All is not Sunny_

Lviv, Ukraine October 24, 2015.
The weather forecast for yesterday was "Dreary". Very unprofessional I thought. To make a judgment and not just report the facts like "Rainy, Overcast" etc. And incorrect too. The sun was actually out as I planned to climb to the top of city hall tower which overlooks the city.

For the last two weeks I've been physically training for the "assault" on this city's "Mt. Everest" (ok a bit of a stretch) with its challenging reputed-to-be 400 plus stairs. (I counted 406). In my hotel I took the tiny elevator which holds only 3 people (on the left of the picture here) down to breakfast and walked back up the massive double 100 stair (exactly my actual count) staircase as I do every day. Good cardio workout!

By the time I'd made the round trip (down to breakfast and back up to the room) the sun had gone into hiding proving the forecasters right on the facts but not the interpretation. It's never dreary here. On days such as this the city has an equal if not greater haunting charm. And it is the best coffee house weather. Perfect for spending time indoors pursuing my "new career". But, that's a blog post for another day.

Thanks to my physical training I made it to the top of the tower with no more heavy breathing than I heard from some considerably younger than I. And I took some pictures, but will have to do this again on a sunny day when at least for high altitude picture taking there is no substitute Another reason to return to this town. As if i needed any.

Here I've included a picture and video on a sunny day.  The video shows the setting in the historic  medieval square. And if you listen closely, you can here the bell in the tower ringing at Sunday noon.

In the picture of the tower you see here, there is some face lifting going
on. And in front of my hotel they are repairing the road. And one of the city blocks in the old town is hidden behind a wooden fence as they are doing a big new construction job with now a big crater which you only see when you peek (no pictures here for this) behind the boarded up fencing surrounding the site. They are building the foundation for what I fear may be a big out-of-character building.

My fears were stoked further when I walked out of the city hall after descending from my trip to the tower top and found a demonstration where a guy dressed as an executioner was beheading a cardboard figure with a cardboard ax. I just missed photoing the actual execution. I asked a young guy and he told me in broken English that they were protesting the construction going on in the city.

A woman overhearing us broke in to say very emotionally how what they were doing was illegal as this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But, she said, someone comes along and gives the city a million dollars and then something for the politician to put in his own pocket and it happens. Like her, I find this very disturbing.

However, I don't want to overstate this as I don't really know the full extent of what's going on or planned and this happens in every city where preservation versus development is an ongoing struggle including my own hometown of Baltimore where a cabal of political and social elites threatens to destroy our most famous icon public park, Mt. Vernon Place. Their motivation? Largely ignorance and bad taste IMHO. But,don't get me going on that.

I spent the afternoon in a newly discovered (easy to do here) coffee house, This must be the coffee and chocolate capitol of Europe. The variety of the many cafe choices (it seems every block has one here) certainly makes this a terrific city in which to hang out.

I spent a couple of hours studying the manual for my relatively new SLR camera so I could video a performance at the Philharmonic in the evening. I learned a lot including the basics of how to keep the flash from firing and the beep from sounding so as to cause the least disturbance during the performance. I say I learned a lot but these devices are so complex and the technology so advanced that I barely scratched the surface. 

As I studied I took a lot of pictures trying out the various settings of the camera and as I was packing up to leave a middle aged guy came up to me and asked me why I was taking pictures of him and his friend without asking their permission. Uh oh.

He didn't speak much English and my Ukrainian is extremely limited. But, my pronunciation of "I don't speak Ukrainian" and "I don't understand" is so good, because of the listen and repeat recorded language course I've been taking, it tends to convince the listener of the exact opposite of what I am telling them.

So he went on and on speaking Ukrainian in an agitated manner which I found a bit alarming. Having gotten myself in trouble with advanced camera technology I was, fortunately, able to rescue myself with equally advanced computer technology with my Chromebook computer with, in this instance, an invaluable feature of almost instantly starting without the long delay of my Microsoft Windows computer which I left at home to avoid the risk of theft of my most important personal files and possibly even my identity.

The manual for my camera immediately displayed on the computer when I turned it on and he quickly grasped what I was doing, It wasn't "all about him" net even about him and his friend at all,, And just as quickly we became new best friends with him asking me where I was from, how long I was here for and on and on such that I became concerned that I would be late to the concert.

My time in the coffee house all paid off though as I was able to get some nice videos of the Ukrainian American celebrity violinist Oleg Khrysa.  And how good was the performance?

Well I sought professional advice from the two student musicians sitting next to me.  I knew one of whom had to be a violinist given the shape of the instrument case she had sitting in front of her resting against the balcony guardrail, And,.after some language confusion, she told me "it was beautiful".

Play the video below and I think you'll agree with her assessment as did the audience which completely filled this beautiful and uniquely intimate concert hall.

And if you play the video all the way to the end (just 3 minutes) you'll see something I find especially encouraging here for the future of classical music. The prevalence of youth in the audience including those too young to sit through a concert in America literally jumping for joy as well as a brief shot of my very young concert neighbor to the right of me.

And if you don't know this already let me mention you can make this video full screen by pressing the button on the far lower right.

Enjoy!