First Day In Lviv

First full day in Ukraine
I slept really well, probably due to having the whole dorm to myself. Probably slept a bit too well in fact as I forgot to change the time on my phone ahead one hour so the 10am alarm clock was actually 11am and I lost an hour.
My main priority was to just explore the city on foot and just experience the charm of the city. The Polish peole from the day before had hinted as possibly meeting up today but I had decided I wanted a day alone to explore. I hadn’t heard from them prior to leaving the hostel. Gabor did eventually text me but I chose not to reply immediately, I wanted to be alone and my time was limited and precious. I decided on two excursions as well which were recommended by my Lonely Planet Guide. It said “don’t even think of leaving Lviv without visiting the Lychakiv Cemetery, described as the Pere Lachaisse of Eastern Europe. Never having visiting the more famous Paris Cemetery I had no idea of comparison but with a write up like that I had to give it a go. I really should stop giving Lonely Planet so much credibility. I had never heard of anyone buried there, not even Ivan Franco which LP picked out as a highlight and very important figure. A lot of the gravestones were very impressive but very quickly I became bored as one grave merged into another so after about half an hour I turned around and left, quietly regretting having devoted so much time to visiting the place.
It was now past lunchtime and having passed on the pathetic hostel breakfast I was starving so I stopped in the Old Town for lunch at the Korzo ‘Irish’ pub. Half decent food, ridiculously slow service and a clichéd Irish music CD seemingly on repeat greeted me for the next hour.
I had decided to visit the Robert Dom’s Beer House next, a brewery of Lviv’s oldest beer Lvivske. There is a museum attached with tasting included in the £1.20 admission. I got ridiculously lost and disoriented trying to decipher the Cyrillic road signs against my map and had almost given up when I found it. The museum was interesting but the tour was only in Russian and Ukrainian so I just wandered around the exhibits and proceeded onto the tasting. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the ‘tasting’ was two full pints of different types of beer rather than the shot glass size tasters I was expecting.
Pretty tired by this point I returned to the Kosmonaut to relax prior to dinner. I got chatting to an American guy called Scott and a Dutch woman who seemed to be together. They invited me to join them for a drink which I did. It soon became apparent that they weren’t a couple but the American guy was desperately trying to impress her, it would’ve been funny if his attempts to impress her weren’t so vomit inducing. Still they were interesting company. He had lived in Ukraine for two years as a church Missionary and was fluent in Ukrainian and was very useful in communicating with the bar staff when necessary. I hadn’t learnt my lesson in not treating Lonely Planet as Gospel and had decided to go the highly recommended Amadeus restaurant and they decided to join me. It was tough to find but the food was well worth the effort.
My first impressions of Lviv was that it was a very pretty city but not as stunningly beautiful as I had imagined. The architecture reminded me very much of Gdansk and Poland in general, which is a reminder of the fact that Lviv has only been part of Ukraine since 1945. I had a great day exploring the old town and getting a feel of the city and am looking forward to one more full day tomorrow.