Lviv

From May 12th to 14th, 2023

Day 1

• We drove from Warsaw, Poland through to the border of Ukraine near Budomierz.

• The drive took about 4 hours to get to the border, then another 3 hours to get to Lviv and our hotel Leopolis.

• We walked around Lviv, past the opera house and had dinner at a dungeon-like torture themed chamber restaurant called Meat and Justice. This sounds weird, I know, but it was the highest rated restaurant in Lviv. The food was great, fire grilled, and the theme of the torture dungeon was comparable to a medieval times style entertainment. 

• We went out to a few bars all around town that night, the coolest of which was 12 Steps Bar

• We ended the evening with one last beer at The Pravda Beer Theatre that closed down around 10:30 so that all staff can make it home by the 11pm curfew. The curfew is in place because of the war.

Day 2

• At 5am, sirens went off and a voice overhead directed us to head to the bomb shelter in the basement of the hotel. Not expecting to have a drill in the middle of the night (and partially forgetting which country we’re even in), we gathered ourselves and made our way to the basement of the hotel where we waited until another call came letting us know it was safe to go back upstairs. We think it was the activity in Khmelnitsky (about 150 miles from Lviv) that caused the alarms to go off.

• Went back to bed and woke up around 10 to walk more around the city and wandered through the park to enjoy the tulips at Stryiski Park. We stopped for a fire coffee at Lviv Coffee Mine and had a once in a lifetime coffee that was torched by a blowtorch right in front of us.

• We had a quick lunch at another bunker style war themed restaurant named Kryivka with a lot of war propaganda all over the walls. Some of the images could be considered disturbing.

• We drove 3 hours to a small town named Drohobych to spend the evening in the Ukrainian countryside at a cottage. We made it to the cottage and were hosted by a group of 3 Ukrainians and their yorkie dog, Mia. They had prepared our room for us, and were preparing dinner for us all evening. To start we had a borscht soup, then the second course was corn/grits (Hutsul Banosh) with a mushroom sauce on top of it, then we had trout as our 3rd course, the fourth course was chicken, lamb and steak. There may have been a dessert course, but by that time all the home-made moonshine had kicked in and there was singing and dancing to end the evening. 

Day 3

• Crossed back into Poland near Medyka and all was fine with our car, passports, papers, etc, but the border control lady told us that our window tint was 10% over the limit. So, our guides stripped the window tinting on the front windows right then and there. Otherwise we would have had to have gotten back in the line to cross the border and that could have been more hours of waiting.

Watch:

• Servant of the People

• Lord Of War