Lviv

We have been in Lviv for 2 days now. It has been raining most of the time but the city is still beautiful, however in a more central European way. Odesa had architecture like that of St Petersburg whereas Lviv is more like Krakow or Prague. All the buildings are some shade of brown or beige and quite shabby looking, but in a good way.

July 4^th 2011

We started the day off well, with potato pancakes (called blyny, known as latkas in Winnipeg) and crepes stuffed with spiced apples. This filling breakfast cost me only 17 UAH (2 dollars), for all of us we spent 73 UAH (9 dollars). We have been eating most of our meals in Lviv at this particular cafeteria mostly because it's cheap but also because it's great food and has a nice atmosphere. For supper, we all filled our bellies with a few dishes each (including perogies) then got 1 piece of cake each for dessert as well, in total it cost 120 UAH (15 dollars). Back to the point, after our meal we walked over to the hub of town Ploshcha Rynok, to visit tourist info. The lady there was really helpful and was also interested about our boat trip from Batumi because she was wondering about taking it later that summer. She told us that the tram to the cemetary which I will mention later was currently not running and that we would have to walk. The walk was shorter that expected and surprisingly nice, 2 km down a street that was mostly gardens and attractive old hospital buildings, we assumed that the medical service was not great in Ukraine and that that explained the hospitals proximity to the cemetary. The cemetery we were going to has been compared to Pere Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetery. It was in fact a lot like Pere Lachaise, it had all the same Gothic tombstones, overgrown graves and moss covered statues as you would find in Paris. We took a walk through the grounds, the only grave we recognized was that of Ivan Franko, a nationalistic Ukrainian poet, but it was a nice walk up through the trees and graves to the top of the hill. We had planned to get a bus back to the centre but it was only 2 km, so we walked. We walked through the centre to the other side of town, to the Lvivske brewery. After a bit of head-scratching we found the entrance to the brewery museum. We wandered through looking at the brewing exhibits and then waited while Dad did some taste testing. We could not visit the actual warehouse though, we think it was because no guides spoke English, it was all a bit disappointing to be frank.