Don't worry, I hate reading too
First Nights in Lviv
I was already in Poland, and Ukraine felt like the natural next move. I’d been traveling for nine months and wanted to see what it was actually like on the ground right now, so I did what any extremely modern idiot would do: I asked ChatGPT if visiting Ukraine was possible.
I also knew a friend there, a DJ who’d been playing shows in Kyiv, so I reached out to ask if it was safe and whether we might cross paths. She said yes.
So I went.
My very first night set the tone.
Air raid sirens went off at 2 a.m., and all the foreigners slowly worked their way down to the bunker, if we’re being generous enough to call it that. I went down to the hostel reception and asked the guy at the desk if he was coming.
In a thick Ukrainian accent, he looked at me and said:
“If you scared, you go to bunker. If you not scared, you go to sleep. I’m staying here working.”
By the third air raid, I put in my earplugs, climbed back into my top-floor bunk, stared up through the skylights above me, and meditated myself to sleep.
That’s Lviv in a sentence.
The locals are numb to it. If anything, they get annoyed when foreigners wake them up climbing out of bunks at 2 a.m.
The next morning, everyone wakes up. There’s a daily moment of silence in the streets for those who lost their lives, and it ends with — I kid you not — “May the force be with you.”
Then life resumes.
People line up for coffee. They dress sharply. Service members mix into the crowd. Kids run around laughing and jumping through fountains on a hot day. Lviv feels fashionable even in wartime. It’s a city that feels alive, despite everything.
I was in Western Ukraine, relatively far from the frontlines. It’s not safe, but safer.
A week before I arrived, a drone flew right over my hostel. Another strike had recently hit a factory nearby. I had plans to go to Kyiv after Lviv to meet my friend there, but then a missile hit frighteningly close to her neighborhood and she told me not to come. She was leaving anyway, heading south to a smaller town.
So I stayed in Lviv.
A British guy I’d met at my hostel ended up going to Kyiv instead, and he’s basically been there ever since. Raves about it and now has an apartment with a Ukrainian girlfriend. Maybe that was a missed opportunity. Or maybe I dodged a bullet. No pun intended. Part of me still regrets not going.
I went in with zero agenda. No plan. No checklist. Just a spectator with an open mind, curious what it actually felt like on the ground.
Some of the most interesting conversations came from simply asking people what they were seeing. When I asked if they still got many foreigners through, the answer surprised me: Brazil, Spain, Portugal, the U.S. But almost all of them were there to volunteer for the war effort.
I was just there to see the place.
That felt strange for a moment, like I should have had a better reason. But every time I brought it up, people assured me it was fine. More than fine.
Multiple people went out of their way to thank me for coming.
There were Americans there too. Some had been living in Ukraine since before the war teaching English. One had just moved there to do the same. I heard stories from a soldier back from the frontline, a guy who runs a bar, and people just living their lives inside something enormous.
Over five days in one city, I made real friends, heard things I’m still thinking about, and left wishing I’d had more time.
Nights Out in Lviv
After a few days, the rhythm of the city starts to reveal itself.
Friday nights are surreal. Everything officially shuts down for curfew from midnight to 5 a.m., but somehow everyone knows about three or four speakeasies scattered around town. Secret doors. Literal red buttons. Hidden bars. Music going late.
That first Friday, there were drone alarms all night.
Inside the speakeasy, nobody paid attention.
People just carried on.
Saturday night was a different scene entirely. I was invited to an EDM show just outside the city. People dressed to the nines and much more fancier. The martial law out here in the west isn’t super strict. If you’re American, they really don’t bother you if you’re headed home. Ukrainians seem to get a slap on the wrist, depending the circumstances. Mostly, people quietly push past the rules without blatantly ignoring them.
Something else you notice pretty quickly is the gender imbalance.
There are beautiful Ukrainian women everywhere. Stylish, kind, easy to talk to, dressed nicely, moving through the bars and clubs like it’s any other European weekend. Total foxes, honestly.
But there are noticeably fewer men around, and the men who are there often carry a different kind of weight.
On my train into Lviv from Poland, a female Ukrainian soldier came through checking passports. She was also handing out pamphlets to Ukrainian nationals about joining the military. Men and women were being spoken to, and people had to take photos holding the brochures to confirm they received them.
Then you hear the stories from locals.
Fathers in their sixties being pulled off the street and sent toward the front. Sons, brothers, friends disappearing into a war that doesn’t care if you had other plans.
So when you see Ukrainian women who now live abroad come back to Lviv for a few days, to visit family, see friends, dress up, go out, post stories, and act like life is still life, it creates this strange tension.
They’re not necessarily coming back to party. A lot of them are coming home.
But home is now a place where some people can visit for the weekend and others can’t leave.
A few Ukrainian men I talked to, soldiers and non-soldiers, were clearly frustrated by that. Especially with the more obvious influencer types using the city as a backdrop, posing through a reality that other people are bleeding inside of.
And I understood why that bothered them.
But I also couldn’t fully judge it.
Because what would I do if it were my country? Would I stay? Would I leave? Would I come back for a weekend and pretend things were normal just to feel human again? Would I resent the people who could escape? Would I become one of them?
And honestly, wasn’t I doing a version of it too?
I came to see what Ukraine felt like during the war. I took photos. I went out. I wrote notes. I turned observations into a story. Different context, sure, but still part of the same uncomfortable truth: when something historic is happening, everyone finds a way to survive it, process it, or frame it.
Some people do that with a rifle.
Some with a passport.
Some with a camera.
Some with a cocktail in a speakeasy while the sirens go off outside.
That’s what made Lviv so hard to categorize. Nothing was clean (well the city itself is incredibly clean). Every observation had another layer underneath it.
And then there’s the influencers.
Everywhere you go, bars, clubs, in front of random buildings, there are couples where the guy has clearly become a full-time unpaid photographer for his girlfriend. At this electronic music show I was invited to, I watched one guy photograph the same woman in the exact same spot for forty-five minutes because she didn’t like any of the photos.
In Lviv.
During a war.
I’m nine months into traveling the world because I retired from being someone’s instagram boyfriend, and somehow I found myself watching the same job description play out in a warzone.
Sirens, speakeasies, and boyfriend photography.
Some things are apparently universal.
Conversations With Soldiers
The other side of it shows up in conversations.
I talked to an injured Ukrainian soldier and asked what he thought about a possible peace deal. He was in Lviv recovering from wounds. I quite honestly don’t know how he didn’t have PTSD by the stories he was telling me that I’ll keep private.
His answer was blunt: he just wanted people to stop dying.
He told me Ukraine would probably have to give up some territory for peace to happen, but not too much. Not the heartland. Not Kyiv. Nothing that erases who they are. Just enough to stop the bloodshed.
When I asked about Zelensky, he didn’t hesitate.
“This man is defending our country. He hasn’t given up. That inspires us.”
Then he said something that stuck with me:
“We won’t know the truth about this war for ten years.”
Not just the frontlines. The big picture. The politics. The foreign interests. From where he stands, he can only see what’s right in front of him: men trying to kill him, and his brothers trying to hold the line.
Everything else is fog that history will sort out later.
How is he wrong? I mean look at all the wars America has been involved in. We still don’t know for 100% fact what conspiracies are true decades later.
Life Between Two Realities
That’s what Ukraine feels like right now.
Two realities running side by side.
Speakeasies and sirens.
Influencers flying in for the weekend, and to be fair, also visiting family, while soldiers come back from the front for a few days off, or to heal, or to remember what normal felt like.
A receptionist sitting at his desk at 2 a.m. while drones pass overhead, not going anywhere.
I didn’t come here to say I visited a warzone. I came because I was curious and wanted to understand how people actually live and think inside something like this. There’s always something to learn from the uncomfortable.
And honestly, Ukraine is underestimated.
The people. The resilience. The quality of life that somehow persists.
It’s also the cheapest place I’ve been in Europe by a wide margin, and apparently prices have doubled since the war started. When this is over, this place is going to boom. I’d bet on it.
American movies tend to portray Ukraine as this gray, Soviet-looking place stuck in the past. That’s not what I saw. Granted, I was there in the summer, but Lviv felt far more stylish and alive than the stereotype.
And honestly, some of the gray apartment blocks didn’t feel that foreign to me. Rural America has plenty of bleak winter landscapes too. We just call ours “affordable housing near an Applebee’s.”
Tourism matters here too.
The economy is still open. People are still running businesses. Cafes are still serving coffee. Bars are still pouring drinks. Hostels are still checking people in. Simply showing up and spending money is not a small thing.
Multiple people thanked me for coming.
That wasn’t nothing.
Leaving Ukraine
Leaving Ukraine somehow became its own separate adventure.
My plan was simple: take a cab to the border, walk across into Poland, then get another cab or train on the other side. It sounded easier than taking a 2 a.m. train during curfew and sitting at the station for three hours.
Then a guy stopped me near the border and said he could get me all the way back to Krakow for $150.
I did the math in my head. It was probably going to cost me only $30 or $50 more than piecing the whole thing together myself, and it sounded much easier.
So I said yes.
I also immediately had a gut feeling it was a scam.
This was one of the rare times in nine months of travel where I did not listen to my gut.
And sure enough, things got weird fast.
At one point I told him, “No, just let me take my bags out of your car. I’m going to walk across. This is taking too long.”
He kept saying, “My friend is coming. My friend is coming.”
Eventually, his friend showed up.
He was an older, scraggly Polish guy who did not speak a word of English, driving a car covered in newspapers. Not “there are a few newspapers in the back seat” covered. Covered. Like the car itself had been sponsored by print journalism.
At this point I was sitting there thinking, “What the hell did I just get myself into?”
The Polish guy then started telling me, through translation and hand gestures, that when we got to the border I should say I was a volunteer.
I was not a volunteer.
He kept saying, “You American. You say volunteer. Faster.”
I told him very clearly, “I’m not lying to border patrol. I’m not saying that.”
He was disappointed, but we moved on to the next part of his plan, which apparently involved me helping him buy vodka and cigarettes.
Before crossing, there’s a little shop where alcohol and cigarettes are cheaper, or better, or easier to resell, or whatever border-crossing side hustle he had going on. He told me I needed to come inside with him so we could buy more than he was allowed to buy alone.
So now I’m helping a Polish stranger in a newspaper car buy extra vodka and cigarettes while trying to leave a country at war.
Normal Tuesday.
He looked at me and said, “You help me, I give you souvenir.”
Then he gave me a Ukraine magnet and a stack of newspapers.
At the time, I was confused. Looking back, I kind of love that he gave me the newspapers. It was the most chaotic souvenir exchange of my life.
The border crossing itself was even stranger.
Every time the line stopped, this guy would get out of the car, stare down border agents, wave his hands, and try to get us moved forward. Clearly, he had done this before. It also seemed like the border agents knew exactly who he was, which was both comforting and not comforting at all.
At one point, he was rubbing the dates off some of his passport stamps and asking me if I could still see them.
That’s when I started wondering if this was just a scam, or if I was accidentally participating in a low-budget Eastern European crime documentary.
The whole time, he had my passport. He was handing it around, tossing it onto dashboards, passing it to agents, taking it back, shuffling papers, yelling things I couldn’t understand.
I’m usually pretty calm when traveling, but there was definitely a moment where I thought, “Cool, this is how my identity gets stolen by a man who pays people in fridge magnets.”
Eventually, as we were getting close to the Polish side, he asked me when my train was leaving.
I said, “What do you mean, my train? You’re taking me to Krakow. We’re picking up my suitcase and then going to Krakow.”
He looked confused.
I said, “Your boss told me you were taking me all the way. I gave him $150.”
He looked at me and said, “You gave him $150? I don’t even know that guy. He gave me $20 to bring you across the border.”
And there it was.
Maybe he was messing with me. Maybe he was part of the scam. Maybe he genuinely had no idea. I still don’t know.
But what I do know is that I had paid $150 to be smuggled through the world’s least efficient favor network and rewarded with a magnet.
As we made it across the border, he then proceeded to the first rest stop where there were people literally hustling vodka and cigarettes and we spent about 20 minutes of him trying to get money from it. No one would give him the price he was asking.
Eventually, I made it to the train station, got my bag, and bought a first-class train ticket back to Krakow for something like €25 or €30.
In the end, I probably could have walked across in fifteen minutes.
Instead, I spent hours in a newspaper-covered car with a Polish cigarette mule who tried to convince me to tell border patrol I was an American war volunteer.
Honestly, as exits go, it felt appropriate.
Ukraine did not let me leave quietly.
I only had five days in one city. Barely a scratch on the surface.
A full guide on how to actually get there, where to stay, how to cross the border without accidentally hiring a Polish cigarette mule, and what to know is coming in another post.
But this one was never really about logistics.
It was about going in open, paying attention, and trying to understand a place that refuses to become just one thing.
Everyone keeps going.
What else can you do?