What can you say about Europe's biggest country (well, if you exclude Russia, that is) if you only spend less than a week? Not so horribly much, obviously.
When you arrive at 21:30 in the middle of Ilychevsk seaport, 20 km away from Odesa, when it's dark and cold and the only available onward transportation is one taxi, then you know that you're all exposed to some serious rip-off on the taxi fare. With no negotiation power, we had to settle at the asking price of 130 UAH (about 14EUR), which was however not such a complete rip-off.
Arriving in Odesa, we found a nice hostel with the helf of a Japanese fellow-traveller. The address is Velika Dranautska 10, apt. 3 (door code 358), for anyone happening to be nearby.
Odesa was quite a nice city, with a good deal of churches and boulevards to explore. It seemed to us, however, that it is mainly a summer city, with nearby beaches and bars. Wintertime walking through the streets proved nice enough, though not particularly enchanting.
The famous "Potemkin-steps", as seen in Eisenstein's well-known classic "Battleship Potemkin", were actually a bit of a disappointment to us. It's just a staircase, really. With an optical illusion and all (from above you only see the landings, whereas from below you see only steps), but altogether not that impressive.
From Odesa, a night train took us to Lviv. Not Kiev, as we had first planned, because Kiev is quite out of the way and Lviv had been recommended to us by both travel guides and fellow travellers.
And indeed. Lviv is most definitely going to be one of the new "hot" Eastern European cities. There's a great deal of historic building to discover (a myriad of churches, castles, houses,...), the cobblestone streets guarantee charming walks, there are a few flea markets worth exploring, there is a range of modern boutiques and shopping opportunities and there is a good range of restaurants and cafés.... All being very cheap to Western-European standards (but several times more expensive than e.g. Central Asia).
For serious shoppers, the shopping experience is probably still a good one as there's more than just the big Western chains: there are a lot of Russian boutiques with goods that don't often reach Western Europe (at least as far as we're informed).
So: Lviv is the place to go to! With no visa needed to enter Ukraine, and with Polish cities such as Krakow and Lublin not at all very far away, Lviv for sure is a tourist destination the rise. Go there before the crowds do!
Our two days in Lviv where well-spent and well-enjoyed, but with Pieksämäki still not anywhere in sight, we had to continue. A day's drive in a bus brought us back into the European Union, in Poland, to Warsaw.
Five days in Ukraine gave us just enough time to decide that we like it, and that we can very well imagine going back there one day...
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