Last night was a quieter night; we had some guests over, but they only stayed until about 9pm. Actually, it was really fun: My host brother, one of his friends, his friend's dad, and I had a big war with toy guns (we terrorized my host mom and the other guests for a few hours). Then we had a snowball fight in the courtyard. Life is great when you're an eight-year-old boy (or an eight-year-old at heart).

Anyway, I promised to write more about my trip. We visited three cities--Kiev, Lviv, and Odessa. I enjoyed all the places we went, but Lviv was definitely my favorite. Kiev is also very beautiful, and Odessa has its own unique feeling, but Lviv is an awesome city. It feels very European and imperial: It was the capital of Austro-Hungarian Galicia, and it is full of gorgeous old buildings and narrow cobblestone streets.

 It is also the most ethnically Ukrainian area of Ukraine, and I was really surprised by how different it felt there compared to Russia or eastern Ukraine. People in Lviv look more central European, and the women are a different kind of beautiful than in Russia. Also, people in Lviv speak almost exclusively Ukrainian. The signs are all in Ukrainian (and sometimes English), and people either don't know Russian or are hesitant to speak it. Language is a big source of contention in Ukraine, and we definitely noticed a difference between Ukrainian-speaking Lviv and Russian-speaking Odessa (Kiev is somewhere in the middle--all the signs are in Ukrainian, but people mostly speak Russian.) Fortunately, Ukrainian is quite similar to Russian, and someone with a good knowledge of Russian can figure out Ukrainian pretty quickly. I can't really have a conversation in Ukrainian, but I knew enough to, for example, read the directions on a coin-operated locker in the Kiev train station or ask where the bathroom is located in a restaurant. We had plenty of interactions in Lviv where we spoke Russian, and the other people spoke Ukrainian, and we mostly understood each other.  

We arrived in Lviv early on Christmas morning, and the city was mostly still sleeping (there is a sizable Catholic population in Lviv, so some people even celebrated Christmas that day instead of on January 7 like Orthodox Christians do). We dropped our bags off at the hotel and walked around the city for a while. Of course, being that this is Europe, nothing was open until 8 or 9am, so we had to wait a while to get breakfast. But we found a nice cafe, had breakfast, and continued to adventure. We wound up at the top of a mountain in the center of the city called the High Fortress, which has a great view of the whole city. Then we ventured back to the hotel and took a well-deserved shower and turned in early that night (two days of train riding and traveling gets pretty tiring).

The next day we explored at lot more of Lviv. We started the day off by climbing to the top of the city hall's tower, from which there is a great view of the city. Then we visited a huge cemetery, got lunch and played pool in a little hole-in-the-wall cafe, walked around a big part of the city center, and toured a brewery. We even met some very friendly--and very drunk--Russians, who mistook us for Russians at first and took us to a cool bar that is done up to be like a Ukrainian rebel army bunker. You have to say "Glory to Ukraine"--in Ukrainian--to get in. It was fun, although it became clear that they were totally broke and planning to free-load off of us and expected us to buy them all drinks and food, so we didn't stick around too long. We caught our train back to Kiev later that night.

Here are some pictures of Lviv: