World Music Festival!!!

This weekend was a really good one. We (Antonina, Mischa, I) went to Swirsch near Liviv. That means more than 850 km over bad streets and to see a lot of poverty in the countryside. We started at six in the morning and I was realy lucky that we had a good car. A brand new Honda Civic. Liviv is in the western part of ukraine and was once a part of the Habsburg Monarchy. This is why the buildings look like in Salzburg. Because of the lack of money to restore the buildings it all looks a little bit broken. But it is not like they would not care and so they try to do the best. The outcome is one of the most beutiful cities I have ever seen, with amazing parks, a car free inner city, nice restaurants, and many young and open minded people. We were in a restaurant where they tryed to make it look like an underground army meetingpoint in sowjet union. The entrance has no sign and you just open a door and stand in a 2x2m room next to a guy with a maschine gun. He askes you for a code word. "Are there any russians?" would be the translation. After we told him that there are no russians he opened a secret doo behind a book shelf and we could go down into the basement. It was amazing how they decorated all the resaurant. They designed it striktly in the original way like it was. You really get the feeling how the revolutionists had theyr meetings down here.

Swirsch:
It is a small village 50km outside Liviv. It was nearly impossible to get there because there were no signs to impement where the festival could be. The world music festival was ment to have five stages where over 30 bands from russia, moldvia, ukraine, usa, germany, uk performe. On friday the event was great and we danced a lot till dawn. When the first sunlite came up we decided to go to bed. The tent which we slept in was actually made for two persons so you can imagine how we where lying in there. It was really packed. Saturday morning, or better say lunchtime, we went to a castle near by and found a small lake to swimm in. Afterwards we went to a village where we bought some beer and were sitting in the shadow and talking about travell expiriences. After we came to the conclusion that it would be too far to walk back to the camp; we had the glorious idea to aske a guy with a horse trailer. He finaly agreed to take us there.
We came back to the camp and foud out that they started to take down the main stage and the rock stage. We were supprised and had no idea whats going on. Later this day they told us thaat the organizers have left the szene and have stolen the money of the tickets. They didn´t pay the musicans or even the owners of the stages. But the show had to go on and so the rest of saturday night they just played on one stage (a smaller one). The mood of the people, the weather and the beer was so good that in the end nobody cared.
On sunday the police closed the whole camp and everybody had to leave a quick as possible. They din´t even had the permission to do the festival there....thats just ukraine.
On sunday night we came ome to kiev and Antonia and I decided that this is not enough and went for a beer. Monay was another half day off. Monday night I met again with Antonina and we wnt out for dinner.
Today (tuesday) the metro was stuck in the tunnel and after twety minutes we finaly made it to get out save. I had to take fucking taxi to get to work!!