Lviv High Castle

We walked from our apartment to Lviv's High Castle yesterday, about 45 minutes or so through relatively warm temperatures. We were bitter over having brought our coats by the time we got to the bottom of 'Curved Nose' street, just the other side of down town. While I was sure that Amy knew, I did bring up that the castle is now what most of us would call a piece of wall. Best to set expectations before you get too far along.


I couldn't imagine at first why there were so many Volvos and Audis speeding past us up and then back down the hill. Turns out the stair up the last stretch of hill starts more or less at the parking lot of Lviv's television station. In addition to Europe's largest free-standing lattice work antennae, the television station is notable for a statue of a saint that's just opposite an onsite café.


The castle wall is impressive, but I don't think Amy even hesitated as we walked past. In fact she asked Axel who would win the race to the top, her carrying him or me stopping to take photos.


The destination was mostly about the view though. We could see all the way back to our apartment. This is the second time we've done this. Using cathedrals as reference points, it's pretty easy to make out St. Yura's and then the nearby Dnister Hotel with the dark patch of Ivan Franko Park in front of it. The clouds massing should have been some kind of sign, by the time we got back down to town it had cooled considerably and the wind had picked up. It's been snowing ever since.

Lviv Museum of Ethnography and Crafts

Two days ago we visited the Lviv Museum of Ethnography and Crafts. There was only one room of the hand tools and huts I expected, and the rest of the collection was either modern or a more straightforward reflection of Lviv's cultural history. A collection of Habsburg clocks, watches, and pocket-sized sun dials for instance.

The building itself turned out to be the highlight of the trip. A grand stair case flanked by a pair of lion bannisters led up to decked out hall on the second floor. The lions had breastplates. Not the first time I've seen lions with breasts here, I've also seen lions with curiously phallic faces serving as skirts for male statues. Amy and Axel sat in a window seat under one of a dozen stained-glass windows, taking in grandeur that you just don't find in a country that's been a democracy from the get go.



The handtools and huts didn't disappoint. They had the long and pointy quality that I associate with broken bones, accusations of witchcraft, and devil's horns. Also the sort of visual spareness that I equate with sensible design.


There was a surcharge for photographs here as well (5 Hryvnia). In the first room we visited a docent told us to keep it handy for the inevitable requests to see it. Turns out no one asked. But each of the subsequent rooms we visited had at least two docents. They would pass from room to room, gallery to gallery, through a series of doors that were off limits to visitors. As with the Railway Museum we were asked to fill in the guest book. I get the sense that everyone is, not just folks from far away — most people seem to think Amy is from Poland.

The Pharmacy Museum

Today we headed down to The Pharmacy Museum at 2 Pechatnykiv St. We'd walked past a couple of days before and it had an appealingly dark vibe about it even from the street. In a move that most novelists wouldn't even think about trying to get away with, there were three women stationed behind the counter of the pharmacy - a functioning apothecary since the 1700's.

Amy was purchasing our admission when we were told that there was a 3 hryvnia surcharge for taking photos. We were not deterred... along with the entry fee of 5 hryvnia for adults, the excursion cost a bit more than $1.50. If you go, be sure to follow the green arrows all the way out through the courtyard and into the cellar. Creepy.


In the courtyard breezeway were these paintings of the apothecary store front along with busts of famous medicinal folks, like Hippocratese.

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The museum did not disappoint on the cool containers front. There were specimens from all periods of Lviv history, even some from China.

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Might have been worth using a flash here. Blurred it up like an amateur despite two attempts.

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There were descriptive placards in multiple languages including English, fortunately for Axel none of them said "Don't Touch."

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Since perusing the ingredients of a Carter Beats the Devil on the drinks menu at Flora, I've had tinctures on the brain. A number of tinctures here.

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There's always one: Traveling to Lviv With Small Children

On travel websites, in letters to the travel section of NYT, or on the Berkeley Parents Network mailing list someone always writes to ask if anyone has experience traveling to this or that locale with small children. The locales range from the sort of places that I would disparage someone for worrying about bringing a child to, to borderline war zones. Responses range from encouraging common sense to full-fledged outrage.

We contend with these issues in the relative privacy of our dining room. We quickly ruled out a trip to the Socotra Islands because of the practicalities of getting in and out of Yemen with a two-year old - to say nothing of the prohibition against alcohol. So at various points in the planning stages, this trip was going to be a first-time visit to Easter Island and then a return visit to the Galapagos, all of which seemed doable based on our last trip there. More recently we though we were heading to Japan. We had some concerns about finding family-friend hot springs, but they do exist.

As we started our research about Lviv I came across this quote on TripAdvisor:

There is so much to see in Lviv, but I am afraid February/March is not the best season to visit it, if not the worst! If you are ready to brave heavy winds, snow and slash[sic], and ungritted streets with ice - welcome to the City of Lions

It can't be said that we didn't know what we were getting into. We packed the huge coat that my dad gave Axel for Christmas two years ago, we packed three sweaters for him, and we packed leggings for under his jeans and made a go of it.

Some things to keep in mind if you are thinking about traveling to Lviv with a small child, particularly in winter. Babushkas will absolutely voice opinions about your child's exposed ankles, or how he really should be wearing his hat. Axel has little time for hats and less for gloves, and we tend to be tolerant parents. Our attitude toward the weather is that of a tourist, not someone who has to live with it. Imagine our surprise when we got home one day and Axel stumbled about because his legs were numb. We left on the window seat over our radiator and he stayed there very happily for 15 minutes.


Babushkas will be hands on with your child to remedy situations. One day in Strysky Market Axel was at his wit's end, sobbing heavily in his stroller. A round and bundled old woman leaned in to comfort him and he howled louder even as she gave him the cookie below.


This is a smoking city. Cigarette butts accumulate in snow and ice around children's playgrounds. Non-smoking areas in most restaurants we've been to tend to be small - usually two tables near the cash register. It's predictably disconcerting to be taking off your child's clothes when they smell like you do after a night out on the drink. We don't see many children on the streets or in shops. Some shopkeepers seem to be judging Amy harshly for having Axel out and about at the hours we do (never later than 7), even having him in stores at all. They are probably judging me too, but by not understanding the language I'm spared the freight of grief.

For all that, our two-year old loves Lviv. We entered a noisy and thick with smoke middle eastern restaurant the other night and Axel howled when we left for want of a table. The other day a tractor followed us for a solid two blocks up a busy sidewalk, Axel asking what happened all the while. He loves the truck play structure in Strysky Park, the playroom in Puzata Hata, the teenagers ice skating in the old part of town.

Lviv's Railway Museum

This was our second trip to Lviv's Railway Museum, we caught the #2 bus without a hitch and were there within minutes. The building that houses the museum is big. We walked through the same frosted glass doors we'd gone through the day before, when the museum was closed for a national holiday, and saw an enormously wide set of doors open on to a darkened institutional hall way.


So it was with some surprise that the woman behind the counter walked us back out of the building and around to a side door for the museum itself - a room so small that Amy and I exchanged a glance and a smirk before a docent walked out to meet us. His name was Roman, and he talked to Amy for a solid half hour while Axel and I tried to keep ourselves occupied with the two larger model trains available for viewing.


Their conversation was more about the history of the occupation of Lviv by various parties than about the railway itself. Throughout the museum there were a handful of stone badges that labelled the railroad by ruling interest. These were very cool looking, and had hand-carved geometric patterns on the back. They were also devilishly difficult to get good photos of because of the light in the room and because they were hung from bright burnished poles by shiny lengths of chain.


Eventually it came out that in addition to be the museum docent, Roman was also the artist who'd painted the dozen or so portraits of leaders of the railway on display, carved a marble bust of the most recent head of the railway that would be used to derive a form for a bronze sculpture, and also painted the large mural of Lviv near the entrance.


Based on this description it may be difficult for you to know whether or not a visit to the Railway Museum is worth the trip. The museum is free. The model of the electric train is very cool and held Axel's interest for a good 10 minutes - Roman told Amy that it was used as an instructional tool for student engineers. There's also a model steam train that for some reason Axel was less interested in - quite possibly because it did not have a face. The museum also does a great job of conveying just how frequently Lviv has changed hands over the last few hundred years. Ultimately, if you're not a train person, then the primary reason you'd be interested in visiting is that your child or loved one is. And for train people, it's always worth it.

Nearly forgot, Roman encouraged me to take this photo of these wrenches.

Cathedrals and Crows

Until today we'd always headed straight or turned left when leaving the apartment. So everything was new to me when we turned right and made our way to a bus stop. Snow was still thick on the ground, we tromped through banks of it to get across the street. And then happened on a cathedral less than a quarter of a mile from our digs. In the course of our 30 minute walk we passed another massive cathedral, a soviet monument that was under repair, and a busy market.





The thirty minute walk through snow and slush was required because none of the buses that we wanted to take stopped for us. Eventually Amy put together that these were on a Sunday schedule owing to a holiday. We found them all eventually, one stop up and in a queue. I haven't been able to determine if there's a color scheme for these buses that correlates to route numbers. I also haven't figured out why many buses and trolleys that have a route number like 1, 2, or 9 will also have a three digit series of numbers in their side windows.



In the afternoon we ventured out to the old central market area. We got there just as the crows were starting to do their thing. We'd seen this the day before and no one had commented on it. Even more crows than you see in this photo, Hitchcock levels of crow really, and no one looked up but us. Amy observed that the weird thing about was that they were crows and not some more common flocking bird. Our friend Brad over at Wild Boar Farms said he'd seen a National Geographic segment on the same phenomenon in Yuba City, CA.


The old part of town really is lovely. An elegant mix of run down and renovated, graffiti and gargoyles, shops and cafes. I say this not because it's surprising but because as an American you almost never hear about this city.



We stopped at a bank on the way home to pull out as many hryvnia as we could to pay for Amy's language tutoring. When possible we've tried to pay for our larger planned expenses in hryvnia. At the same time, the folks renting us the apartment and coordinating Amy's tutoring have a strong lean toward dollars. Still, we've exceeded our maximum withdrawal amount from the bank nearest our apartment. Not sure if the restriction has something to do with the current economic climate or is more general.

Key Trouble

We didn't get very far today.

Yesterday afternoon we went over to the neighborhood park to play in the new fallen snow. I don't know the name of the park, it's adjacent to the Dnister hotel and everyone just describes it as the old park (Ivan Franko Park maybe?).

Axel took to the snow in ways I didn't expect. After a few cautious steps in a pristine white expanse on the sidewalk outside our door he tromped all the way to the park and a good deal of the way into it. He giggled at every lobbed snow ball, and laughed out loud when I threw loosely packed snowballs at him. Amy grabbed low-hanging branches and shook the snow loose. I made a miniature snow man, which Amy said looked more like a rat than the cat Axel had requested. Two boys rode mountain bikes through the snow, four policeman marched by in step, children tugged sleds on metal runners. We were quickly frozen, drenched up to the knee, and headed back home through the city where the snow was mostly rain.


Everything was such a jumble of wet clothes and goods when we got home that somehow the keys didn't make it in with us. By the time we looked back out in our shared foyer they were gone. Both Amy and I had heard someone arriving in the apartment next door shortly after us. They insisted that they'd seen nothing. We emptied everything in the apartment, put it back together, and then emptied it again to no avail. Just our luck, this happened on a three-day weekend.


We've gotten in touch with our landlords and help is on the way. Meanwhile, the snow is still falling. We have in mind to eat at Seven Pigs restaurant when we can, I'm hopeful it will be like a Ukrainian Gonpachi.

Out and About

Today we set off in search of a market that Amy had stumbled on before I arrived. I decided to leave the stroller at home, so Axel could walk as much as possible, and because the thought of navigating the ice and slush with a stroller seemed like a non-starter. We wandered through our neighborhood crossing the street to get ahead or to steer clear of icy patches. Amy cautioned along the way that traffic didn't typically stop for people carrying children.

Compounding this, most intersections in this neighborhood represent three converging streams of traffic, any one of which can include buses, electric trolley buses, and trams as well as cars. At an intersection that has become my nemesis, we came around a corner and walked past a steep frontage road that leads up to the polytechnic university, stopped before running over a set of rails across two lanes of traffic and finally another set of rails to make the sidewalk opposite. With Axel tucked into his stroller this can be particularly exhilarating.



Moving through a partially-thawed landscape of brightly painted university buildings, sprawling and dilapidated old homes, and a surprising number of notary offices we wound up on the wrong course. Sitting at a crowded bus stop, Amy found our location on the map that came with our apartment and got us headed in the right direction.



We came within a block of the market. Axel and I had gone several rounds over his need to be carried. Each negotiation ended up with him agreeing to walk only to closer and closer landmarks, the last walk was maybe 3 meters and he cried profusely the whole time. It also seemed to be getting colder. At least we were all less warm. Also, Amy had to be back to meet here Ukrainian tutor. So we grabbed a trolley back toward home.


There was still a reasonably long walk ahead of us. At one point Axel's shoe fell off. We slumped onto a basement window ledge and a woman passing by said something while I put the shoe back on. Smiling and nodding. A ways up the sidewalk she told Amy that she thought I didn't know Axel had lost his shoe. That I might have him walking around barefoot.

Arriving in Lviv

As I climbed out of the plane and on to the gangway, a gust of wind blew off some foam that had been taped to the top of the cabin doorway. There was plenty of sun though, it felt almost warm as we piled into a bus for the ride to the terminal. The airport looked a lot like a train station, warm earth tones and classic proportions.


A flatbed truck with some luggage was trying to back up from the main building of the airport and passengers kept grabbing bags from it even as it moved. I noticed my bag on the back of a truck that had already entered the airport. I scooped it up and made for the door. Two offers of taxi ride before I noticed a guy holding a sheet of paper with my name on it. I waved and we walked quickly to his car.

I didn't know much about the driver; only that he was affiliated with the folks we had rented our apartment from. After a few blocks or so he asked if I spoke Russian, and I answered no - in Ukrainian as Amy would later point out. The ride in was uneventful, not many street signs and some street signs for unexpected things. A Mercedes dealership for instance. When we got to the apartment he insisted on carrying my laptop and camera laden messenger bag, and walked me through a bunch of doors and up a concrete spiral stair past an old elevator.




My guide rang the heart-shaped doorbell for our apartment and we waited. We could hear things but no one came to the door. He looked in my direction and shrugged. Turns out Amy was trying to get pants on Axel who'd been going pants free owing to how warm the apartment is. While I hugged and carried Axel, Amy carried on multiple conversations with Vasiliy about how much we owed for the ride from the airport and something about a pillow that it would take a couple of days for me to remember to ask about.

I unpacked all of the edibles I'd brought from home, and we walked down busy streets —past the Hotel Dnister— to a small shop where we bought some Lviv beer for 4.50 hryvnia and a hard sausage. For dinner we ate odds and ends. Pelmeni, the sausage, and a sharp, acidic cheddar that Amy had bought. The Prather Ranch Meat Company Slim Jims I'd been entrusted with, and a delicious relish of beets and horseradish.

Within minutes of lying down with Axel to get him to sleep I was down for the count.

Getting to Lviv: Arriving At Broyspil Airport

As soon as the doors on the bus from our plane to the terminal opened, people ran for the passport check. This was not the purposeful but self-conscious fast-walking of American travelers. It was running in wool coats, in hats, with bags, up a short flight of ice-covered stairs. It was 11:00pm local time.

I've only learned a third of my cyrillic alphabet, and spent most of the flight from Munich learning phrases to get through customs. Hello. I am here to vacation. My wife is in lviv. That's not mine. I need to speak to the consulate.

I took the green path for customs control, for folks with nothing to declare. Under a sign that informed in multiple languages that once you crossed a certain a white line it was your ass. I took all this in just as a guy in uniform intercepted someone who'd been on the flight with me. I waited for one of four other guys in uniform to do the same to me, instead they stared blankly. Eventually I followed a young woman who wheeled her carry-on bag around me, out the doors and marked "into city."

I was predisposed against airport taxi drivers. The guide I downloaded to my iPod suggested that they tended to charge higher rates than other taxi drivers, that some would switch currencies on you from 300 hryvnia to 300 dollars once they got you to your destination. As with any population being reported on primarily by American tourists, a grain of salt is probably in order.

The taxi drivers had an unofficial uniform of dark pants and bomber jackets. One followed me through the waiting area in the airport, and eventually helped me find the green phone for the Airport Hotel. In my mind, the green phone on the wall was a northern european bright green. Turns out it was more of an olive drab number glued to a column. The sign above it showed a blue terminal a few twists and turns of road and a red circle that was the hotel.

There were easily 10 more jacket-clad drivers outside. I deflected their offers with a variety of phrases. I tried the word shuttle and was offered a ride to Kharkov. Realizing that they couldn't understand my pronunciation of Boryspil, I settled on "hotel bus". Once I told them this, they all said "wait here". When the bus pulled into view, one of the drivers I'd spoken to shouted that it was my bus.

Watching the News Or Not

At some point I decided that following headlines on Ukraine was like reviewing the Department of States' Travel Advisory for the country you're intending to visit. It's good to be informed, but if you've already performed the moral calculus and intend to proceed with your trip there's only so much you can do before getting there.

Of course once Amy arrived and reports were trickling in by text message I did wonder why she was having a hard time getting hryvnia and why the renters of our apartment wanted to be paid in full for our rental in U.S. dollars. While attending my employer's annual Sales Conference, I received a copy of the New York Times that described all of Eastern Europe hanging by a very thin economic thread. Protests and a run on banks in Kiev.

Since arriving I've been following this a good deal more closely. A handful of articles describing the situation with the IMF, a smartly-dressed spokesperson for the secret police describing their action against Naftogaz, and so on. Today my search results were scuttled by the Dallas Cowboys signing Defense End Igor Olshansky, the NFL's only Ukraine-born player.

Before that it had been the gas crisis, and before that an apartment building blowing up due to a gas leak. Lots of strange goings on with gas in this country.

Getting to Lviv: Back in Munich

The work trip to Munich was sudden, lasted only 3 days, and I brought with me some viral nastiness from home. My boss and I made it outside for dinner one evening, and that 15 minute walk through the old town of Freising was the only time we spent outside.

Among other disappointments from that trip: I ordered a pilsener when we sat down to beer with colleagues, turns out this is usually an after dinner beer. I took some ribbing from our Israeli sales manager, who had been taking a good deal more than ribbing all night over the latest occupation of Palestine. When we sat down for dinner, I made it through one bite of my soup and then white knuckled a trip to my hotel room where I slept off said viral nastiness.

When my boss and I left Munich, I arrived at the airport feeling pressed for time - and then waited. I picked up chocolate, some gummi bears, and a book for Axel. All of the high-end duty free shops had big sale signs in their windows but at the end of the day, a Burberry scarf is a Burberry scarf.

My fondest hope for the trip back through was that I might score some more gummi bears. On my way off the plane, I realized that one of my colleagues and her husband had flown from San Francisco with me. They would have two hours to kill before their flight to Torino, me before my flight to Kyiv. They were routed through a gate for EU citizens though, and I went off to try and find some hryvnia.

Eventually I did. The kindly woman at the Western Union exchange laughed at my request for 200 of them. She said she had 99 of them, or about 15 dollars worth. "Enough for Taxi maybe." "Better than nothing." I tried other wings of my terminal, but all other exchanges were dark. I grabbed a big bottle of water, and then sat at the Aerobrau. My weisbier was 10 Euro cents cheaper than the water. I had to show my passport to buy the water, and to write down the name of my home city.

Before: Tools Of the Trade

One of the early considerations for whether or not a month in Lviv was feasible for us, was how I would fare not even knowing the alphabet. The trip will be our first personal travel outside of North America since we went to Ecuador - Amy was six and a half months pregnant at the time.

In the last year, work has brought me to Japan, to San Diego, and most recently to Munich. At least in Japan, I seemed to hit some kind of traveling stride. I studied my guide book, downloaded language podcasts, and was surprised to find my American colleagues looking in my direction when they didn't understand something they were hearing. This was an unusual experience for me at least in part because I am used to traveling with Amy.

During our trip to St. Chinian, I could mostly follow along in restaurants and vineyards but knew that Amy could get us out of any linguistic jams we might find ourselves in. We were both out of depth once we got to western Ireland, but there would usually be someone in the room (or in one memorable case, the road crew) who spoke English. In Ecuador, we were accounted for by our guide at all times - he read menus at every restaurant we stopped at in the Galapagos long after we'd realized that you could have fish grilled, fried, or both. We had been to Vancouver to start our bike trip last year, but the only non-native situation we really had to navigate was ordering food by the gram at the market.

I'm determined to carry some of my own verbal weight this trip, and being responsible for Axel several hours a day should be a good prod. I've armed my iPod with:

• Speakeasy Ukrainian


• WordPower Ukrainian


• Ukraine Travel Guide

While WordPower has the ability to record and playback you own pronunciations, I prefer the significantly less expensive SpeakEasy which includes a primer on the Cyrillic alphabet and a more straightforward typographic approach. The Ukraine Travel Guide seems to be pulled in large part from WikiPedia.

There are a bunch of free translation applications for the iPod but all of them require that you be connected for them to do their thing. For iPhone users they may make sense, but wifi is not ubiquitous in Lviv.