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Tuesday, June 2, 2009




Bo gdzie jeszcze ludziom tak dobrze, jak tu?
Tylko we Lwowie!

This song written in the begining of 20th century has been an athem of people charmed by Lviv. Since the last weekend at least 4 more people can sign under that sentence. Lviv is charming, international, old and young, surprising, unforgettable...






Arrival

We came to Lviv without any serious obstacles on Saturday at about 12 am (GMT+2). The booked hostel presented itself surprisingly well (we paid 5 Euro per night) and the receptionist - Marichka - astonished us with her Polish language. The only problem which appeared in the begining was, that we had to climb on the 4th floor to get to our room. It seemed to be impossible to be done few hours later. We were awared that in many hostels in Lviv the hot water is available just at certain time - so it was in our hostel as well. Clean and sated we moved to the city. This time - as opposed to my last visit in the city - we had great weather and nothing could stop us from exploring this town.


First impressions? Our money was double worth as in Poland, girls were two times prettier than in our homeland, but the city was much more neglected than our domestic touristic destinations. From the visual point of view, Lviv seemed to have a bit of Cracow, Paris and Oslo at once. You can easily notice the big heritage of the city - Polish, Soviet and finally Ukrainian history stamped significantly in Lviv's architecture, urbanism and people's mentality.



I can't say that inhabitants who we met were hostile, but they weren't too much friendly as well. That can suprise if we consider, that in 3 years Lviv will be one of the EUROCup hosting cities.




Evening



Although during the day, we couldn't complain about weather, in the night it started raining. However that couldn't be a reason to not to enjoy Lviv's nightlife. We stayed in the hostel, where were coming the other guest. Really international company - Poles, Americans, Canadians, Chinese, Russians, Cubanians and Ukrainians let me feel again as on Erasmus. I won't go to details about numbers and quantities... but that night surprised us in many aspects. First of all our stupidity and immaturity - it's a shame to confess, but we did it and left all the prescious stuff - including passport with visa in the centre of the room on the shelf - fortunatelly all our hostel-mates were good people and our mistake dispense with consequences. Second - more glorious was getting to know our new city-mate - Patrick from Hong Kong, whose polish language was sometimes better than our. We just remember that the evening finished about 1 am because of two Americans who were so kind to ask receptionist to quit the party. The morning was the last surprise of that night, because we woke up without hangover and in quite good shape. As a result of our evening in that hostel appeared such a picture:






Sunday





On the last day of our visit in Lviv we premised to fullfill the touristic duties and see the key-places in Lviv. For a kick-off we run our legs to the Old Town to verify if entitling Lviv as "Three Cathedrals City" isn't an abuse. It is not. There are Latin (Rome-Catholic), Uniate (Greek-catholic) and Armenian cathedrals. What's more there are dozens of other temples which on Sunday seemed to be half-filled.
By the way - I owe you a complementation. On Saturday the Old Town was dominated not by tourists, nor by cadet corps (usually you can see many of them in every big Ukrainian town), but by the newlyweds. Whereever we went, there were many couples taking the memorial pictures with their guests and beautiful, skyborn and astonishing maids of honour. Lviv is the second place - after Belgrade - where we got an impression that Angels came to Earth. Gorgeous girls!

But to recur - later we went to Lychakiv, where among the others are located the memorials - the tribute to Polish soldiers defending Lviv in the begining of the last century.
Eventually the departure time has come and with fulled up with delicious dinner we moved to the bus station. *here I am going to skip few words dedicated to person who misinformed us that we lost quite a sum of money...




The come back



You can get the impression that every return journey from Ukraine is jinxed and I am overdrawing some situations. You can belive or not, but it really happened.
We came to the border with a coach (marshruta) at 9pm, ready to wait long in a queue for the passport control. But unbeware the border was empty - no more smugglers binded up with tapes of cigarettes - there were just few people waiting for check-in and that's why the custom officers where very pedantic with control.



It took over an hour to cross the border and when we came to the parking to take a bus we got a cold shower. The last bus went away 4 minutes ago. It was 10:10 pm and really noone wanted to take us (4 boys anyway) to Przemysl where we was our train to Wroclaw. Of course there are advantages of tightening our eastern border and strengthening the country security, but in such situation we saw just the drawbacks. Because while you stop smugglers, you stop all the business around them - not only trade, but also the means of transport (before joining Schengen Zone buses were running untill 1 am), what affected us in that moment.
We had no choice, but to walk 13 km from the border. And when in 3rd kilometer hopelessly we waved to hitch-hike, suddenly a jeep stopped. "Great!" we thought... but then the lights flashed and a masked border guard with machine gun jumped from the car. "Great" we thought again, but this time it had nothing with enthusiasm. He questioned us and wished safe noctivagation to Przemysl. "Oh, thank you very much, but maybe you could give us a lift?! " "We don't work as taxi drivers" he replied.
Sentenced to walk at 11:30pm we entered Przemysl, but our GPS disillusionized us - there were still 6 km to the train station. We decided to stop and take some rest.


Here is place for short comment: The picture's quality is at it is, and I would never publish that, but it's significant situation and there was no time to take the second shot, because...
... then a car stopped and man speaking with such an eastern accent decided to drop us to the station. Sent from heaven or just directed by profit - he brought us to the station, where we had to wait untill 5:50 am for train to Wroclaw.




Conclusion?

We don't regret anything!

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