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.