Lviv, a city of generators...

...thanks to the constant electricity cuts, as a result of Putin's attempts to send Ukraine back to the dark ages. The generators are deafening and it's never quiet in the lovely, old pedestrianised area of central Lviv any more.
Those establishments that can afford it have generators; the small independent traders either close or make do - like the tiny cheese and butter shop near our flat, which just consists of a refrigerated counter. When we went in there yesterday, during a power cut, the poor shop owner was getting stressed with trying to find batteries for weighing scales, having to use a calculator and write down everything she sold in a notebook. Then we went to the bank - to pay my speeding fine! - and nothing was working there.

But most people manage to get on with life as normal, including other volunteers. Our good friend, Mo MAD (MAD Foundation that is!), invited us for dinner last night. The power was already off when we arrived, but she cooked us a meal on the gas hob and gave me a blanket when it started to get cold. She had just moved to a new apartment and hadn't got round to buying candles yet, but we improvised with a torch on the table and had a lovely evening.

This is when we have to admit that we almost never experience power cuts in our apartment block. We have been puzzling over this, especially as Lviv Croissants next door has a generator running almost constantly. We finally mentioned this to our landlord today when he came to read the meters, and he explained that this building is on an old electricity circuit, not the computerised one, and so someone would have to come along and physically turn off the power. And for 8 flats it's not worth it. We're just lucky, and it's nice to get back from hard journeys, over several days, to a warm flat.

We have been planning our next aid run, which will be jointly with Tomasz and two other volunteers from Paszki dla Ukrainy (Parcels for Ukraine). Tomorrow, we travel to Krakow to load the van with humanitian aid again from Paszki. On Friday we return to Lviv and on Saturday we'll travel to Kyiv on the first leg of our journey, meeting up there with the Poles. We're travelling in an eastern direction this time. We're spending a considerable amount of time, planning how we'll deliver the aid in the safest way possible, and also trying to find good contacts in the areas to which we're going. 

This is a humourous response to 
Germany’s decision, finally, to send Leopard tanks  to Ukraine.

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