I just returned from Ukraine last night. Specifically, Lviv. A year and a half ago Cynthia and I made a mad dash to L'viv, a midnight run bookended by a trip to Auschwitz on on end and a journey onward to Opole afterwards. At that time we had only been in Poland for a few days, and had very little idea of Poland. As things can only be accurately judged in relation to the things around them, we emerged with interesting memories of L'viv, but our conception of L'viv, what we thought of it, and by extension, Ukraine, was not very clear.
So when the opportunity arrived to make another trip there, it seemed like a grand idea. Our entry to Poland had been marked with a trip to L'viv, which had left a certain impression of what lay to our east. To make another voyage east now, a few months before leaving, would allow me to weigh my previous impressions with newer, hopefully more balanced impressions, having lived in this corner of the world for a longer period. Furthermore, this time I would be accompanied by a couple of friends, and a tour guide would show us some of the more remarkable sights, which my wife and I had certainly missed on our first trip.
Our first trip had left me with the impression that Ukraine was largely comparable to a public housing project. You could see that it had been built with great hopes, and that it still was the scene of many hopes and dreams, where a million small dramas played themselves out with all the tenderness and tragedy of a million King Lear's every day, yet the first and last and foremost impression was one of dilapidation, ruin, poverty, desperation and the persistent yet subtle waft of urine. So what would this trip bring?
The last time we crossed the border it was in the dead of night, with all the fogginess of perception that goes along with it. This time was at mid-day. Going from the Polish side, the differences were evident immediately. Directly upon leaving the border post, the fields were suddenly uneven, unkempt, very muddy, with trash strewn across them. In point of fact, there was solid, uninterrupted stream of rubbish in the ditch on either side for kilometres at a time, in addition to the frequent sprinkling of debris throughout the muddy fields. There was water standing everywhere - in the fields were large puddles, on the side of the road where people waited for busses were puddles and mud and standing water which had to be negotiated, and all across the road were puddles and potholes. It was as though the science of drainage had yet to be discovered, even in towns and villages.
I had never noticed, as the absence of something is not particularly noticeable, how clean the fields in Poland were, nor the fact that they were not uneven, muddy, and filled with water. I found this interesting - I had assumed that Polish fields were naturally as they were, but since JUST over the border this was not true, I have to now think that some sort of engineering has been going on here for some time which moves the water out of the fields. All of which makes perfect sense, now that I take the time to consider it.
I spoke of the roads - the roads in Poland never impressed me by their luxuriousness. By no means have I seen anything equivalent to our 4 lane divided highways. But just across the border these simple 2 lane highways turn into a pot-holed, broken, bumpy country lane that most US counties would be ashamed to call their own. Our bus driver literally drove half over the white line to avoid the holes along the edge, and pulled back into our lane as necessary to allow oncoming traffic past.
We were not even out of the border post when the Polish man in front of me whipped out his camera-phone and began compulsively snapping photos of everything he saw - the horse-drawn carts clip-clopping alongside the highway, the worn-down, depressed looking grandmas shuffling alongside the road laden with bags in either hand, the church smaller than my living room, the chickens roaming in people's front yards. The comments and behavior exhibited by some of the Polish people made me feel as though they were enjoying a little bit of a sense of superiority in what their country had managed to do. By all accounts Poland itself bore many resemblances to what I am describing here when communism fell, though perhaps not going to such extremes in so many areas.
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