Lvov is a Battlefield

Well, well, well.  Look who came to greet me in Lviv: my good buddy Steve-o.  Stephen Harper was, for some reason, in Lviv at the same time as me, and I can guarantee he likely did not sleep clutching his belongings with his passport and wallet tucked into his boxers on a massive Soviet train that bumped and grinded through the Carpathians to arrive at 5:45 AM and deposit him in a rainy and cold Lviv with no means of finding his way to the centre or any piping hot vareniki.  So, I'm sorry, Stephen, but you didn't actually "do" Ukraine.

Actually, two things to note from this: my encounter with Steve and his smarmy political staffers was less than pleasant.  They were so rude and treated the whole affair as though a visit from Canada was actually important.  Guys, we're Canada.  Chill the eff out.  Watching him put a wreath on a Holodomor monument is not "top secret official business" so being rude to curious Canadian expat onlookers who want to feel a connection to the motherland was totally unnecessary.  After one whole year of being an expat I was suddenly and mortifyingly embarrassed to be Canadian.  If we were a Scandinavian country, they probably would have invited me for a drink and asked if I had a place to stay.  Canada needs to stop taking itself so seriously.  We're an adorable middle power that influences through multilateral consensus-building.  What could be more adorable than that?  I'm surprised none of these political staffers learned that in their 4-7 years of doing a Poli-Sci degree.  The other thing to note is that I did get piping hot fresh vareniki, in small cantina by the train station where some neanderthal punk stared me down when I walked in and I had to sit next to a sleeping pregnant woman who sat up, started smoking, and then went to the kitchen to heat up my food.  So take that, Stephen Harper.  You jelly?

Anyway, I rolled into the Cosmonaut Hostel, which was in a beautiful old apartment block in the centre, and I was able to shower and change my socks and put down my heavy bag to prepare myself for a day of walking around Lviv in the rain and watching a bus try to stop but instead slipping on the cobblestones and slam into the side of a tram and knock it off its rails and cause glass to shatter and woman to have a bleeding face.  That was all pretty real.