Grand Hotel In Lviv

... The performance was solid. The ticket for my good seat was only $10. <br><br>As I emerge from the theater, I see another performance that is part of the festival. It is a local Cirque du Soleil type show. Jugglers, fire breathers, acrobats &#8230; <br><br> Afterward, I find a new café below the opera theater. It is packed with a very artsy feel. Food is very good and inexpensive although it ...

... man was selling handcuffs and other interesting devices. Ins&#305;de the walls were red and were criss crossed with chains. To our great amusement a group of drunk university students at the table next to us were playing with the various whips, manacles and chains for use in the restaurant. They even had a waitress whip each of the boys at the table while everyone laughed as the boys howled.<br><br>To add to the hilarity of the experience Ross decided to try Salo (p&#305;g fat - a ...

... line through it. To give an example of what a word looks like in Cyrillic, I will use PECTOPAH. You may never guess, but it means restaurant. P is R and C is S and what not. I experienced the Cyrillic alphabet when I was in Bulgaria 4 years ago but most of what I learned then is long gone. Plus I am going to be surrounded by the Cyrillic alphabet for a couple more weeks at least as Russia also uses it. The joys. Travelling isn't all about going on vacation, sometimes ...

... was that it began to snow on our second day. The snow is absolutely amazing! Everything is coated in perfect white, untouched fluffiness. The bone-chillingly cold climate becomes bearable when you have such an amazing vista everywhere you look. Every snowy tree is a potential photograph, every rooftop straight out of that 'white christmas' movie. Every old, rusty drainpipe has nurtured a cluster of clear, icy tendrils which somehow forms a ...

... also thought it was time to give our bodies a rest from the vodka thrashing. Sadly, it's our last day in L'viv. We bought some more presents, and then it was time to go and see Die Fledermaus. We had better seats this time, and it still cost only £7.50. **** I wish it was this cheap in London. The opera was great, but it was in Ukranian. In between the sets, we went and visited Brian who had taken the manageress of the hostel, Olesya. She was getting ...

... and got the map thing sorted, my new buddy and I headed back into town to fully explore the city and see everything we missed during our quick look around last night. We walked into the center and checked out a few of the churches before stopping in the market (where I got a wonderful wood and tile bracelet for less than a buck). Went in for a look inside the Arsenal Museum before going into some more churches. Another market ...

... celebrate Andrei`s flatmae birthday. Our next stopover was at the Orlat Lwowskich cementary - one of the most famous places in Lviv. There is lots of Polish graves - of artists, writers, as well as Polish soldiers fighting for freedom of Poland. The soldires have even a separate mini-cementary; the are no-name graves, too. Lviv used to be Polish and you still can see it in lots of places. The Polish graves as set next to Ukrainian, ussian or even German ones. Very good ...

... apartment blocks. This certainly wasn't the UNESCO world heritage city of Lviv I'd heard all about, but it was still interesting to look at. Another thing that surprised me was the electric powered buses. They were powered in the same way city trams are, and it was a somewhat strange site for me. Our driver dropped us off close to Lviv's rynok, which was where I first saw just how beautiful the city really was. Prior to the Second World War, Lviv was the second largest city in ...

... would take us to autovokzal pyat 5, eventually an old lady or two tried to help us find the correct minibus. This led to crossing and recrossing the corner and the lady asked every single person in the area to help us. Though we got different direction at least 5 times, we did actually know where we were going and would have done a decent job on our own. We tried to tell this to the lady (she not speaking English us not speaking Ukrainian) to no avail. The last kid she ...

... be in the same queue as me? That was the moment that I realized I really overestimated my ability to travel alone and independently in a former Eastern Bloc country like Ukraine, where most people do not speak any Western language at all and their alphabet is not even that readable. For a country like Ukraine, I should have joined a package tour group (like the way I traveled to Russia) instead of doing it all by myself. Now I feel stuck.