Lviv on NYE

On New Year’s Eve, we had a very eventful day in Lviv.
We had a tour guide walk us through the city and we had a chance to learn the significance of many of the monuments, churches and historical sites of the city.

There's one thing we quickly picked up on- Lviv people are the Texans of Ukraine. They are VERY proud and nationalistic. As we talked to people, we kept hearing certain refrains:

"REAL Ukrainians are from Lviv."
"We speak only Ukrainian- not Russian like in Odessa or Kiev."
"Everything east of Lviv are a bunch of Russians." etc.

These are some proud folks!

Anyway- back to the tour.
As I mentioned, there are certainly some amazing churches in Lviv. We were told by Olya, that there are Eastern Orthodox, Greek Catholics, Roman Catholic and Armenian Churches. There were frescoes and murals, and sculptures galore! Olya provided information with such fine detail, that Arun later confessed to me that there were a few times his mind wandered....hee...

We then walked within the Old City. There were houses where people wrote gossip on the walls... there was a building where a restaurant exists in such secrecy that to this day- you have to knock on the door to be allowed in to dine... there were buildings that housed the first department store in Lviv...

Olya showed us the monumnet dedicated to the Virgin Mary. There is a cut-out halo behind her head so that no matter the weather in Lviv, she will always be lit. The sculptures on the base of the monument depict the struggles of the Ukrainian people against the Russians and the sacrifices of the people to gain Independence.

We went to the Pharmacy Museum, which still functions as an Apteka (pharmacy) even today! And we ended with a visit to the Ethnographic/Folk Museum.

After our tour, we headed back to the hotel. Lest, I do too much advertising for this hotel, let me provide a bit of a caveat. There is no doubt that it's a great hotel...but the staff? They were a different story. Don't get me wrong- they were very smooth, very polished, very professional. They were also lazy and would rather lie than work on customer-service. When we asked if there were any shows at the opera house, tha manager assured us that there wasn't anything playing since it was New Year's Eve. Arun went to the opera house anyway (it was 50 m away from the hotel) and sure enough- there was an opera playing! It's a good thing Arun didn't trust him!

We stood in line for tickets and unfortunately my Russian did not get us anywhere. However, for whatever reason, Lviv natives speak more english than we've found in Odessa, so with the help of some people in line- we purchased 25 gryvna tickets for the 6 o'clock show. We tried to figure out what the show was, but for $3 tickets, we decided it really didn't matter.

Our dinner program at the hotel started at 10pm, so we thought this would be a great way to spend the evening. Sure enough, it was a gorgeous interior and we had a ton of fun taking pictures. When we got to our seats, we were thrilled because for the first 30 minutes, the orchestra played some beautiful Schubert. Then... the opera started. And it turned out it was a Ukrainian operetta. So about 30 minutes in, we decided to head out.

Luckily, there was plenty of action around the main square, so we had fun walking around.

Then we had an evening of music and song and managed to meet some Ukrainian-Americans. Within the hour, they had moved to our table, and we were having a BLAST!

The most interesting part of the night, however, was when the hotel staff interrupted our singer to put on the annual Presidential Address. Yes- the president makes a speech just prior to midnight, which seems almost anti-climactic. I mean, it's nothing like a political speech to blow the energy out of a room! But I did have to take a picture of the screen- so here he is- Yashenko doing his thing in Kiev. [And yes- he spoke in Ukrainian.] We asked our new friends: Olek and Oksana what he said, and they retorted that there wasn't enough 'substantial content' worth translating. Hee.

He stopped speaking about 2 minutes prior to midnight. We watched the countdown and then lit some fireworks at our table (this would NEVER pass firecodes in the US!!) and continued partying. At about 1pm, our friends decided it would be fun to take some champagne out to the middle of the square and continue celebrating there.

So off we went- to the middle of the square and watched the ridiculous partying. Fireworks EVERYwhere... bottles of champagne.... you name it. By this time- it was already 3 in the morning and we were planning on getting an early morning start to head to the Carpathians [by the way- this did NOT happen.] Anyway, we headed in, but stopped at our friends' suite first. They were VERY helpful (unlike our hotel staff) and so they called and told us where to get the bus service to Bukovel (turns out- you have to transfer at Ivano-Frankovsk) but this was definitely a better option than our hotel manager who suggested we hire a taxi to take us the 250 or so km at a cost of "only $250 or so."

Suffice to say- we had a FANTASTIC New Year's and I'll end on our favorite pictures from Lviv. The first is Arun's favorite ("The Police are talking to Santa!! Take a picture !! Santa was NAUGHTY!") and mine (the B&W)