The Wettest Cheese in Lion Town

Lviv is a large and very pretty city with plazas, markets, and winding streets. There's a rewarding Old City and gorgeous architectural details and bursts of wild nature in the sprawling outskirts. Big parks and active cathedrals and friendly crowds.

The trams run on wires, so the sky is criss-crossed with the geometry of transportation, and that gives off a sort of San Francisco vibe which only deepens as you encounter the liberal views of the people. Is Lviv the Berkeley of Eastern Europe?

I slept in on my first morning, a rare luxury and much needed, and went out to tick tock along the cobblestones. I was a clockboy keeping time on the streets. It was a Saturday, so folks appeared to be at their leisure.

There's plenty to see and endless church spires, so it was a little hard to designate a landmark. The street names are mostly in Cyrillic, and though there are frequent helpful street signs in English, they were never exactly where I wanted them.

Which isn't their fault. I just want them all the time, because I am awful with directions and something weird has happened to my short term memory over the last few years. When I have a map, I just shred it pulling it in and out of my pocket, and sometimes that old devil takes control and spins that map around.

If you can pronounce the Cyrillic alphabet, you absolutely recognize the words. It's just a matter of remembering/learning. The trick I learned in Bulgaria is that the word рестора́н means "restaurant" and you see it everywhere, so it's a frequent reminder.

You know what it means, so you can be like, "Right, the P is an R. You pronounce C like S and H is an N." It has most of the "traitor" letters in it, and then all you have to do is remember that the "strange" letters are pronounced like the Greek letters you know.

So, the P sound they surrendered to the R shows up again as pi. 3 is a Z. They love math so much, it's part of their alphabet.

However, like anything unfamiliar, it's easy to just blank out.

Blanked out over to some little carts where I bought some Ukrainian Easter Eggs as souvenirs and poked around looking for vegetables. Found a glorious sort of farmer's market with gnarly old carrots and deep green cucumbers. Bought a sack full. Everyone chattered away at me like I was a person.

Everything was pennies. The biggest concern was that I would have too large a bill. Like, I didn't want to look like a gangster with a fat roll of cash. But having anything over $5 looks that way. The Monopoly man there to buy parsnips for a laugh.

A woman had some white squares on cloth. Some was obvious feta cheese, dripping wet, and some was more solid-looking and less wet. I bought a big square of it. Big cheese fan here, and why not try the homemade local stuff.

There wasn't any bread around, and that seemed like the best companion for this wet cheese, so I decided that would be the quest. Find some bread.

Chewed my carrots and explored. In all these places, you look for the Stare Miasto (which means Old Town) and the Rynek (which I thought meant square but means "marketplace"). The Rynek in Lviv is smack in the middle of the Stare Miasto.

I had gone out without the camera on purpose. The point here was to just explore without the "tyranny" of documentation. I dearly love photowalks, they're almost the whole point. But on this day, after that long border crossing, I just wanted to be. Just find some bread and have a relaxing morning.

Of course, I took notes for things I would want to see later when I was armed. One of the churches had a marvelous studded green door that I instantly decided was my favorite in the world. I bought a magnet that looked like a lion with ribbons in his mane.

Lviv is named after a dude named Lev who ruled under the name King Leo. So, lions are everywhere. They work them into every design, and the park benches have little winged lion emblems on them.

There were some bakeries and some people selling baked goods in the street but no bread. What they had were these special holiday haystack cakes (apparently a famous Orthodox treat) and long bricks of, I presume, cinnamon snacks.

It's funny how you get obsessed with small stuff when you're traveling. Like, getting a nice loaf to go with the cheese was my idée fixe. Gorgeous cathedrals all around, a city dripping with history, interesting locals, and would have tossed them all for a sack of rolls.

Made my way past some interesting statues based on Greek gods. I love how all statues essentially look alike. Saints and gods, just bodies, but the little symbols tell you who they are and fill them with meaning. It's just a stone lady, but.. dogs....it's Diana!

I get emotional thinking about how the world was before writing. Someone had to tell you what the dogs meant, and maybe it was slightly different depending on who told you.

Found a little market and went in for bread. Big glass counter full of... meats and endless fish. Just, all sorts of tiny, oily fish. Terrifying and beautiful (and gross). Gasping mouths and void-like eyes.

I pointed to something that looked like a cutlet but might have been a fried egg. The lady (who spoke no English), picked up two burrito-looking things. Sure. I nodded and she wrapped them up for me. Pointed again to the cutlets. A fist full of cabbage. Sure. In the pile. Cutlets? Fish. I really didn't want the fish, so it was the first time I said no,

God, that plastic glove heaped with those silver bodies.

She only let half of them fall out. Fine. Fish. Pointed again to the cutlet and it worked. Cutlet!

No bread. Headed home with a bag of vegetables, a sack of meat and fish, and the centerpiece, that marvelous dripping square of mysterious cheese,

Got a little lost, because that's what I do. Giant metal men on horseback, huge towers with golden flames on top, bright velvet giraffes in front of a toy store.

On the road home, a woman was selling pussywillows and herbs and had a bag of what looked like a sliced baguette. Fortune! I walked up and asked for it. It was a heavy bag of perogi. Like, forty of them. I know perogi, I know what they look like. And yet... I was bread mad and everything I think I see becomes a slice of bread to me.

Bought them anyway. Enough food for a minivan full of pig farmers.

Back home, I laid it all out on the table. Wooden eggs, a pyramid of food. I put one of the burrito things in my mouth. Some kind of savory fried meat. I put the fish in the fridge so I didn't have to look at them.

Unwrapped the cheese. I'm the kind of dude who eats a brick of cheese like a candy bar. I sometimes slice it if I'm sharing, but if it's just me, I hold the cheese and I bite off chunks,

Grabbed it and my fingers really sank in. Would I need... a spoon? Was it like... soggy feta or...

It was butter.

I couldn't write a better punchline. A long, wandering journey with the single purpose of finding bread for my cheese, and it ended without bread and, it turns out, never even started with cheese.

The butter was delicious. I dipped the cucumber in it. It was that kind of party.