If you don’t count the day trip I took a week ago, I’ve spent two whole weeks in Lviv, and it’s honestly been a relief. I’ve been using a lot of the time to plan where I’m going to be from mid-May to mid-June,¹ and while I’m excited about the plans I’ve got it does involve hopping from one place to another every couple days. I keep promising myself to slow down and relax, and I keep breaking those promises.

I think I’m starting to figure out why, and it’s probably chemical. My ADD-which-looks-a-lot-like-depression² means I mostly exist in two states: doing everything³ or doing nothing. Doing everything looks like hitting towns for a couple days and moving on. Doing nothing looks like lying in bed or shuffling around an apartment all day. The former certainly seems more healthy. But honestly, I need time to recover. Which means, I need both.

But I might be reaching the point where two weeks is too long. I’m getting used to being on the move; I’m finding I like getting to the airport four hours before my flight and relaxing in the lounge. I can relax on a train or a bus. I’m booking places closer to where I want to explore, so I lose less time traveling around. The net effect of all this is to reduce the amount of stress I tend to have. And since my ADD-addled mind requires a certain level of stress to function, maybe it’s natural I’d start traveling on a faster schedule.

All this interacts with the places I’m staying, of course. Places like New York or London or Berlin are big cities with a lot going on — I could stay weeks or months⁴ without really running out of things to do. Smaller places like Split or Zitácuaro or İzmir you run out of options sooner. I love spending time there and seeing what life is like in smaller communities. But I want to see everything. So I’m almost always itching to move on.

Lviv’s been a good place. I’ve been staying in the Old Town, which is scenic and gorgeous, a great place to wander through and get lost in. Compared to other places I’ve been, there’s not a whole lot of major sites to see in Lviv, and most of those are centered around the Market Square. I’ve been through a number of the churches,⁵ climbed to the top of the town hall, and wandered up to the former site of the cleverly named High Castle. So that took a couple of days.

The real draw, though, is the nightlife — walking through the market square just after the sun sets, with the street vendors flinging those mechanical birds or LED lights around, and the streets absolutely teeming with tourists and locals heading to and from restaurants or bars.

It’s almost nice enough for me to forgive the food. Much like Kyiv, Lviv is going through a kitsch restaurant craze. Unlike Kyiv, Lviv turns out to be very bad for vegetarians.⁶ Many restaurants don’t have anything vegetarian at all on the menu. Lots of restaurants don’t have menus posted online at all. Many that do just post pictures of the menu and don’t provide English translations. A surprising number don’t bother with a website at all.

There’s a fun beer hall at the corner of the square⁷ that brews their own beers and features a live brass band every night playing AC/DC, Metallica, Adele, Maroon 5, and the like. It’s great. I’ve been once, because they only have fried cheese, a couple salads, and dessert on the menu, and I’m not going to hang out alone for a couple hours to get a decent seat and hear the band if I can’t get a decent meal during it.

It’s also been fairly rainy, so I’ve been keeping rather domestic and sticking close to home. I did a little shopping for souvenirs,⁸ finally managed to see a dermatologist,⁹ spent a number of evenings with takeout pizza or just hanging out at the cocktail lounge across the street. Since I’ve got a rather busy month coming up, hopping to a new place every couple of nights, maybe that’s all for the best.

I needed to be in the Netherlands for a larp, so I caught a flight out from Lviv this morning. I’m currently crashed in a hotel in Tilburg. Getting here was a mess, catching a bus to the train to another bus to another train. Discount flights are like that; I could have flown someplace more convenient, but this was not only a cheap flight (often a trap, after you add the time and cost of catching all the connections to get to the airport in the first place) but it was also the only direct flight from Lviv to the area.

I should probably head out to find food shortly, but I may just grab something quick in the hotel restaurant. I’m meeting friends tomorrow and then hopping into the larp Friday night. And I managed to grab a ticket from the waitlist for a larp next weekend,¹⁰ so I’m going from three weeks more-or-less alone to three weeks of intense social interaction. It’s not ideal, this whole “feast or famine” approach to seeing friends, but it’s what I’m working with. It’s a work in progress. I guess so am I.

Next: Amsterdam (AMS) to London (LUT)
Prev: Warsaw (WMI) to Lviv (LWO)

Footnotes

¹ Scotland, mostly, it turns out

² And which I’m not currently medicated for, which has plusses and minuses

³ Or “all the things,” to use the vernacular

⁴ Or, apparently, years

⁵ Lviv has hundreds of churches, and a lot of them are hundreds of years old.

⁶ Not that Kyiv is great, but it’s certainly better.

⁷ Pravda Beer Theater

⁸ Not for myself

⁹ It turns out, among other things, I had something called “Bowen’s Disease” which is actually straight up skin cancer. It’s the kind you want to get, if you’re going to — very minor, completely treatable by a cheap outpatient procedure, unlikely to metastasize — but just hearing that come out of a doctor’s mouth is still a little scary. The offending patch has been excised, so it’s now mostly just tromping around Europe for the next month with a slowly healing scab in the middle of my back.

Also, can I just say how nice it is to be able to buy antibiotics over-the-counter? I understand that that may not be a great idea from a societal standard, but now that I know what the standard course of treatment is for my (chronic, repeated) Rosacea the fact that I can walk into a pharmacy and just buy what I need without the stupid specialist’s visit and subsequent copay is fantastic.

¹⁰ All For One, a game based on The Three Musketeers. Or, more precisely, all those swashbuckling ’70s films based on The Three Musketeers.