Friday, my final day in Lviv. It was strange to realise that my time in Lviv was coming to a close and I didn’t feel ready to leave the city and the people I’d grown close to.
I decided to go to the Pasta Café for some final volunteering. I spent the day there packaging and sealing vitamins that would be included in the larger food packets. The sealing process depended on me using a machine powered by electricity, as it required heat to melt the plastic covers. After an hour of doing this, there was a sudden power outage. The longer-term volunteers explained how these have become a regular occurrence throughout the country since the invasion. After five minutes of sitting in the dark, the power returned, and we got back to work. A volunteer who had been walking ten minutes from the Pasta Café during the outage said that they noticed that the power wasn’t working where they were. The full-time employees didn’t seem to react much when the outage first happened, going to show how this must be a mundane thing in their lives now.
To see out my time in Lviv, in the evening I went along with one of the volunteers from the Pasta Café to a special event being hosted in the grounds of the Potocki Palace, a cheese and wine festival. This was a great way to spend my last evening in Lviv, and the volunteer I went around the event with happened to have gone to a gastronomy school in Austria — I was given a detailed explanation of all the wines we tried!
My bus out of Lviv would be leaving at 2:50 am. I packed my things and prepared for the journey ahead. Even though my flight would be leaving Krakow at almost 6pm, I had been warned by several volunteers that crossing the Ukraine/Poland border could take many hours. One volunteer I spoke to had told me she’d been on a bus with people who had missed their flights due to the time it took. I didn’t sleep, deciding I could leave this for the bus journey and set off to the station to complete my adventure.
The Merchant’s House – Fundraising & Events Coordinator – part time
