Travelogue: Budapest & Lviv

The Itch

After a busy day just before Christmas, I sat down and with an imposing piece of work to finish. 

Rather than doing the work at hand, I found myself looking at cheap flights from London, and, of course, the uniquely exorbitant Aurginy flight prices. 

I had a season of work which was pretty intense. I’m not complaining about running on a hamster wheel, my wheel is one I have chosen and designed myself and I love running on it, but it’s important to hop off the wheel and jump out the cage once in a while. 

I like travelling. Though I went off-island this year, to Ireland to see family and to Bristol on a stag do and Sark for family and fun times, I didn’t feel like I got away. Lots of fun and wholesome times but not an adventure, per se. 

So I leave Guernsey with just my guernsey and a hat, which I should have learned is insufficient for winter in eastern Europe after becoming nigh-on hypothermic in the Ala-Too mountains in Kyrgyzstan three winters ago in the same get up, but here we are today. Smart has the plans, stupid has the stories—and the burn holes in his joggers after hugging the fire to make it through the night. 

Loosely, I planned to fly to Budapest then onwards to Armenia, but as happens with Buda, I fell in love with it again, stayed later than planned, then got an overnight bus to Lviv in Ukraine for three days and two nights, staying with a family I contacted via couchsurfing (an app to meet and stay with people with no money exchanged, only hospitality and cultural exchange). 

Budapest I assumed I would blag a hostel or couchsurf on my first night which didn’t happen, but I ended up talking with a legendary Indian dude who offered a space in his flat for the night.

The next two nights I stayed in a delectably scrappy hostel, where a spontaneous conversation erupted between myself, a German Bach-loving guitar player, an Italian influencer and yoga teacher, and a dashing French lad travelling solo for the first time. 

Mid-conversation, I remember thinking: this is what I miss about travelling, and the reason I love hostels; there is novelty, strangeness, spontaneity. Stimulation.

Short of exciting, though, as I late into one evening drink my stein of Czech pilsner and book an overnight bus to Ukraine, my Nepalese and German friends looking at me as if I’m crazy. 

Safety

Had a few concerned messages about safety, which I’ll put to rest quickly. 

I have an English mate James whom I met in Lebanon who has lived in Ukraine for some time and knows the sketch, and assured me it’s safe. We are artistically insulting to one another but I know he has my back so I trusted him.

I’ve been to another warzone in Iraq, to which I arrived past midnight and hitchhiked into the town as the taxis were $20 a shot—rip-off! 

I’ve also been to Lebanon which was—and sadly is—unstable and war-prone.

Likewise Kyrgyzstan, which was having a border clash with Tajikistan when I arrived: busloads of Kyrgyz riding towards the border with everything from AK-47s to slingshots. Literally, a grown-ass man getting a bus to do war with a slingshot in 2021. Wild.

These three places I did not once feel unsafe (apart from as a passenger in their cars, which is a different story). 

There was a time when I was sleeping rough in Kyrgyzstan that I put a knife under my pillow. After a few nights and such amazing experiences with the locals, it felt faintly ridiculous, and the knife returned to its role of cutting up cheap Soviet style sausage and cheese. 

Where have I felt unsafe? London. Manchester. Paris a little. Guernsey late into a Friday or Saturday night.

That all said, I didn’t choose to go to Ukraine for safety and predictability, I chose to go as I have never been and it’s somewhere different, strange, and exciting. 

Historical Broadbrush

Despite being victim to untold historic misery and atrocity, both Hungary and Ukraine have sound, coherent and proud cultures. 

(Or is this cultural coherence because of these hardships?)

For those not aware, here is a big ole broadbrush to illustrate my point:

Hungary has been invaded and attacked by at least the Mongol hordes, the Ottoman Turks, the Austrians, the Russian Empire, the Habsburgs; Nazi Germany, who killed half a million Hungarian Jews; and the Soviet Union, whose army raped and pillaged its way through the country after ‘liberating’ the land in WW2 and brutally repressed an attempted revolution in 1956. 

Ukraine has likewise endured centuries of oppression from its more powerful neighbours including the Russian Empire, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Nazi and Soviet regimes. The famine orchestrated by Stalin to subjugate the Ukrainians killed an estimated 5 million humans, or the current population of Ireland. 

The peoples of these countries have in living memory suffered some of the worst atrocities in humanity’s blood-seeped history. Yet the people here are, in the round, not resentful—save for the Ukrainians vis-a-vis the Russians, which should go without saying. 

Budapest

From my limited experience in Budapest, I can tell that the Hungarians are a tremendously proud people, and they have much in their country to be proud of.

For all the invasions, they have also been the beneficiaries of amazing cultural inputs from the full stretch of Europe: sheer spires and gold onion-shaped domes from the Catholic and Orthodox churches, intricate fractal facades of the Jewish Synagogue and gothic grandeur of the riverfront parliament all vie to conquer its distinctly eastern skyline.

The city is split in two by the Danube, giving it a further eastern feel, the first thing I think floating across the river with the two distinct sides of the city either side of me—Buda and Pest—that this is like Istanbul, similarly conquered by this people and that, but holding that cultural capital in everything from its architecture to its customs to its food to its language.

There is a definite Soviet twang, but one that is forgiven by the influences of its western neighbours.

Many of the people will know a little English and be unafraid to try and speak what they know, even the older generation, even if limited and heavily accented.

This city is youthful, alive and kicking, with the buzz of a Barcelona or a Bristol, not the open-air museum vibe of many western capitals. Old baroque buildings are criss-crossed with graffiti. ‘Ruin bars’ labyrinth there way around grand Soviet-era buildings; one room a wine bar, another with a DJ playing electronica; one room serving beer and palinka, another with an acoustic artist singing her heart out. 

I had this plan to fly to Yerevan in Armenia, but I overstayed my time in Budapest and had recently been regaled by tales of Ukraine by two of my good friends who have spent time there, friends with whom I travelled in Central Asia and the Middle East. 

So, happily, I found myself on an overnight bus drinking bottles of cheap beer, reading my Kindle, cruising towards the Ukrainian border, messaging families in Lviv via Couchsurfing asking for a place to stay—saves me blagging it like I had to in Buda. 

To Ukraine

Ukraine is a vast country, some would say the biggest on our continent—depending on who draws the line—consisting of vast plains and richly fertile lands. The ‘breadbasket of Europe’. 

The name Ukraine actually means borderland, and it has been something of a buffer between east and west, and suffering untold misery because of it, its cities laid claim to and its statehood being abolished by its neighbours both east and west at different times; something we are seeing today, sadly.

At the Hungarian border, we get off the bus into the bitter cold of the early hours.

I pass my passport to the border policeman, who takes it without breaking eye contact with me, then flicks through it page for page. He closes it and flicks through every page once more. 

Looking up, he asks, “Soldier?”

Smiling awkwardly, I reply, “No, errr, tourist.”

Raising his eyebrows, the fellow passes me back my passport. I go into the bleak toilets and pay a bleak lady a bleak 50 forint (10p-ish) for a pee before I go back onto the bus to not-sleep as we cruise into Ukraine proper. 

Shortly afterwards we stop and are searched by two Ukrainian men in military fatigues, first taking each of our passports and leaving the bus, then searching the hold, the toilet, under and above our seats. We are given back our passports, the gates are raised and we are let into the country. 

I finally nod off to sleep as the first fingers of day are pulling back the dawn. I awaken with a jolt as the wail of air raid sirens pierce the morning. I must have made some frantic movement as a couple of the other passengers glanced over at me, but other than that, there was no reaction from anybody at all.

So I sat up straight and watched the sunrise over the city as the sirens wailed.

Lviv

Arriving in Lviv, I get a strong familiar Soviet vibe, which makes me feel homely. I’ve been to 9 ex-USSR countries. It is the same feeling I’ve had in Riga, in Bishkek, in Tbilisi, across the former Soviet Union: simple harsh predictability of concrete and sheet-metal that is so familiar it feels nice. The bus into the central town cost under 10 pence. My guernsey fails valiantly in its efforts to keep out the icy cold. 

This side of the old Berlin Wall, human faces become ‘harder’ and less expressive, in general but especially in public spaces. Smiling to strangers is not a thing that is done. That said, the air is markedly morose, more than usual.

Men in military fatigues walk with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths, trucks and APC’s career roar down the roads. There is a palpable disquiet, despite Lviv being so far from the front. 

Ukraine is officially under martial law—things I noted, no men may leave the country, there is a curfew, random checks and searches, tighter border controls—yet there are still people in the streets, and there are new year celebrations in the pagan style I have seen before in the Baltics. 

After exploring the beautiful city of Lviv for the morning, cold crisp air and wintry sun taking the edge off the -2 chill, I make contact with my host family and make my way to their house in the suburbs of Lviv. 

I could just as easily been in the Soviet suburbs of Riga or Bishkek. Snow dusting small gardens which would have grown fruit and vegetables in the summer, sheet iron garage doors and red-brown gates, houses of indiscriminate character. 

My Hosts

I meet and greet the family I’m staying with.

Babushka lives on the bottom floor, which she and her late husband built. Next floor lives Babushka’s daughter Helena and her husband Oresh, which they built and where their daughter Yarka lives and out of which their older daughter Khrystyna has just moved with her boyfriend. On the third floor lives Uncle Taras. 

Yarka and Khrystyna speak great English, with a clarity and Englishness that is refreshing to hear in a world tainted by Americanised pronunciation. 

Taras, a roofing engineer, has time off work and can look after me with his nieces, whilst Oresh and Helena are still hard at work. 

After some chat and some lunch, we ready to make our way into Lviv to mooch around the city. 

Taras’ eyebrows nearly jump off his forehead when he sees I only have my guernsey to wear. “You will be ill! Aren’t you cold?”

“It was cold in Budapest but it’s a different cold here,” I reply rather uselessly, looking at he and the family dressed up in multiple layers, hats and scarves.

“Come with me,” Taras says with some exasperation. 

We pop upstairs and I try on some of his coats, all too small, then a hoodie with traditional Ukranian style and national colours fits, which he kindly lends me.  

Off into town, we drink some vishnyak, a dangerously delicious cherry liquor heated up with boozy cherries waiting for you at the bottom and mooch about the city centre, Rynok Square and the High Castle, chatting away happily.  

We make our way to the Dominican Church, an achingly beautiful ornate structure which my guides tell me was built by Polish architects in the Italian baroque style. 

In the church, a fractal framing of pillars frame the iconography, overawed by arches, commanding reverence. Ukrainians enter the church crossing themselves, many lighting a candle of remembrance, and chime in throughout during the service. 

An older fellow approaches me and says something in Ukrainian. Without thinking I muscle memory, ‘Ya nyisky’, a Russian phrase which is thankfully the same in Ukranian, which is a very similar language. Taras whips the beanie off my head and says, “He say hat no.”

New Years Eve

We get back to the house and I meet Oresh and Helena, who are very excited to meet me.

Helena set up the Couchsurfing account, but speaks the least English out of the family. Oresh has learned enough to clunk his way through a conversation, Taras has put in immense effort for 2 years to break quality conversational level English, and the girls speak brilliantly. 

Taras tells me that his sister Helena was ‘severe’ with her daughters, making them study English everyday and paying for private tuition. 

Helena is a clear, powerful, quiet spoken matriarch and though she says the least throughout our evening, I make my best efforts to engage her via her daughters’ good English. 

Helena works in a traditional clothes shop, selling Ukrainian clothing known as vyshyvanka, and has sewn her own clothing which her husband Oresh proudly showed me the next morning. 

Helena and her team visited Shanghai on a works trip before wartime, seeing where and how the mass-produced versions of their clothing were made and having something of a cultural exchange. 

“It smelled Soviet,” Helena said of her arrival in China, translated by her daughter Yarka. “Men in uniforms, regimented, searches.” I noted to myself that the same thing was happening in Ukraine at the moment. I have an impulse to share that the United Kingdom is fantastically Soviet and unfree in this and more respects, including jailing people for sharing opinions online, but I am asking plenty of my translator as it is, and tarnishing their rosey view of England seems mean and unnecessary. 

Helena and the family have previously hosted American, Canadian, Spanish and French couchsurfers, but, “We have no visits since Covid and wartime.”

After eating some Ukrainian pirogi and drinking some beer, we go upstairs to Taras’s floor, opening a bottle of whiskey and eating a spread of food, including pickled bits from Babushka and Helena’s homegrown apples. 

“Why come Ukraine?” I’m asked, perhaps for the third time in my trip. 

“I have never been before,” I start, “Two of my friends visited and said good things so I thought, why not!”

“Do you not feel unsafe?” I am asked by Yarka.

“I feel more unsafe in London or Manchester,” I reply with my stock answer, quite genuine and to their shock.

Taras shows me a video of their railway station after a Russian bombing, which he took on his phone from his flat. Black acrid plumes rise in the distance, sirens wailing and whirring. I rethink my position. 

Taras tells me that he wakes up to the sirens often. Rather than running and hiding underneath a doorway or similar, as the guidance suggests, he stays in bed. “If it is my time, it is my time,” he says simply. 

At about 11pm, Yarka says goodnight, and I orchestrate a round of applause for her patience in translating for us. 

Not long before midnight, Helena says goodnight, as she has work in the morning. Oresh joins her shortly afterwards. 

Taras and I finish the bottle of whiskey and pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate the new year 2025. After that we open another bottle of whiskey and continue our spiritously spirited conversation into the early hours.

We toast to United Kingdom.

We toast to Guernsey.

We toast to Ukraine. 

“People want this war to stop,” Taras says. “One year, two year, now three year, people tired, people not want more war. It mess with my mind, every day, death, death, death.”

“My neighbour,” he goes on, tears welling, “My neighbour, he die this week. North Korea soldier kill him.”  

“I wanted fight war,” Taras tells me, “But I think war now about money and USA. Ukrainian no want war. Russian no want war. USA and Zelenskyy want war.”

I’m surprised by the frankness of his opinion, which I’m not sure he could share with his family, certainly not publicly. 

“This war, I think of Soviet Union and Afghanistan,” I say in reply, keeping my English as simple and slur-free as possible. 

“When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, America gives money and weapons, they want it to go on and on and on to make Russia bleed.”

Taras nods in agreement, bringing his chin right down to his chest. “Of course,” he replies. “But now it is our people who die.”

After making some more toasts to each other’s families and countries, some more whiskey, maybe some guitar, we finally call it a night. 

The Morning After

Next morning I awake earlier than I should like, somewhat hazy, and bumble my way into the kitchen for some water where Oresh is wide awake and pleased to see me. 

“Good morning!” Oresh greets me with a big handshake and smile. “Breakfast want?”

“Ooo, not quite yet thank you,” I say, mistakenly using too many words, as he looks at me blankly. 

“No,” I try instead. “Chai, davai.”

“Chai!” He replies, slapping his hands together, and putting the kettle to boil. 

Oresh and Helena have wanted to learn English too, but with two children and busy jobs, they have struggled to find the time to get to the stage of Taras. 

What Oresh lacks in grammar and vocabulary he more than makes up for with effort. 

Oresh tells me about his life.

Oresh trained as an engineer, served in the Soviet Army for two years, and then came back to Ukraine. 

“Ukraine, no job, no money,” Oresh tells me about growing up in Ukraine, sweeping his hands apart. 

“All politician take money”—Oresh gestures with a grabbing motion and puts his hand in his pocket—“but our politician take more, more, more.”

“People salary very low. I want money, I want house, I want children.”

“Make money, I take spirit and tabac, go Poland and sell, make money,” he tells me, laughing a little nervously at admitting it.

“Good!” I reply. “Nobody hurt, you make money, you have house, you have children. Dobre!” 

Oresh smiles and nods proudly. 

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, Oresh tells me, there were jobs, mostly manufacturing. Oresh tells me there was a division of production across the USSR: a tire in Bishkek, a steering wheel in Riga, something else in Moscow, so when the Soviet Union collapsed there was chaos. 

People didn’t know how to do things independently and privately, and the State-run corporations were sold off for a pittance mostly to a small group of now-oligarchs. 

“No good time,” Oresh tells me. “No food. People take hat, people take shoe, people take door!”

Oresh’s in-laws had their metal garage door stole not once, not twice, but three times in the chaos and poverty that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

“Now safe, now money,” he says. “My daughters speak English, good job, good money.”

Yarka and Khrystyna with their English—thanks to Helena—and good education can earn a good wage in remote work, which translates as an exceptional wage in the Ukrainian economy. 

We get ready to spend another evening in Lviv together. I ask Taras if I can borrow his hoody again.

“Of course,” he says. “It’s yours now, it’s present.” I thank him profusely and give him a big hug.

We meet Khrystyna in town, who greets me with a smile and a hug. 

Though I only had the pleasure of one evening of Helena’s company, Khrystyna said their family WhatsApp has been bombarded by her messages the last two days: Does Liam need to rest? Have you made him tea? Your father didn’t give him any butter yesterday morning, make sure he has butter! What time is his flight? 

In Lviv we visit the Organ Hall to listen to a performance of classical and contemporary on this stupendously large organ in a hall acoustically designed to carry its full power. 

We revisit the Dominican church for a service and vertap performance. Epic. Awe-inspiring. I feel rare resonance with the all-too-stifled essence of religion. 

The service was intense. I see a family crying in the church during the service. People light candles. The air is thick with emotion, which surges in my own chest hearing people pray together in one voice. 

After that, there was more vertap. Vertap has all the Slavic paganism I’ve come to know and love: devils, dancing, singing, linen clothing, plaited hair.

There was also a unique almost Asian-sounding wailing song sung by one of the lady performers that shot right through me. I sense lament, a vibe not dissimilar to some of the songs sung in the pubs of my similarly peasant-catholic clan in Ireland. I note to myself that both countries have suffered famines that would justify this tone in their national songs.

Afterwards I say to the family that the performance was wholesome

“What does this word mean?” I’m asked. 

“Wholesome means, like, good—positive! It seemed positive.”

Khrystyna’s boyfriend replied, “We have no choice.”