Carpathian Mountain Trip With Real School: Day 1

Our friend Andre and his wife Olya run a ministry called Real School and they invited us on a trip with their group to the Carpathian Mountains. We've always wanted to go so we eagerly (maybe too eagerly) said yes. We know some of the teenagers going and while it was supposed to be a fun and relaxing trip we saw it as an awesome opportunity to build relationships and spend serious time with some specific people. 

We being pretentious.......experienced Canadians in the ways of Ukrainian train travel, like to book our own train tickets. We know what works best for our family (our own private four-bed room with air conditioning) but none of these rooms were available so we reluctantly agreed to book with the rest of the group in what is called "platz cart"....I always thought it was "plus cart" but there is NOTHING "plus" about it, ha ha. Basically it is a completely open wagon with about 60 beds filled with strangers. Also it was a 24 hour train ride to Lviv and it was +36 when we left Zap. Andre assured us that the windows on the car open and it will be cool and comfortable. Welllllllllll, of course, we ended up at the emergency window that did not open. Here I am sweating away at +32 (so far this was cool) while the couple behind me are drinking BOILING HOT TEA: 

"This is Ukraine" is always the reasoning or response we get. See: +32 currently.

Steve and I had an earnest talk about what God was trying to teach us in this moment. Humility? Letting go of control? Forgiveness? How to roll with the punches? But I thought we knew that one by now!!

There was one longer stop (60 minutes) at Krivoy Rog so we went out to buy some ICE CREAM and more water to last the rest of the trip.

Two girls, Liza and Katya were kind enough to trade places with us for the night because they didn't want to sleep in the wind anyways, so we did sleep comfortable and dare I say that we even used our sheets to cover up over night.