I spent my last day in Lviv finishing up my research and was planning to leave on a night train east to Vinnytsya. I had covered Vinnytsya already, albeit briefly, but I wanted to go back and visit the nearby village of Sharhorod, which is supposedly Ukraine’s most authentic remaining version of a Jewish schtetl, or ghetto. Schtetls have been big draws even since Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated” was published a few years back. But there were no tickets on the night train, and I absolutely had to get back to Kyiv the next day, so I cancelled my schtetl plans and bought a ticket on the express train to Kyiv the following morning. That meant one more night in Lviv. Would it be as eventful as the first?

Actually it would, albeit, in a goofier sense. This night I was joined by a couple of American tourists, Ted and Kate. Once more we warmed up with a couple beers in the English-style pub – clearly a recipe for a surreal evening. After that we dropped by the amazing Robert Doms brewhouse next to the Lvivske brewery. It’s located three stories underground in one of the brewery’s old storage vaults. Named after Lvivske brewery’s founder, the recently opened brewpub distributes fresh draught Lvivske in litre steins (Hr 12) and generous helpings of German food. There’s nightly live music in one of the vault’s four chambers. I’d stumbled across this place earlier walking back from a worthwhile tasting tour of the brewery. Cha-ching!

We had been throwing around the idea of going to a casino that evening, and a frothy liter stein of Lvivske’s finest was all that was needed for our talk to become walk. Ubiquitous Split casinos hog prime downtown real estate in most large Ukrainian cities, offering nouveau riche punters a standard post-Soviet nightclub diet of disco, strip bar and 24-hour casino (all that’s missing is bowling). But unlike many casinos, which allow you to wear anything as long as you are ready to lose money, Split has a strict dress code. And on this particular evening their security guards were giving no quarter to my pleas to be let in with shorts. So I asked if I could exchange my shorts for the kilt being worn by a mannequin in the bar area.

“You can’t play in a kilt either,” the manager responded.

Was there an official policy banning kilts from the casino area, I asked?

“Yes.”

I highly doubted they had an official kilt policy, but my demands to see evidence of a no-kilt rule fell on deaf ears. So I decided instead to trade dungarees with the approximately 5’6”, 135-pound Ted (I’m 5’11 and 180 pounds). Somehow I managed to squeeze into them, although fastening the buttons was out of the question.

The best part of story is that once I got into the casino, I cleaned up. I won almost $200, a fortune considering my initial investment of $40. That really must have irked the manager after all the grief I had caused. Things got even more absurd when Ted decided he wanted in on the action. Although my shorts were close to being trousers for the shorter Ted, the manager was having none of it. So Ted switch into Kate’s jeans (she’s a bit shorter than Ted), and Kate requested to wear the kilt. Surely they couldn’t refuse a girl in a kilt, right? But rather than debate it, the manager just let her in wearing my shorts.

After winning some more money we all changed back into our original duds and parted ways. One hitch: my cell phone remained in Ted’s pocket. That neither of us noticed probably indicates that we’d had at least a half-beer too many. Back at my room, I spent a good hour searching in vain for my phone and calling both my phone and Kate’s phone from the land line. Kate told me later that they mistook my phone’s croak-like ring for an actual frog.

It had been a classic “only-in-Ukraine” evening.

The next morning I was zipping toward Kyiv on the wonderful Lviv–Kyiv express train. After seven weeks of traveling around Ukraine, my trip was essentially over. The biggest surprise of my trip was that, despite the eased visa rules, Ukraine had yet to take off as a major international tourist destination. Before I arrived, I had imagined Kyiv and Odesa overrun by tourist hordes, like most European cities. Yet this had not happened. Even Lviv, while extremely touristy by Ukraine standards, gets a fraction of the tourists that nearby Krakow draws.

The thought comforted me. While I realize that tourism benefits local communities, nobody who travels frequently in Ukraine wants to see it “discovered” by the rest of the world. Unfortunately, Ukraine’s discovery can’t be far off. This summer budget airline WizzAir launched flights within Ukraine and it will soon start flying to Ukraine from Western European cities. Budget flights almost singlehandedly turned the Baltic capitals of Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius into tourist and stag party meccas where hotel rooms book out months in advance during the summer. Sadly, Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa can’t be far behind. Ukraine as you know it – endearing, partially Soviet, stubbornly resistant to English, master at service with a scowl, blissfully undiscovered and untouristy – will soon change. And “only-in-Ukraine” moments like my last evening in Lviv will gradually become extinct. Enjoy them while you can.

Names have been changed to protect identities in this story. Read more articles about Bloom’s travels in Ukraine at http://mytripjournal.com/blukeblog