We stayed at the Kosmonaut hostel in Lviv, which had much "character" and was superbly helpful. Since no-one speaks English, buying train tickets is almost impossible on your own, but the hostel staff wrote out a little slip of paper in Ukrainian to give to the ticket seller, which made life so much easier for us.
We usually like to try local restaurants and food, but to much disappointment in ourselves, we had a great deal of trouble interpreting menus and after trailing around a number of places on our first day with little success, we finally succumbed to a pizza place !
Despite all the challenges though, the city is really beautiful and very walkable, and it was great to visit somewhere so different from the other East European countries that we've seen. Top on the list of attractions is actually the cemetery - it has lots of different headstones and architecture and well worth a few sombre minutes navigating. We also found a couple of lovely art galleries (which were dirt cheap) and had time to see an Opera "Rigoletto" - sung in Italian with Ukrainian subtitles. At under $15 for a private box this was incredible value.
