What strikes you in Ukraine is the number of cafés.
I always thought coffee was the domain of Italians, but the first time I truly experienced a real coffee culture was in Ukraine. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a small town like Zhmerynka, a larger one like Kamianets-Podilskyi, or a big metropolis like Lviv – the smell of coffee is everywhere. Not from chain cafés. You won’t see Costa Coffee, Starbucks, or Green Café Nero. It’s from small coffee shops, each with its own name, logo, style, color palette, and unique identity. You’ll also find macarons, local cakes, and almond, coconut, banana, or oat milk. And you’ll find a warm, welcoming atmosphere and smiles. I miss that. Our Wrocław is beautiful too, but finding a local coffee shop is a challenge. Over there, you pass one at practically every intersection. And everywhere, you can indulge in the aroma.
Ukraine also enchants with the smell of shashlik.
In Poland, we usually understand shashlik as a small skewer with pieces of meat, bell pepper, sometimes mushrooms, onions, or tomato. There, “going for shashlik” is like “going for a barbecue,” and the shashlik itself is usually hefty chunks of meat on a long metal skewer, grilled over a wood-fired barbecue. You can find shashlik in roadside diners as well as good restaurants. They’re juicy, made from properly marinated meat. Typically served with red adjika sauce, sometimes also with a white garlic one. The most impressive ones I had were veal shashlik in Ivano-Frankivsk. Outstanding. And their smell…
The third scent is the smell of blood.
Even though we were far from the front line, you can feel the war in the air. You can feel death. Cemeteries are filled with flags standing at the graves of soldiers, the roar of jets breaking the sound barrier over cities, the hum of drone engines — Russia sends thousands into Ukraine every week. The pain of people who’ve lost someone dear, and the passing military funeral processions.
Coffee and shashlik are remnants of the old reality and a bridge to normality.
To live. Not to go mad. The smell of blood reminds us of the war — a war that’s supposedly hundreds of kilometers away, but in truth, just two steps from us.