ukraine: ternopil, kremenets, pochayiv

camille enjoyed traveling to lviv enough that she was willing to travel with me again over a holiday weekend the next month...we had a three day weekend, and stupidly decided to wait until the last minute to buy train tickets...note to self, this is not a good idea, as there are few tickets left for any destination...i ended up picking some random city listed in the guidebook just because we wanted to go somewhere, and not be stuck in kyiv for a long, holiday weekend...
our night train took us to ternopil...as soon as we exited the train station in the morning, we took a taxi to the bus station...maybe we could've walked, but we had no map, and it was just barely daylight, and much colder than we'd expected...

we got to the bus station, and the ladies selling tickets were telling everyone they couldn't sell any tickets for the time being, as no buses were going anywhere due to the bad weather...since we didn't understand the reason, all we knew was that we were at a bus station in a small town, unable to go anywhere, which just annoyed us...
when we did figure out it was because of bad weather both of us wondered about that...this is ukraine, which gets more than its fair share of cold, crappy winter weather...eventually the storm hit us, and we understood...bits of hail, sleet, and general yuckiness...

eventually buses did start to leave, and we were able to get seats to a town called kremenets...its a small town in western ukraine...according to lonely planet, this town was never captured by the mongols when they came through this area in 1240-1241...
there is a fortress on top of a hill just outside town, and my original goal was for camille and i to hike up to the fortress...there isn't much left to the fortress, it's more a few ruins, a ring of walls, and a gate tower...howeva, as we got off the bus, we realized the hike was not going to happen...the wind was blowing, the snow was falling, and neither one of us was mentally prepared to deal with the messy weather while hiking...plus, we didn't know where to find the trail head...

at that point, our goal changed to finding food...we had been on the train all night, then on a bus, so we were hungry...we walked through more than half of kremenets before finding a place for food...it's a small town, there are not a lot of restaurants...my guess is that they don't get a lot of tourists, especially not foreigners...the place we ate was a bar of sorts...
we took a look at the jesuit collegium, which was built by the poles when they took control of kremenets (1731-1743)...we didn't go inside, but the outside of the buildings are pretty...plus they are slightly up a hill, so we could see over the town a bit...not stunning, but definitely nice...what breaks up the aesthetic beauty of the collegium is the war monument in front, built by the soviets to memorialize their triumph in WWII...the memorial looks decent, but couldn't they have put it in a different place?

famous violinist isaac stern was born in kremenets in 1920...there were jewish communities here for centuries, until the nazis massacred 15000 people they'd hearded into a ghetto in 1942...(these communities, like so many others around ukraine, have essentially disappeared now)...
after walking through a park, looking in a couple churches, and eating, we walked back to the bus "station" (and by station i mean parking lot) and boarded a marshrutka bound for pochayiv...
pochayiv is another small town, mentioned in the guidebook for only just one reason...pochayiv monastery is "a beacon of ukrainian orthodoxy - moscow patriarchate - on the edge of a largely ukrainian catholic region" according to lonely planet...you can see the monastery as soon as you get off the bus...

the monastery is the second largest orthodox complex in the country, after the lavra in kyiv, and was founded by monks fleeing the mongols in 1240...as it is so big, there are a lot of visitors, but they are almost all pilgrims, not tourists...somehow, you can sense the difference in atmosphere from what i've felt in kyiv...
to get into the monastery complex, visitors (women) who aren't already wearing a skirt and headscarf must go in a small room and borrow (with a deposit) these articles of clothing...at first we didn't know the money was just a deposit, we thought it was a rental fee, and were disappointed by the price...

wandering around the monastery was awesome...except for when an old lady in one of the churches started yelling at us, and we weren't able to figure out why...at first we thought she was indicating something about us not being allowed to take photos, except that we werent taking photos!! (there were very clear signs upon church entry that said no photos)...then she started pulling at our pants, maybe she was saying we shouldn't be wearing those? except that we had on the borrowed skirts over our pants, and we certainly weren't the only people with this particular fashion statement...maybe she was just crazy? camille and i never did figure this out...

after exploring the monastery and wandering the town (the town walk took about 10 minutes) we found a place to catch a bus back to ternopil...this ride was a true adventure on roads not in particularly good shape...winter weather in ukraine must make it VERY DIFFICULT for road engineers to keep anything in good shape...lots of potholes and bumps...
we got to the hotel easily enough in ternopil, they had our reservation...one of the reasons i'd chosen this hotel was their listing of having a sauna...it turned out to be part of a complex called aqua world...or something along those lines...after me arguing a bit, we were able to pay for just the turkish hamam (we weren't going to spend any time in the pool, and had no desire to pay for that)...an hour of steam room time alternating with dips in the cold pool and the dry sauna, and we both felt amazing...i'd go back to ternopil just to go to that sauna:)
our hotel had room service, we both ordered pizzas for dinner...nothing outstanding, but we didn't care...

the next morning we had breakfast in our room, packed up and checked out...we didn't have much of a map, so wandering around was a challenge...we found a big street market that covered both sides of a road...normal stuff available: fruits and veggies, tires, mops, bread, etc...
we found a park along a river, that was lovely and peaceful...there was snow on the ground, and it wasn't completely dry so we had to watch where we went...
in town i was taking a picture of a statue with flowers laid at the bottom when a congregation came to the statue and sang hymns...i was not able to figure out what was happening...but when i thought about it, it was a holiday weekend, so that probably meant something...
we found a park along a lake...there was an island in the middle of the lake, with a very picturesque bridge leading to an area looking out to the island...the lake was frozen at the time, which made everything that much more picturesque...awesome...i was not very patient in waiting for people to get out of my photos...(usually i can wait for a long time, but i was very impatient that day)
the train station ended up being quite close, we timed our arrival so we didn't have to wait long for our train...the train ride back to kyiv was nice, mostly during daylight:)