Lviv Pictures
Once again, a huge thanks to Catwoman for hosting them!
***
I had expected chickens. Screaming children. Straw on the floor, maybe. That's what I had been led to believe about platzkart, the infamous fourth-class cabins on Ukrainian trains. Still, Susannah said she wanted it; cheaper and safer, she had said.
Luckily, my expectations weren't fulfilled. If you've seen a coupe on a normal European train: four bunks in a room, then platzkart is what you get if you put two more bunks in the hall and then remove all the walls. Packed, yes. Chaos, no. Although I'm told that in the summer, chaos it is.
When we were there, for Valentine's day weekend (although, as friends because I was dating Diana), the only people making noise were us, talking quietly, barely able to see each other in the dim light. It was 10:00 PM, and most of the lights were off, letting people sleep on the overnight train to Lviv.
Finally, around midnight, we crawled onto our bunks and both went to sleep, lulled by the gently rocking train.
***
The conductor of our wagon woke us up 6:00 AM to have us up and ready to go by the train's arrival at 7:00. I was running on five hours of sleep from the night before, and about six for this one, so I was starting the whirlwind two day trip already exhausted. We were in Lviv for a Valentine's day tour package that seemed too good to pass up: lodging, food, a tour of the city, transportation to a nearby castle and dinner in the castle, all for 200 hrivna, or slightly less than $40.
It was a tour being put on by a new Ukrainian tour group in conjunction with Hosteling International. Both should have sent up red flags.
They were supposed to meet us outside the train. In fact, I had confirmed it by phone the night before. No one was there. Fifteen minutes of standing in sub-zero temperature later, there was still no one there, and the train had gone. We went inside the mammoth and beautiful Lviv train station.
I called the tour company, but it being 7:30 AM in the morning, it wasn't open. Susannah waited in line for a return train ticket for her. Because you need a passport to buy a train ticket, we couldn't buy ours together. I had successfully bought mine in Zhytomyr, but she had been unable to get any tickets from where she lived in Harkiv, near the Russian border. In Kyiv, she had been able to get a ticket to Lviv, but not one back. We were sort of doing this by the seat of our pants.
The lady told Susannah that there were no tickets available, but she should try back tomorrow. With no luck reaching the travel agency, we checked a guidebook and saw that the Hotel George was reasonably priced and centrally located. We took a cab from the train station to the hotel, a neo-renaissance building over a hundred years old with a huge staircase leading up to the second floor. The paint was faded and chipped and it was one bathroom per floor, but that gave it a rustic grandeur. Plus, at $15 a night, it was hard to beat.
Of course, my bags had no sooner hit the bed than I received a call on my mobile from the tour company hostel: they had changed the meeting location and had not been able to get a hold of me the previous night. The would come to pick us up.
Susannah was all for staying at the Hotel George and ditching the tour company. I should have listened to her, but instead I was thinking that we'd also miss out on the package: the food, the tours, everything save for the castle tour, which I knew could be purchased separately. So we had them "pick us up" at the hotel.
"Pick up" generally connotes someone getting you with a car. This really meant that a guy showed up and led us to a marshutka, in which we sat packed for a 20 minute ride that took us to the very outskirts of Lviv. When I mean outskirts, I mean there was nothing past the edge of buildings but snow-covered steppe. It was the absolute outer edge of the city. We were in the part of Lviv that the Soviets had gotten to, with their towering and ugly block apartments.
Susannah and I live in Soviet block apartment cities. We came to Lviv to forget we were in the former USSR for a weekend. Glancing with dread at the buildings, we followed our guide for a 15 minute walk over slippery ice-covered sidewalks to a building that looked just like the others, trash spread around the outskirts and being picked over by dogs and crows. That was the hostel.
The rooms weren't bad (albeit cold), but I was already fed up with the deal. Every Hostelling International hostel I've ever been it was on the outskirts of town, forcing me to spend valuable vacation time on public transportation, on which I was also spending what few dollars a day I saved by taking the HI hostel. I simply refuse to use them anymore. And I was not about to spend 35 minutes each way walking and on marchrutkas when the Hotel George was smack in the center of town for just a few bucks more.
Hungry, we ate the breakfast at the hostel, determining our options. There we also met Christopher and Wendy, the only other Americans on the tour. Wendy was a Peace Corp Volunteer, Christopher was her American husband who worked at a Kyiv newspaper. Telling them about the Hotel George, we as a group decided to call it a bust and head back into town.
This turned out to be a problem.
The tour group simply didn't want to let us go. It's that Ukrainian one-way mentality: we had come, we should not leave. Thus proceeded and argument in Ukrainian. Lviv is the center of Ukrainian Nationalism, and is a city where pretty much only Ukrainian is spoken. Wendy and Susannah only spoke Russian. Christopher only spoke English.
This meant I had to do all the arguing. It also meant that Susannah was getting pissed, feeling snubbed because these people wouldn't talk to her in Russian.
"Speak to me in Russian," she demanded in Russian.
"Russian is my second language, and is difficult for me," said the 20-something Ukrainian guy in charge of the tour.
"Well Ukrainian is my fourth language!" she shot back in Russian.
"Look," I said in Ukrainian. "We don't like the room, we don't want to be on the tour, we're leaving and that's it."
"What about your rooms that we have we paid for?" asked the director. "What about the breakfast you ate?"
"We made no agreement and paid no deposit," I said. "We came, did not like them and now are leaving. We will pay for breakfast. How much do we owe you?"
Well, they didn't want to say how much we owed. In fact, they wanted to get a hold of someone higher up and get permission from them.
"What is going on?" asked Christopher in English, now fuming.
"They have to get permission," I said.
"Let's just go," he said.
"We have to pay for breakfast," I said.
I stood there, extremely tired, thinking back to that warm room in the Hotel George, a room that had breakfast included in the price, and that was two hours ago, two hours I could have been sleeping instead of on marchrutkas and dealing with this.
Twenty minutes later, we were still at the hostel, the argument going around in circles while the director said he was waiting for someone higher up to call him back.
"Let's just drop money and go," said Christopher.
"Fine with me," I said.
We dropped 20 hrivna each on the counter, easily five times the cost of breakfast, and began walking out.
"You can't go!" said the director.
"Bye," we said, and walked out.
***
Forty-five minutes later we were checked back into the Hotel George, and it was already noon. Now having no time to sleep, we went out into Lviv. There was a small debate as to whether we should still take the Castle Tour. It meant dealing with the people from this morning, but it was the main reason we had come to Lviv. I knew it wasn't getting back until late and I was already tired, but Susannah had really wanted to go. We did go, a monumental mistake that is humorous in hindsight, but we'll get to that.