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.
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.
