When I took my first overnight train from Kiev to Lviv, I was naive–maybe even stupid. No one in my cabin spoke English; I definitely spoke no Ukrainian. I didn’t understand why the bathroom door was locked when the train was stopped. In the morning, I was confused why the train attendant popped into our cabin four times within an hour and chirped at us before we finally rolled in to the Lviv train  station at 6am. The cabin was sweltering hot, and I never got the tea that I had paid for. It had been an experience, but nothing I was keen on reliving. I promised I’d take the day train for the return journey. That had been a month ago. I was still riding high off the thrill of finding family in the most epic way imaginable. I’d spent the last week meeting/visiting several cousins all across Western Ukraine. The Motherland Tour had been a much larger success than I’d dreamed. I didn’t want to leave Lviv, but my roommate was meeting me in Germany that week, and she likely would’ve been irritated if I bailed in a brief Facebook message, “Sorry, I’m staying in Ukraine…but have fun alone in Germany!” (and rightfully so). I stalled as long as possible to visit with my delightful cousins (26 years is a lot of time to make up!), until I had no choice but to take the overnight train. I had to get back to Kiev.  The Ukrainian Train Adventure I entered the cabin of my train in Lviv, where an older gentleman was curled up on one of the upper cots. He immediately sat up, and began chattering away in Ukrainian. At this point, I’d had a whopping three weeks of Ukrainian language study under my belt. Definitely not enough for conversation, but I could catch one or two words per sentence. I’d also become quite good at reading hand gestures and facial expressions. (If you ever need a teammate for a game of charades with Ukrainians, I’m your girl!) Through a combination of my limited Ukrainian and body language-reading abilities, I learned the gentleman was a professor from the city of Ivano-Frankivsk; and for about half an hour, he sat and spoke to me in slow, clear Ukrainian. Through a combination of charades, my bad Ukrainian, and Google Translate, I told him that...