Europe Ukraine

In Love with Lviv

I arrived too early on my night train. The train I took left at the best time for me and had only one stop but it got me in at like 6:00am. I should have booked a hostel room for the night before so I would have a room to go to. But instead I took a tram from the train station to the town centre, grabbed a coffee from the one place I found that was open at that time a day and sat in the town square for a while, watching the city wake up, feeling a little like Belle at the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, except that I didn’t want to leave.

I was instantly smitten with Lviv. It is so pretty. Like any of those really pretty small European cities. It has charming narrow streets lined with inviting cafes and eateries, spilling out onto the street. Beautiful buildings. Really old churches ranging from haunting to impressive. Quaint town squares. Lots of flowers. It’s just wonderful.

I was so happy to walk around. Kyiv was cool and impressive but Lviv was charming.

I ate some great meals there, from traditional Ukrainian to excellent Italian to a really wonderful Armenian meal. And everything was so in expensive. Like I had a meal with salad, pasta, and wine at a really cute place and it was like $12 Canadian. Kyiv was also very inexpensive but it really hit me in Lviv.

Oh, and Lviv has tones of excellent coffee shops, ranging from cute to cool, but all with a real focus on excellent coffee, like you would find in any more famous coffee city. (And chocolate shops. Lviv is famous for them.)

There isn’t much in the way of “must see” sights in Lviv. You kind of just go because it is lovely. I was happy to see the churches and soak up the atmosphere.

An excellent little cafe selling bread items filled with meat, cheese or fruits

On my first day of walking around I spotted the big opera house, took a photo, and figured it would be closed due to Covid-19…but it wasn’t. It was open and there was a show on that night.

I was thrilled. Because of the pandemic, I hadn’t been to a live show in a year or more so I decided to see this show, whatever it was. What it was was a show called When the Fern Blooms, from the 1970s, but banned by the Soviets, so it is only in recent years that it has been produced.

I can’t tell you what it was about. I don’t speak Ukrainian and it didn’t have surtitles, but it was clearly very patriotic. It started off well, but honestly it ended up corny, and reminded me of cheesy 1970s sci-fi movies mixed with the big number at the end of the movie Stayin’ Alive. But the good things outweighed my criticisms. It was opera, I was there, I was entertained, and…In the interest of social distancing I bought myself an entire opera box and paid very little. It was either $30 or $60 Canadian. I felt like a king. A masked king.

I stayed at the Lviv Dream Hostel, which was excellent. Perfect location, great amenities and hangout areas, as well as maybe the cleanest hostel kitchen I have ever seen.

There weren’t many backpackers there but lots of people who were in Ukraine working remotely because life was better there at that time than in their own countries, in terms of the pandemic. One guy, an accountant from San Francisco, was told by his employer he would have to work remotely for at least another few months, so he decided to work remotely from Europe. Why not? The place just had a great hostel atmosphere, even if the style of traveller was a little different at that time.

On my next day, I had planned to visit the yard of lost toys, which became pretty blog and Instagram famous as a courtyard in a residential neighbourhood where people had collected and put on display a group of ever-changing lost toys. I found the courtyard, but the toys were gone. I would like to think they all found homes, but the truth is, the residents probably got tired of looky-loos tramping through their backyard. And rightly so.

I did carry on however and visited the Lychakiv cemetery, which is excellent. It is a huge cemetery, still in use, but dating back to the late 17th C. It is massive and very green and peaceful. Perfect for a walk. I was lucky enough to come across some gathering (not a funeral) that involved passionate singing.

That evening I just meandered around and had a meal and cigar. Enjoyed some wonderful traditional music from a busker. I had enough time there and I feel no need to return, but I really loved my time in Lviv.

When I left, instead of the train, I took a short, cheap flight back to Kyiv.

Europe United Kingdom Yemen Trip 2025

London Layover: The Canals

I landed in London at 8:40 AM after my incredibly short night in Cairo, concluding my journey to Yemen. I had only a five-and-a-half-hour layover before my flight home to Canada, but there was absolutely no way I was going to spend that time sitting inside the airport terminal. Within minutes of clearing customs, I was on the Heathrow Express heading straight for Paddington Station.

I stopped for a quick espresso and to take in a little public art.

I firmly maintain that for a layover of this length, taking a stroll along the canals near Paddington is an excellent option. I had visited the area once before, but only the sections directly adjacent to the station. This time, I ventured a little farther into the neighbourhood properly known as Little Venice. It was so much more beautiful than I had imagined.

There are countless reasons why London remains my favourite city in the world, but one of the main ones is its seemingly endless supply of charming neighbourhoods. Walking that morning past the clear, reflective canals—lined with beautiful historic buildings and flowering trees—I was in absolute heaven. It is entirely possible that it all felt especially lovely because I had just spent the better part of a week in Yemen. While Yemen is incredibly beautiful in its own right, it was also hot, punishing, and dusty.

I felt a wave of pure happiness that morning, enjoying the slightly cool weather, walking under a canopy of lush green trees, and looking out over the serene waters. Eventually, I made my way back toward Paddington Station and stopped for a coffee and some avocado toast at one of the charming little barge restaurants moored on the canal. It was an absolute delight.

It really is amazing how much you can accomplish during a short layover in London if you are willing to move. With that, I headed back to Heathrow Airport. My magical Yemen trip was officially over. My next adventure would keep me a little closer to home: a quick day trip to Calgary.

Europe United Kingdom Yemen Trip 2025

London Layover: Belgravia

One of my greatest travel joys is having an exciting destination to visit with the bonus of getting a long layover in London on the way there. I say it so often that’s cliched, but London is probably my favourite city. I used to live there, and have visited it many times so for me it is a perfect place to have a day layover as I already know my way around and I’m happy to revisit it.

The way I approach London as a layover is to pick a neighbourhood that I want to visit and generally stick to that neighbourhood. Sometimes it will be because there’s something in particular that I want to do, like visiting a certain museum or a cigar store, and other times it will be just an area that I haven’t been to in a long time or forever. Obviously, the length of my layover somewhat dictates what I do. On my way to Yemen, I had some time in London and decided to base my visit around a cigar lounge.

I smoke cigars a lot in London, and that usually finds me going to Saint James Street, but I had been hearing about a lounge called TomTom and decided to make that my focus. I took the Heathrow Express into Paddington station and switched to the Tube, and took the underground to Sloane Square. From there it was a short walk to the TomTom cigar lounge. But what a walk.

I don’t know the names of all the streets that I walked down, but if you look at a map and you trace the route from Sloane Square to TomTom, you’ll have an idea. I think one of them was Pavilion Road. Anyway, the streets were ridiculously charming. All bricks with Union Jack flags strung up and every door festooned with colourful flowers. It was a charming neighbourhood. It seemed that every second window had delectable looking pastries and the weather was just nice enough that people were starting to sit outside.

Just as I got to the cigar lounge, I noticed a cute pink tea and cake shop across the street and I couldn’t resist. It was called Peggy Porschen cakes. I had never heard of it before, but they certainly did a good job of drawing me in with their pink floral exterior. I went inside settled on a pot of tea and a slice of a cake that I surely didn’t need but was happy to have. I sat outside and enjoyed my delectable treats feeling very girly. Just then the weather turned and I headed over to TomTom.

TomTom is a bit of an odd cigar merchant. They have a walk-in humidor but in the humidor only one of each type of cigar for sale is on display. I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally the merchant will display a box of the cigars that are on sale this one just one of each. It had a very minimalist appeal. Cigars in London can be quite expensive and none of them are cheap, but while there are options that are hundreds of Pounds you can still get a decent high end Cuban cigar for less than $100. I picked one of those.

Had I not known that they had a cigar lounge, I would not have discovered it on my own. The retail portion of the business was quite small and there were a couple of seats outside but nothing to suggest that there was a lounge, however when I asked about it, they led me through a slightly hidden door at the back of the humidor and I went down a flight of stairs into the basement. This is cigar lounge is quite cool. It’s very stylish and has a little bit of a 1970s flavour. Unfortunately, I was the only one in there when I went so it was a bit strange to have it all to myself, but I appreciated the time to relax and enjoy my cigar. I did that before deciding out of an abundance of caution that I should go back to the airport. I probably could have spent another couple of hours, but I had a flight to catch to Egypt and then another one to Yemen, where I was meeting up with people, and I couldn’t risk missing any of my flights.

I wandered back to the Tube station through Belgravia, which honestly doesn’t even sound like a real place. It sounds like something out of a Harry Potter book. I caught the train back to Heathrow, my spirits high and my energy fueled by tea, cake, and tobacco.

Onwards to Cairo.

Cyprus Christmas trip 2024 Europe Germany

Night Lights: Overnight in Munich at Christmastime

I left Nicosia and flew out of Larnaca, Cyprus, headed home to Vancouver, but first I had a layover in Munich. I was to arrive at about 8pm and leave the next day at about 11:30am. I booked myself a night at the Wombat’s City Hostel Munich Hauptbahnhof in a six-bed girls’ dorm.

Unfortunately, my flight was delayed so I didn’t arrive in Munich until about 11:00pm. I took the S-Bahn train (line 1 and 8 run every 10 minutes or so into the city centre and the trip is about 40 minutes).

I walked out of the train station and into the night air. It was dark. It was cold. The streets were empty, but they were festive. It was beautiful to see Christmas trees and Christmas lights, and with the cold night air it felt so festive. Even the regular buildings that were not decorated were illuminated in some way and it just felt a little bit surreal. I could have taken the metro a couple of stops to get closer to my hostel, but I was so happy to be outside that I decided to walk. Everything was closed unfortunately and I saw only a few people walking around. I got to my hostel and went to my room. And forgive me as I go on a bit of a hostel rant.

Some hostels are well designed. They have dorms with soft blue lighting that won’t wake other sleepers when you come in, they have beds with curtains so that people have privacy and more darkness at night. They have lockers and cubbyholes where people put their items. This was not one of those hostels – or if they did have those things no one chose to use them as their stuff was all over the floor. I walked into the hostel dorm, and it was pitch black. There was no gentle motion light, and the only options I had was to stumble around in the dark or turn on the overhead light. I wasn’t about to turn on the overhead light and wake everyone up, so I decided to let my eyes adjust for a second and then try to make my way to my bunk bed. But because there was no place to store luggage properly, people had bags and suitcases and shoes all strewn about on the floor and I tripped over things multiple times as I tried to find my bunk. Also, trying to find your bunk in a pitch-black room that you’ve never been to before is extremely challenging. I finally found it and it was one of those ones where they don’t put the sheets on the mattress or the cover on the duvet or pillowcase and you have to do it yourself. I wasn’t about to fiddle around with that in the middle of the night on a top bunk so I just slept in my clothes on top of the plasticky mattress covered with naked duvet cover. I fell asleep quickly. Unfortunately for the people that I was sharing the room with, I wasn’t only the last person to bed, but I was the first person awake. I got up a few hours later showered and dressed and left again. I walked back to the main train station and went back to the airport. I stopped for a little breakfast on the way, but the city didn’t feel as magical as it had the night before.

If I was doing it over again, I think I would have booked a better hostel or a private room for that one night, but it’s hard to argue with the price of a hostel dorm. So, I didn’t get to do a lot in Munich on my layover, but I really enjoyed being there, even briefly. And so ended my Christmas trip to Cyprus and my final trip 2024.

I would be homebound for about two weeks and then I would be off to Miami.

Wandering North

In Love with Lviv

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