazine stand on the street where we could catch a tram and were not having a lot of luck with the English/Ukrainian communication. Luckily one of the people in line spoke English and she showed us where we could catch a mini-bus (called a Marshrutka) that would take us in the direction of our hostel. It was the same bus she was taking so she was able to make sure that we got off at the correct stop and she pointed us in the direction of our hostel which was greatly appreciated. After a quick nap, we headed out to find some food and thanks to the directions of our hostel staff, ended up at the greatest restaurant ever! Puzata Hata (not to be confused with Pizza Hut) is a festival of Ukrainian comfort food served cafeteria style. We ended up going to Puzata Hata 8 times in 5 days and are still not tired of eating borscht, cabbage rolls, potatoes with dill, potato pancakes and verenky, which is the correct Ukrainian name for what we usually call perogies. We could get exactly what we wanted every meal and it usually cost us under $7 Canadian for the two of us.
Our hostel had MP3 players available for rent that came with a map of the city showing the locations of many historical sites and attractions. As we followed the map around the city, we listened to the recorded tour guide talk about each place we were seeing. It was not bad but of course we were unable to ask questions since we didn’t have a live person as a guide. The next day we found out that there is a free guided tour of the city available every day and we were just expected to give the guide a tip if we liked the tour, so we went on that tour as well and it was great. Robin and I were the only ones on the tour so we were able to ask all the questions we wanted and the guide could take her time explaining things in greater detail if we were interested in something specific. We also learned more about the history and stories of the people and businesses behind the buildings and not just the dull architectural details of the design and dates of construction. Our guide was also able to point out some of the more interesting themed cafés which are something that seems to be quite popular in L’viv. A few of the more unique cafés we saw were: A large underground complex of caves and tunnels that has a Ukrainian Resistance Army theme. There is an armed guard at the door and each group of people wanting to go in are taken through the door into a small room and asked for the password, if you give the correct password which is "slava Ukraine" (glory to Ukraine) you are given a shot of honey vodka and then a large book shelf is opened up and you walk through the opening behind, down the stairway and into the underground café. Inside the café, there are military helmets and guns on the walls, the tables and stools are made of planks and most items we saw served came in stainless steel bowls and mugs. For added authenticity, one of the armed guards walking around the place will fire off his pistol at random and even though it’s only blanks, it’s still bloody loud and can scare the crap out of you if you are not expecting it. Oh and the honey beer there is great! Another café specializes in Jewish food. The menus have no pork on them and also have no prices on them because you are expected to barter and haggle with the waiter to come up with a price. If you bribe your waiter though, they will “sneak” over a pork dish for you. We didn’t have time to go in and try our haggling skills though so we are not sure how hard of a bargain they will drive. An odd piece of trivia is that L’viv is the birthplace of Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch who was in to some odd sexual fetishes and is the reason we have the term “Masochist.” There is a café in L’viv dedicated to Sacher-Masoch where the waitresses will handcuff and whip you and there is a bronze statue of Sacher-Masoch out front with a “surprise” in his pocket for you. We didn’t have time to visit that café either but I did get a picture inside Mr. Sacher-Masoch’s pocket.
During our tours around the city, we heard a lot of interesting stories about the old town. The central part of the old town of L’viv revolves around the town hall building and during the earlier years of the city, there was a protective wall built around the old town. The city was founded shortly after the Catholic religion had spread from Poland to Ukraine and the city policy was that only Catholics could serve on the town council. When the town council was planning the layout of the city, they reserved the best land which was in a ring around the town hall for only Catholics to live in and made the Ukrainian Orthodox and Jewish citizens live on the much less desirable East side of the city which was the most likely point of attack in the event of war. Another weird bylaw of the old city council was that no house on the main square could have more than three windows across the front of it. The reason for this was that windows could be used for advertising businesses run from inside the houses and they did not want someone with more windows to have an unfair economic advantage! There was however one house on the main square that broke both of the rules, it had six windows across the front and was owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian Orthodox resident who was able to pay the city to bend the rules in his favor. The town hall that is in the middle of the square is still used to this day as the city hall for L’viv and the tower standing above the hall is the third tower that has been built. The first tower was made of wood and was destroyed in a fire. The second tower was built of stone and after a number of years, developed a crack in it. The city councilors were unsure if the tower was safe or if it needed repairs so they held a meeting to discuss it and in that meeting, they determined that the tower was safe and they did not need to do any repairs but just after that meeting was over and the councilors had walked out of the city hall, the tower collapsed. I guess maybe they should have invited an engineer to the meeting instead of just a bunch of politicians… The third and current tower is an exact reconstruction (minus the crack) of the tower that had collapsed. There are 306 stairs to get to the top observation deck and on the way up to the top, you pass by the mechanical workings of the clock in the tower. The clock doesn’t look that large from the ground but the minute hand on the clock is almost 10 feet long. Another interesting building that we saw on our tour was the L’viv Opera House which was built between 1897 and 1900 and is considered to be one of the most beautiful Opera houses in all of Europe. It was quite the architectural wonder in its day for a couple of reasons: It was the first building in Europe to be constructed with a concrete foundation, it was built on top of a river that had been covered over, and it was also one of the first buildings designed to allow adequate fire escape capacity for the number of people it was expected to hold.
One of the most interesting things we did in L’viv was buying train tickets. We have bought train tickets numerous times in the last few months and usually the process is the same: Use the Internet to figure out where we want to go, find out when the train leaves for said destination, write that information down on a note pad, go to the local train station and pass the ticket window attendant the note pad, pay for the tickets and away we go. Our first hurdle came when none of the railway web pages we usually use to search tickets could find the next city we wanted to go to which was Luts’k, Ukraine. We asked the girl who worked at our hostel if there was a train to Luts’k and she checked a printed railway timetable and said there was one every day. Awesome! So we have her write out a note in Ukrainian asking for 2 tickets to Luts’k and then another note asking for 2 tickets from Luts’k to Suceava, Romania and away we go to the railway ticket office downtown. We get to the train station and find that there is one attendant who speaks English! She tells us that she can help us with the tickets to get to Luts’k but we need to go to the international ticket window to buy the ones to Romania. Across the room we go to the International window and are told that we will have to go back to L’viv from Luts’k to get a train to Romania but that we have to go to the international ticket window at the main train station to buy the tickets to Romania. We then take one of the little Marshrutka’s to the main train station and stand in the line for the international ticket window, only to find out that THAT international window is only to buy tickets if you are leaving within 24 hours. We are pointed towards a hall and told “upstairs” so we go down the hall, up the stairs, eventually figure out which unmarked doorway we need to go through to get to an empty hall with another flight of stairs and go through another unmarked doorway to the mysterious “advance purchase international ticket window” where we proceed to wait an hour in line. We finally get to the front of the line and when the lady checks the train we want to Romania, she tells us that there are no seats available on the day we want to travel. We asked her to check the next day and it was full as was the day after that as well. She finally ends up going to check with one of her co-workers and when she comes back tells us that there are no trains from Ukraine to Romania until “maybe September 1st.” So Robin and I have a quick 30 second conference and determine that the best option is to head back to Budapest and figure out how to get to Romania from there. We managed to buy the tickets to Budapest with no further issues and it only took us about 4 hours of standing in different lines and traveling between ticket offices to get them. Communism may be gone from these parts but its legacy of long lines and convoluted processes lives on in the railway system.
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Happy Belated Anniversay