Day 31: Lviv Museum of Folk Architecture

It’s Labor Day, which obviously means we cannot labor today. Instead, we took a two mile walk from the hotel to an outdoor museum showing traditional buildings and homesteads from the various regions of Ukraine. The museum is in a gigantic park, which helps the settings feel authentic and makes for an enjoyable time walking through the area.

The homesteads here look similar to those in Estonia, which is to be expected given the proximity of the two countries. That said, there was also enough difference to make the experience unique. For instance, you’ll notice that the roof in the image above is made of overlapping layers of straw, where in Estonia the roofing was just one smooth layer.

One of the most fun and interesting sights of the visit were the beehives.

The day was overcast with on and off very light rain, so a lot of my pictures ended up looking really dark ( yeah, I should have used a flash ). Still, walking around the museum was great.

A note on planning: doing a little of it from time to time can help out. We came to the museum on a Monday and everything was basically closed. If we had come on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, there would have been a lot more options for sights and activities. Basically, we should have come here yesterday and to the cemetery today. We just weren’t thinking that a place would not be active on a Monday.

After today, it’s back to work for me. My mother and stepfather will be in Lviv for another day tomorrow and then return to the USA on Wednesday morning. I’m here in Lviv until October 9th.

One more note: I’ve been trying to catch up on posting, but the internet in my apartment is having a hard time handling image uploads. That means I have to update this blog from work. As such, I’ve decided that I’ll go ahead and combine many of the weekdays together into a single post, especially as most of these days will involve short entries anyway ( such as “I went to work and did work stuff” ).