The Last Few Days
On Thursday night I finally slept through an entire night and woke up Friday morning to snow falling from the sky. This was, as most Californians think, neat to see. Then I remembered Ivan asking the night before if I wanted a ride to work on Friday. I told him no and that I’d just walk. 1.5mi in the snow. But this walk was nothing compared to the walking I’d do on Saturday.
Friday panned out as a typical day at the office. At lunch I mistakenly chose an entree of liver from the food that is catered daily to the office. Liver. Liver seems quite popular here with many people enjoying its unique flavor. I’m not a fan of liver. I felt bad not finishing my food.
Friday evening a few of the guys took me out to a local restaurant where they have live music. The place was called култ and for the rest of you non-cyrillic reading americans that’s pronounced like the english word “cult.” They had live music. It was basically a soloing violinist with a guitar, keyboard and someone else playing something I can’t remember. The violin player was quite good and even had people up dancing a few times. The first couple to attempt to dance had, as Roman put it, “started drinking long before us.” 
Saturday I got up at the crack of dawn, 8:30 AM. Yuriy and Pavlo were at my place at 9:00 to get over to the start of a photo competition we were doing that day. It was like 19 degrees when we walked out the door and I don’t think it got any warmer all day. It was ka-ka-ka-cold. We met at the top of some park in L’viv and got our instructions for the rest of the day. There were 5 titles for pictures and we were to take pictures that met each of those 5 titles. I can’t remember them all but there was something like a Yin-Yang, “Something Soft”, “There was snow”, “Mobile Love”, “The World has no Love”. In addition to that there was a clue for where to meet someone at 1:00. When we met that guy he gave us a 6th picture to take: “Nude.”
So we left the meeting area to start the competition. Yuriy knew I was freezing so we went straight to a shop to have some tea and talk about what we were going to take pictures of. We headed down to the city center (downtown) and while standing around I snapped this shot of a bus going by. The first few times I saw these buses I couldn’t help but laugh. How many people did they smash into that thing?
Notice where they’ve wiped off the condensation on the inside so that they can actually see out. Not doing this would surely result in your riding the bus all day. There are no scheduled stops for the buses. They stop either when you ask the driver to stop or when someone wanting to get on flags him down. It costs 1 Hryvna to ride the bus, about $0.20.
Then we made it to a large, old church. The inside was absolutely beautiful, but far too dark to take any decent pictures. On the outside of the church were birds… fat birds, like these ones:
It didn’t take long to see why they’re so fat, this not-so-skinny woman came out and fed them:
The other thing to notice from this picture is the blackened wall in the background. That’s the beautiful church I was telling you about. In typical Ukrainian fashion the outside of the building is filthy and the inside is simply magnificent.
Here’s a graffiti-decorated wall.
And finally, here’s another picture of the street I live on. I can actually, sort of, pronounce the street name now. I stand a chance at getting home via taxi
1 comment February 18th, 2007