The Travel Breakdown

To America:

2 buses --> overnight train --> bus --> (delayed) 2 hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany --> missed connecting flight, bus to hotel, overnight stay in Frankfurt --> 9 hour flight to Washington, D.C. --> 1.5 hour flight to Cleveland!

To Ukraine:

~1 hour flight to Toronto --> 4 hour layover that turns into an 8 hour layover due to a flight delay --> 8 hour flight to Frankfurt --> missed connecting flight, layover of 11 hours --> overbooked flight, bus to hotel --> early morning flight to Vienna --> flight to Kyiv --> bus --> 7 hour train --> 6 hour layover --> 2 buses --> back to site

The main point of this being that this trip, in theory, was supposed to take about 36 hours. The first leg extended to about 48 hours, but with a good night's sleep in Germany and some sleep on the overnight train.

The second leg extended to about 72 hours, but the only sleep I managed was a couple hours on a bench and about three hours in the hotel in Germany, and a couple hours on the train to Dnipro (it was not an overnight train). It was rough.

I can't believe I have to go to school tomorrow.

On an unrelated note, I traveled from Germany with another PCV and a Brazilian boy who was doing an internship in Ukraine. When we first arrived, the Brazilian boy commented how absolutely gray everything was and that "It's freezing!" The other PCV and I laughed and told him we thought it felt pretty tropical for Ukraine in January (it was about 40F). I think our jadedness scared him but at least he'll get to see lots of snow, which he said he'd never seen before.