the last thing we did before we left chernivtsi was to go to an internet cafe to surf the hospitalityclub site and get some numbers for hosts in lviv. alesea, our communications expert, took the mobile and start dialling. we eventually found someone and agreed to meet in front of the big 'magnus' shopping centre near the opera building. maria, the orange haired hippy girl, came bouncing along to greet us. she led us to her flat she shared with her boyfriend, which happened to be in the middle of a big renovation project. but somehow maria mangaged to make us feel at home.
she showed us around lviv a little, the italian courtyard and palace which the wedding couples and their entourages use for photo-shoots, a nice little tea/coffee house near the market square, a night-trip to the lookout point over lviv past the brightly coloured telecoms masthead, buying vegetables from the babushkas. we tried a busking session in the gardens in front of the opera, but we surprised by the reaction of some of the old people there who came to pass some comments. alesea told me that their words were not explicitly racist, just that they did not like me or my drumming! just ignore them i told her, don't even get into a discussion with them. in the end, we just gave up, it wasn't worth the effort.
a storm passed in the night and it was drizzling the next day day too on and off, and it was quite late in the day when we decided to head on south for the rainbow gathering. we took a marshutka to the end station, just before the lviv ring road, and then it starts to piss down again. we take shelter in the petrol station and see a beautiful rainbow. with the end of the downpour, we hitch again and get a lift some 20 or 30 kms down the road, getting let off at a bus stop on the fast dual carriageway out of lviv, probably the best surfaced road i've seen here in ukraine. it seems like we will be marooned here but once again, a marshutka driver saves our lives. alesea with the sweet talk, and we get a lift to the turn-off for some place i forget the name of now. and not long before a lift to striy. we have missed the electricki connection to mukachevo, but we decide to get a marshutka to the outskirts of striy and start hitching from there. there is a petrol station there and a truck has pulled in. time to send alesea to ask for a lift again. she beckons me over... we've got the lift. shame it was dark now so we missed all the glorious landscape over the mountains to mukachevo turn-off. it's pretty late at night now, and for an hour we look around for a decent place to sleep.
and find the best compromise between safety and comfort being next to some public toilets. everywhere else was too wet or too rough or too much in the open. in the morning we rose before the sun, having scared some woman out of her wits after she had stumbled upon us on her way to the toilets! fortunately, we didn't wait long before getting a lift into uzhgorod, where we made our way to the centre of town, discovering the benches by the bridge over the river and a huge tv screen blaring out pop music and advertisements. we laid out our wet gear over the benches and tried to rest a little in the morning sun. waiting for the day to begin. it was way too early to be up!
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