January 07, 2016

Annual NYE Hitching Trip (2015/16): Just Lviv it!

I originally planned to write a short comment on this year's NYE hitching trip for my blog, but had other stuff in mind (like applying for jobs and editing the Indian travel video) until a friend who works for the Lublin-based magazine Dziennik Wschodni (www.dziennikwschodni.pl) asked me to contribute an article particularly about our experience in the Ukraine. So here we go. Hitchhiking! Lviv! New Year's Eve!

My good friend cK and I are having this tradition to leave our home town Berlin behind for good between (non-Orthodox) Christmas and some days after New Year. Starting in 2009 when I was having my Erasmus semester in Northern Finland my then-girlfriend and I decided to spend NYE in Swedish Stockholm with friends. Among those people was cK who decided to launch a surprise attack and hitchhiked all the way up North to join us (which took him longer than anticipated, hence he arrived about an hour after midnight, thereby saving me from grave relationship troubles - what a man!). The following New Year's Eves we spent hitching together and formed quite a formidable, very successful team: 2010 in København, 2011 in Oslo, 2012 in Toulouse, 2013 in Praha, 2014 in Beograd and, well, this time in Lviv, Ukraine. We would usually see one place before and after our respective target city and spend our nights couchsurfing either with people who stayed with us some time before (as was the case in Danish Aarhus in 2010), at friends' family homes (as 2012 in Orléans) or with complete strangers (who might turn into friends afterwards). Well, one time (but really only once) we had serious bad luck and were forced to spend a cold winter's night at a petrol station (however, that was in relatively mild Central France and didn't quite kill us - we came prepared).
Other interesting side stories include getting busted for alleged smuggle of drugs which landed me in prison for some hours in Swedish Gothenburg in 2010 (all due to a half-smoked spliff of weed! Wicked, uncivilized Sweden), hitching a Serbian tourist bus at the boarder from Hungary to Nový Sad in 2014 (and the German-Swedish ferry in 2011), getting invited to spend the night for free in a spare motel room by a petrol station lady in Southern Sweden in 2010 - all of whom I can't elaborate at this point.

I will not get into hitchhiking/roadtrip details here, but we usually don't face much trouble making our way to the target city and getting into Ukrainian Lviv didn't prove to be different. Somewhere around Kraków we asked the driver of a car with a German number plate for a ride further down the highway towards Ukraine. He turned out to be Ukrainian (living in Lviv, in fact) and agreed to take us all the way. Some hours later we found ourselves walking over the boarder on foot, entering a country neither my friend nor I have never set foot on (even though we considered it for a long time). I couldn't help it, but it massively reminded me of an episode of the "The IT Crowd" (Series 2, Episode 3: https://youtu.be/qvjS_c1U6zs): Old women begging for money, hovering around looking either helpless, confused or simply freezing cold in a smoggy twilight environment. We quickly passed by, showing our passports to a nasty-mooded boarder control dude and walked on until a car with a Berlin (!) number plate showed up - our driver's colleagues, waiting to pick him up. Being inside he called our couchhost and let her know we'd be on our way ("Natasha's waiting"). Just brilliant. Shortly after entering Lviv we switched cars again; this time it's been his wife and two kids waiting and we squeezed ourselves in. Calling Natasha again. His wife doing the driving. The kids looking confused. And then we made it (not having a clue where exactly we ended up, but it kind of looked like the picture I remembered from Google Maps, so everything seemed in order. One more call from our friend's side and Natasha showed up to her apartment, filled with other travelers.

We were generally met with astonishment (even by Ukrainians themselves) when telling them we'd pick Lviv as an NYE hitching destination. How come, though, we wondered - surely Lviv ("Lemberg" in German since the city was once part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire; Lwów in Polish since - you guessed it - it was also Polish once) had a splendid enough reputation as "Ukraine's least Soviet city, built like a rich layer-cake of neoclassical architecture upon rococo, baroque, Renaissance and Gothic styles with a deep-rooted Central European coffee-house culture" (Lonely Planet being quoted here). It does, in fact, feel like a rather brilliant mixture of Prague, Vienna and Budapest, just without the river scenery (Lviv's Poltva floats underground), maybe just a tiny bit smaller (with 730,000 about half the population of Praha). The Soviet-style suburbs are actually half the fun; they're connected by dead-cheap little yellow buses called marshrutkas (not to be confused with matryoshka dolls, even though those could also be yellow and dead-cheap) with the centre. Lviv also has quite an extensive network of trams which makes it appear even more European in some way; however, we felt quite comfortable walking hence and forth for most of the time, despite the cold.
Coming to "dead-cheap". One of our fellow couchsurfers came up with saying something like "your tooth brush could buy a car here in Ukraine, don't lose it" and it's true: both salaries and everything else are way under EU average (indicating that it will be quite a long way until the Ukraine would be economically able to join the Union, apart from those massive political obstacles. However, I have no doubt that a reformed and renewed Ukraine will one day be part of a greater European Union - there simply are no realistic other options in today's world). The Ukrainian currency is the hryvnia and about 25 of them would buy 1 Euro. For 6 Euro both my friend and I ended up with incredibly tasty bakery stuff (filled with cherries and chocolate), good beer, yogurt drinks, garlic baguettes, fruits, chocolate bars and other sweets. Original sparkling wine from Crimea comes for just more than 3 Euro. Memories to India sprang back to mind; a little Cockaigne of the not-so-far East (Berlin being a mere 930 km away).

Having been to some dodgy parts of Eastern Bulgaria I must confess I wasn't overly confident about the general safety situation. Obviously, Lviv is as far away from the war in the Donbass region as can get, so that didn't really bother me. But what about the people in general? I still remembered being (verbally) attacked by some eerie-looking youngsters in Varna (at the Black Sea coast) in 2010. Well, not so in Lviv - I have nothing more to say than that we felt at least as safe as in any given big city in the EU, if not safer. Not a single time have we been bothered by anyone; on the contrary. Even when tottering home late at night/early in the morning of January 1 and encountering drunk Ukrainians they would neither yell nor get into our way (but simply deal with each other, trying to stay put and not crumble. Right, many people really didn't speak much English, but neither do Southern Europeans in general (and anyone above 30 in the new member states). Still, people were surprisingly helpful and some just outstandingly friendly.

What about the city itself? As mentioned before, it certainly doesn't need to be shy when it comes to comparing itself to other Central European gems. It's quite a jewel herself, featuring an Unesco World Heritage Old Town which seems completely intact (not self-evidently in post-WWII Europe), a hill (High Castle Hill) from where you can catch quite a wonderful view over the city (in summer likely as pretty as during snowy winter times), wicked backstreet yards filled with dozens of dolls and stuffed animals, magnificent cathedrals and smaller churches plus a place Lonely Planet claimed to be a place we shouldn't "even think of missing out". And we did. Oh my. I'm talking the Lychakivske Cemetary here (just East of the Old Town). You should probably see it; the "overgrown grounds and Gothic aura" certainly sound tempting.

Natasha, our couchhost didn't spend NYE in Lviv (but flew to Istanbul instead), leaving her flat to us and three other couchsurfing parties (coming from Poland, Slovenia and Kiev, respectively) which certainly came handy, but also meant that we needed to organize our own party for the evening of the 31st - a trip novelty (so far we always spent the year's last night with or among the people we stayed at). However, we not only succeeded in finding an enchanting private party, but also got to know other surfers in town. One of them - especially charming - led us to a fancy underground tavern that you were only aloud to enter by cheerfully yelling "Слава Україні!" ("Glory to Ukraine!") to an old soldier boy who would do away some booze with you before letting you head downstairs to other gleeful packs of tourists and locals alike.
On the evening of January 1st, clearly not having had enough sleep (due to the ungodly noisy Slovenian boys in the flat) we somehow got sucked into some rather business-like Couchsurfing meeting in the basement of a fancy, rather hipsterish café with prices that would almost meet Central European standards. Strangely, every girl in the round was Ukrainian and every guy was not (which made us coming up with equally strange associations); the reason behind it all was a Turkish dude who apparently tried to convince his newly-married wife of the awesomeness of Couchsurfing which was awkward in itself, but - granted - also fun. By the time he made us tell our favorite CS stories I was agitated enough to drop just some stories that popped up, but I was equally happy to leave and grab a pizza and a traditional Ukrainian Red Borscht soup in some not-so-fancy downtown foodstall.

Hitching back into the EU side of the heavily guarded boarder grounds proved easier than we would have dared to imagine: almost no queue at all (and still some 60 minutes waiting time), although the boarder control woman had a tough time believing that I actually was the guy pictured on my passport (damn beard!), let alone the delightful drivers on the way. We made it to Eastern Polish Lublin quite some hours before the estimated arrival time, again being lucky with to-the-door transport: We happened to get hold of a car which already had two passengers (who connected via the BlaBla Car ride share site) and one of the girls' father actually ended up driving us there. The magic of hitchhiking knows no boarder.

After two marvelous days and nights sightseeing (walking around in what felt like a tremendous outdoor fridge and taking pictures), cooking, having political discussions, watching Berlin-based movies and playing board games in a rather fetching Old Town café we were finally on our way home back to Berlin. It took us about a 100 minutes to actually get a lift out of town - which is usually the toughest part of a trip - but once being on the motorway network everything just seems to develop a momentum of its own. We ended up in three guys' cars; every trip was longer than the previous and featured more intense and memorable conversations. Anton, a 45-year-old Polish social pedagogue who lives in Berlin for a good 20 years, will remain in my mind for much longer than merely until the next trip. He was just returning from a visit to his fatally ill mother, but had such a positive and inspiring charisma that I will likely not forget too soon. Enter 2016.

View of the Old Town from the ratusha, the Old Town Hall.


I [snowflake] Lviv!


Old tram on Old Town Square.


View from High Castle Hill.


Meeting a wonderful couchsurfer at a "secret" tourist bunker bar underground.


Heading home late on New Year's Day.


Lublin Old Town.


Playing board games with other couchsurfers, Lublin Old Town café.