Friday, July 20, 2018

Good Times On The Cruise Ship From Tallinn To Helsinki

I had booked passage on the Silja Europa from Tallinn to Helsinki. I thought when I bought the ticket that it was just going to be a ferry boat heading across the Gulf of Finland. But, no, it was a full-fledged cruise ship. A full-fledged banana plantation consisting of twelve decks of unfettered capitalism filled with marks playing some big corporation's expensive variation on three-card monte. And, really, that's close to a literal description, because you can gamble on the ship. The only things it lacked for the full experience of rapacious cowboy capitalism were open prostitutes and heroin dealers (likely they were there but under wraps). The powers that own everything have this absolutely Freudian need to separate you from your hard-earned shekels while convincing you that you had a great time with a bunch of smelly, vaguely hostile strangers. There's a sucker born every minute, and, if you're lucky, it could be you.



Don't get me wrong. I'm not completely down on a mode of transportation where someone can kill you, dump your carcass overboard before it stinks or gets stiff, and nobody will notice or give a shit. In a way, that's an art form.  I'm just more into good times that cost fifty cents (which, coincidentally, is what most European public bathrooms cost). And there's nothing that meets that criterion on the cruise shit...oops, mistyped...cruise ship. Everything onboard is designed to create a vacuum directly pulling away your cash and/or credit cards. But what about if you bring a date, you ask? Then the two of you can have a special, connected experience together. Hell, no. Then everything would cost twice as much.  Actually, it would probably cost more than twice as much, because Date would most likely want to lay out a pile of cash for stupid shit that I wouldn't even vaguely consider worth twitching over, much less going into full bloody convulsions. And I didn't have any out-of-bounds shrieking children to browbeat into shutting the fuck up and forcefully being subjugated into a trembling modicum of simulated frightened peace, though there were others closeby lucky enough to experience that golden nugget of family solidarity and warmth.



On the plus side, if you buy a deck ticket, like I did, it's way cheap. On the minus side, if you buy a deck ticket, there is no place at all for you to park your still-live carcass (at least until someone kills you and dumps you over the side without a trace; then you don't have to worry about it any more). And they don't really tell you that. It seems like what they really want to sell you is a cabin, which can either be a cramped cubby with no windows, a stately suite fit for royalty, or some level of hell somewhere in between.  But what the teeming masses want are the cheap seats in the balcony, so they have to oblige if they are to maximize profits.


I luckily boarded early, wandered the decks looking for purpose like a ghost who committed a horrific shipdeck murder, and finally on the top deck, I found an uncomfortable bench to actually even lie down on. Of course, once I staked out my little nap cove, I had to lie down to keep the space free to lie down, while other ghoul marks wandered the decks like zombies, looking for elusive peace. But I couldn't just lie there for hours just to prove a point. After a bit, I got bored and had to get up to roam the decks, just to see the best that horrible cruise capitalist human stripmining had to offer, while fully cognizant of the fact that my premium shithole would get immediately occupied by some other unwashed carbon-based life form (which it did). But I saw people who had crammed themselves into much poorer spaces, people splayed out on the floor, people sitting upright whose eyes pleaded, "is this all there is?" I wandered into a few places I got chased out of by people speaking a language I don't understand; that's always fun and amusing, especially if you grin and act stupid in response to their mercenary, exclusionary power play of annoyance. There was the casino, but I think I'd rather cut my dick off. And it was amusing warching the cigarette junkies get the monkey off their backs in sideways rain on the "sundeck". Overall, the most tempting feature for me was the vastly overpriced popcorn, but not quite tempting enough to actually take the plunge. Nope, I was just doomed to the unenhanced deck ticket. It was my curse as well as my blessing.



And, like I said before, ghost suck commerce buttfuck cruise did have its fully redeeming feature. I wrote this, which was my good time that cost me less than fifty cents. Did I mention it's an ideal place for unsolved murder?

Monday, July 16, 2018

Riga, And Witnessing A Horrible Catastrophe There

I had a bus ride that was around seven and a half hours from Sovetsk, Russia, to Riga, Latvia. I don't know why the bus ride was so long, because I talked to a guy who came from Vilnius and he said his bus ride was only about four hours, and it looks to be roughly the same distance on the map. But we did stop at the Russian border for about an hour and a half, and then we stopped in Šiauliai, Lithuania for a little over a half hour, so that accounted for some of it.


I got to Riga around eight at night, but daylight lasts pretty long in this part of the world, so I still had some time. The hostel was just a few blocks away from the bus station, so it was a quick walk of less than ten minutes to get there. The first thing I set out to do was to find a place to eat dinner since I hadn't eaten all day. I had mistakenly left my pocket bag of nuts, seeds and dried fruits in my backpack, which was in the luggage storage below the bus. I found a noodle place close to the hostel called Wok to Walk, where they made noodle bowls to order.  I satiated my hunger, and then went out to explore the city some. It started raining, so I had to get out my umbrella. But I only walked around for about an hour, and got back to the hostel around ten thirty and it was still fairly light outside though the sun had gone down.


The next day, I went out to check out the city again. A guy at my hostel who had lived in Tallinn for a while and frequently had come to Riga recommended a little cafe called Innocent, so I went to check it out. I went there to get some lunch (I got out a little late), and while I was eating, it started savagely pouring rain. I reached in my fanny pack for my umbrella and realized I had left it at the hostel; I had put it next to the bed to dry and forgot to get it the next day. So I waited for a while until it died down a bit, though it didn't subside much.  I finally decided to take the plunge, and headed out back to the hostel to get my umbrella. I was running a couple blocks at a time and then stopping to take refuge from the rain in doorways, and repeating that process until I got back to the hostel, slightly soaked. I decided to rest a bit, dry off, and charge my phone.


For some reason I wasn't feeling Riga much the first few days I was there. I think some of it was due to slight travel burnout; since I'm constantly traveling, every once in a while, I get a little more tired and need to rest. Riga was very nice, though. It's the biggest city in the Baltics, with a little under a million people. Each of the Baltic nations has a capital that is the largest city, and then all of the rest of their cities don't even come close in population, with the exception of Kaunas in Lithuania, which is pretty big.


Riga has a lot of beautifully sculpted parks in the city, and most of them have these weird caricature cutouts of a cartoonish couple with cocked heads, repeated over and over again dressed in different outfits. I never did find out what the deal was with that.


I did a lot of my exploring in the Old Town, which is probably the biggest tourist area of town. It's pretty easy to walk around there, and there are a lot of good restaurants in the area. That is where a lot of the parks are, and many are centered around the area surrounding the National Opera House, though there are some in other areas of town as well.  The old city wall is mostly gone, but a few parts of it remain, and the only original gate from the wall is the Swedish Gate, built after the Swedes conquered the area that is now Latvia. One interesting old building is the House of the Blackheads, which was reconstructed after Riga was blown to shreds in WWII. Another interesting sight in the Old Town is the Freedom Monument, built to commemorate soldiers who died during Latvia's War of Independence right after WWI. Rozena Iela is also in the Old Town, and it is the narrowest street in Riga. Supposedly some people can touch both walls in either side at the same time, but I couldn't when I tried. Maybe I wasn't at the narrowest part.


I also explored the New Town some, and took one long walk out to the island of Ķīpsala, which was a quiet little island in the middle of the Daugava River, though there is a commercial area with a mall on the side of it farthest from the center. Some of the houses there looked like they had been frozen in time. I also checked out the neighborhood farther out from Ķīpsala, which was Āgenskalns. There was a street market in Āgenskalns, but it wasn't open while I was there. There is also an interesting Art Nouveau District with some fascinating architecture, though Riga in general is famous for its Art Nouveau buildings scattered around the city.


I went to Miera Iela, or Peace Street, in Riga. An old saying claims Rigans start their lives at one end of the street and end their lives at the other side, because the street has a hospital on one end of it and a cemetery at the other end. There were a lot of interesting small restaurants and clubs there, though it wasn't really a clubbing district; most of them were pretty understated. And I heard a lot of bands jamming in some of the apartment buildings there. It seemed like a place where artists and musicians would hang out.


On the day before I left, I was walking through a tunnel near the rail station, heading back to the hostel from my day's wanderings, when I saw this guy walking in my direction suddenly start to walk erratically. He quickly looked like he was taking a dramatic turn for the worse, as he started staggering sideways back and forth, looking like he was completely losing his sense of balance. He then lurched sideways in one direction spasmodically, looking like he was trying to make one last desperate and unsuccessful attempt to regain his footing, when he suddenly just fell backwards limply, with his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. I mean, he fell in the worst way, straight backwards. I watched in horror from a distance too far away to do anything, as he dropped like a rag doll and smashed the back of his head on the concrete base of a tunnel column with the full force of his weight, and the base of the back of his head splattered with blood against the column. I was frozen in disbelief for a second, and then I remembered that there had been some policemen near the entrance to the tunnel talking to some people, so I ran back to where they were. But when I got there, I realized that I didn't have the language skills to explain what had happened, so I tried with a sense of urgency to describe what happened in pantomime, pointing frantically into the tunnel. They looked at me quizzically, but luckily, a Latvian guy came up at that moment to tell them what had happened. We all went into the tunnel, and the guy was laying there against the column with his eyes open and unfocused, and his mouth gaping. The police put rubber gloves on, and started to lift the guy up. While they were lifting him, he regained some consciousness, and tried to get up on his own, but the police apparently told him not to, and he didn't seem very successful at it, though he kept trying. It looked like he had a pretty bad head injury and was bleeding profusely from the back of the head. I watched the whole thing helplessly for a while, and eventually left the scene, as I had nothing further to contribute, but this whole spectacle disturbed me greatly, particularly since I had had a robbery incident a couple months before in which I ended up with a concussion, facial and head contusions, and no memory of what happened. And it took me quite a while to recover, but hopefully I've recovered by now. If an apparently healthy looking person could suddenly falter so badly that he just drops like a stone seconds later and smashes his skull open, is there really any sense of security about our bodily integrity? But people have sudden drastic medical issues all the time. All we can do is hope that it doesn't happen to us, and if it does, that it doesn't turn out too badly. I don't know what eventually happened to that guy, but I hope for the best, though it looked absolutely dreadful.




I stayed at: Riga Hostel, Merķeļa iela 1, Centra rajons, Riga, LV-1050, Latvia. The hostel seemed OK, but my room was very crowded and cramped, with very little room to put down my stuff. There were lockers outside the room, but they were very small, maybe only big enough to hold my fanny pack, and I didn't use a locker. Apparently in the last couple days I was there, there was a bedbug infestation in the room next door to mine that the hostel didn't seem to be doing anything to remedy, so I was glad to get out of there and move on before it spread. The building the hostel was in had a different hostel on each floor, run by different companies, and the one I stayed in was on the fourth floor.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Sovetsk, And A Little Jarring Surprise

I took the bus to Sovetsk, which is a small village on the border of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast and Lithuania, separated by the Neman River. But I was soon to find out about something that I hadn't counted on. I got off the bus on arrival, loaded up my backpack, which I had stowed in the bus' baggage compartment, and set off to walk to the hostel where I was staying, which was only a few blocks away. I had walked a couple of blocks when I realized there was a car tailing me slowly as I walked. It was an older model, Eastern European looking car. I tried to ignore it for a bit, but then the car pulled up beside me, and a middle-aged stocky guy got out. He started talking to me in Russian, and I wasn't able to follow what he was saying. His tone was conversational, and not hostile or anything, and at first I thought he was trying to solicit an informal taxi ride. I shook my head and said, "Nyet," and he pulled out a wallet with some kind of identification. So he was some kind of policeman. He kept talking in Russian, and I still didn't understand, so I said, "nie ponimayu," which means, "I don't understand" in Russian. I asked him, "Passport?" because I assumed he wanted to see my identification, and he answered, "Da." So I pulled out my passport, migration card, and registration card from the last hostel in Kaliningrad; the Russian authorities usually want to see all of that, and it is legally required for you to have all that stuff on you. He inspected my documents, then asked me, "Angliski?" which means, "English?" I shook my head to indicate yes. He pulled out his phone, and pulled up an app that was like Google Translate. He spoke into the app and showed me the results. "You are a foreigner in a Special Border Zone. Do you know anything about that?" the words on the phone said. "Nyet," I answered, kind of taken aback. Uh-oh. What now?



He paused for a minute, and it looked like he was uncertain what to say to me. He then spoke into his phone again, and the phone read out the words, "Since you are in a Special Border Zone, you will not be able to go closer to the river than Victory Street. Do you understand?" I nodded my assent. He asked me verbally, "Piatiy Ugol?" which was the name of the hostel where I was staying. So he either knew where I was staying already, or he deduced it from the direction I was walking. I nodded my head to indicate yes. He typed, "Have a good stay," and held out his hand to shake hands, and I shook his hand, and said "Spasiba" (thank you).



I kept walking down the street, and he watched me head up to the hostel, following me a short bit. I found the door but could not open it in my nervousness from him watching me. I tried to walk down the block to see if there was another door, but he motioned me to go back to that door, and motioned that it was upstairs. Ah, I push, and not pull. I gave him a meek wave, and headed in. Well, that went better than it could have, I guess.


I poked my head in several places on the way up the stairs. Nope, that's not a hostel. Neither is that, it looks like some kind of official government office. I got to the top of the stairs, and saw the word, "Reception" in English. I went through the door, and there was a friendly-looking woman on the other side. She said in halting English that she spoke a little bit of English, and I answered in halting Russian that I spoke a little bit of Russian. She asked me for my documents, so I handed them over, and she made copies. She smiled in recognition when she saw the registration from the hostel in Kaliningrad, and said she had worked at that hostel two years ago. She said she was the only one working there, and it was a new hostel, and I was the first American to stay there. She showed me my room, which had five beds in it that weren't bunk beds like in most hostels, and was quite spacious. I was the only one staying in the room, so I had my pick of beds; they all seemed about the same, so I picked one by a window.



I told her that the police had stopped me, and told me about the Special Border Zone stuff. She said, oh, yes, you can't go down by the river, but as long as you stay away from that area, you will be OK. So it was common knowledge. I wonder if I strayed into the forbidden area, everybody would be looking at me, like, "he's not supposed to be there." Maybe.


I got settled in and went out for a foray into the town. I pulled out my phone to check Google Maps to see where Victory Street was, so I could stay out of the forbidden zone. First, I had to look up the word "Victory" on Google Translate because I had just seen the word translated on the cop's phone. The word that came up was, "победа" or "pobeda". I searched for thst street on Google Maps and nothing came up,  but I found it later under a slight spelling variation by eyeballing the map. It turns out that street is the town's main street, with a lot of businesses on either side, and set up as a pedestrian street, with benches right in the middle of the street for relaxing and people-watching. Also, the street is not a uniform distance from the border, and kind of went diagonal to it, and I was unclear on how far I could be from the border outside the length of that street. But I tried my best to comply with the order I'd been given, and constantly checked Google Maps to make sure I wasn't in an unapproved area. The street was several blocks away from the border at the farthest, and about a block away at the closest. But a good chunk of the center of the city was off limits to me, including a Lithuanian pancake restaurant that I really wanted to visit but couldn't since it was in the forbidden zone. There were a lot of people walking around the town with camouflage uniforms on. But I don't want to know anything; I just want to keep my head down and be a compliant tourist.


The first day I was there, I walked through my officially approved areas, looking for a restaurant. I found two restaurants on the main street that I wanted to try on Google Maps, but both of them had the area where they used to be emptied out, and workmen preparing the space. I was bummed, because I was starving as I hadn't eaten all day yet. But finally I found a restaurant called Mama Mia that was awesome. It was mostly Italian, but also had local dishes, and, to my surprise, their menu was not only in Russian and English, but also about a third of it was dedicated to vegetarian and vegan dishes,  and not just for show, but good, solid fare. And there was a lot of variety on the menu. It's very rare to see that in a restaurant in a small Russian village.


One thing I hadn't seen in Kaliningrad Oblast are the stolovayas, the ubiquitous cheap cafeteria-style restaurants that are plentiful throughout many areas of Russia. One of the closed restaurants I went to was a stolovaya, but I didn't see any others, and I didn't run into any in Kaliningrad, though I didn't look very hard there.


I walked throughout the parts of the village that were available to me, and there wasn't a lot of it. It's a small village with a little over 40,000 people, so the center is not very big. But there was a nice, spacious park at the heart of it. I was really only here to wait for the bus to Latvia (see my post on Kaliningrad for details), but I made the most of my time. On my way walking to the bus station to leave the village, there was a police checkpoint about a block in the other direction. I don't want to know.  I'm just glad I wasn't walking that way.  When the bus was heading to the border, I got to see some of the forbidden zone for the first time. Crossing the border into Lithuania was no big deal at all; I didn't get asked a single question on either side if the border, but there was a lot of waiting on both sides. All in all, with the waits on both sides if the border, the bus was stopped for about an hour and a half. But then we proceeded through smoothly, and we were onward to Riga.



In Sovetsk I stayed at: Piatiy Ugol Hostel, 1 Ulitsa Zhukovskogo 3 этаж, Sovetsk, 238750, Russian Federation. The hostel was nice, it had single beds (5 in the room I was in) instead of bunk beds, and my room was very spacious. No lockers, but there was plenty of storage space. I was the only guest in the entire hostel the whole time I was there, and was often the only person there, as it was the type of hostel where the manager is not there most of the time. There was free breakfast along with the room, and it was prepared just for me since I was the only one there. It was a great deal at a little over ten dollars a night. The room was up two flights of stairs, so we would call that the third floor in the US, and the second floor most other places. No doors were locked from the street to the room, but the manager gave me a key to the hostel's main door late on the first day of my stay. I never ended up using it; I tried it on the wrong keyhole and it didn't work, and the manager showed me the right way to use it later, but I was leaving shortly after that. The manager was very nice and helpful when she was there, and when she wasn't, she left her phone number, which I never had to use.

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Kaliningrad During The World Cup

After visiting Minsk and returning to Lithuania a second time, I decided to go to Kaliningrad, Russia. Kaliningrad is an exclave of Russia, which means it is in bya piece of land that is completely separated from the rest of Russia. Up until shortly after World War II, Kaliningrad had been Königsburg, and had been part of Germany.  So there is this rich Prussian and German heritage there in this small, separate part of Russia. And it was also hosting World Cup soccer matches while I was there. I don't follow soccer much, but it was interesting to see the bustle going on from all the foreign tourists, which it seemed the city was not used to.


I took a bus from Vilneus to Kaliningrad. When crossing the border to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, we were all herded off the bus to wait for a while. The bus driver collected all of our passports in a pile. One by one, they called each passenger up to the window, and then when they were done with that passenger, the passenger would call the name of the next person. I figured I would be last, because the passengers did not speak my language, and would have difficulty summoning me. I was half right. After each passenger had gone up to the window, I waited a moment, and then approached the window.  But the guy behind the glass shook his finger to motion me not to approach. I waited a few minutes, but nothing happened. Then the bus driver motioned me to get on the bus. I never did have to go up to the window. Then everybody else got in the bus, and the bus driver divided up all the passports among four or five passengers to pass out to everybody. They called out names, and passed out the passports, but mine was not among them. We waited a little longer, and some official motioned the bus driver to walk up to the window. He returned with my passport, and started the bus.


Well, that wasn't so bad, I thought. It took a while, but it was mostly waiting. But it turned out that was just the Lithuanian side. We approached the Russian side, and we all had to get off the bus again. They barked out some commands I didn't understand, and motioned us toward metal detectors to walk through to go inside. The bus driver came up to me with my backpack; apparently I was supposed to bring it with me. I walked through the metal detector, and put my bag on the belt to go through the machine. Seemed like fairly standard procedure to cross a border. A wonan came up to ask me some questions, but she didn't speak English. I couldn't answer her questions with my limited Russian, so she went and got a piece of paper with English questions written phonetically in Cyrillic script, and haltingly asked me the questions, to which I responded iin Russian when I could. She finished, and I waited with the rest of the people. Then a guy came up to me, flashed a badge, and said he was a federal marshal and he needed to ask me some questions. He spoke pretty good English. I was escorted into a room, and he closed the door.  He asked me some questions for a bit, and seemed satisfied with my answers. I'm just a tourist with nothing to hide, so hopefully it was routine. Then he welcomed me to Russia and I rejoined the other people waiting. Soon we headed back to the bus, reloaded our baggage, and got on. I was in Russia again. We headed towards Kaliningrad.


Russia has created a special deal for those who are arriving for the World Cup. For those who bought at least one match ticket their ticket serves as their visa, and they are issued a fan ID that gives them all kinds of perks as well. For instance, they got free public transportation on match days. One perk that I benefitted from was that  T-Mobile offered free 4g in Russia for the World Cup. I use T-Mobile because they give me free data in most of the countries I go to, but it is usually 2g and very slow. So, strangely enough, I had the fastest internet I've had anywhere, and I was not as dependent on wi-fi.


Kaliningrad doesn't have a metro, but it does have trams, buses, and small private vans called marshrutkas. All of these options are pretty much dirt cheap. The buses are twenty rubles, which is about thirty cents at sixty-three rubles to the dollar. There is a conductor on the bus on addition to the driver, and the conductor will approach you shortly after you board to take your money, in exchange for a ticket. I didn't take any trams, but I assume it works pretty much like the buses. The marshrutkas are only twenty-two rubles, and you pay the driver when you get off.


There are sellers of kvass in little booths all over the city. Kvass is a fermented beverage made from rye bread, and it is supposed to be high in probiotics. I'd describe the taste as being that of rye bread soda. It's not too sweet, and fairly pleasant. The price goes down the larger of a quantity you buy. I bought it several times, and the largest quantity I bought was a liter, but I could have bought much more. Just a cup of it was about 25 rubles, or somewhere around 40 cents in US dollars.


I spent several days taking in the sights in Kaliningrad, but the highlight was a tour bus to the Curonian Spit. I set up the tour the day after I arrived in Kaliningrad, but the tour was a couple of days later. On the day of the tour, I woke up with intense pain in my right pinky toe when I put on my shoe. The pain was so bad I could hardly walk, but I had set up the tour, so I wanted to do it anyway.  The tour guide was talking a lot, but it was all in Russian, so I didn't understand what she was saying. Most of the stops were short walks, but walking was staggeringly painful. Most of the time we were on the bus, I took my shoe off to avoid the pain.


The first stop was the Dancing Forest. This was a forest where the trees grew in strange, twisty ways, seemingly randomly. I was in a lot of pain, but walked around the whole loop pathway through the area.


At one point we stopped for two hours so people could walk to the beach on the Baltic Sea on the west side of the spit, which was not far, and walk to the lagoon on the east side, which was a couple of kilometers away. I was in so much pain that I figured I would skip the east side. I hobbled toward the beach, and stopped to sit on a bench to take my shoe and stick off to see what was going on with my toe. My toe was about twice its normal size, and bright crimson red, and so painful to the slightest touch that I could barely even touch it. Great, I probably had an infection. I tried to play out in my mind what I would do in Russia with a painfully infected toe. I kept my shoe off and walked toward the beach. The pain was hardly noticeable with the shoe off. I got in the salt water of the sea and stayed there for a while to soak my toe, hoping that would help.


After the beach, I sat on a bench again to massage my toe to see if it would help. At first it hurt like crazy just to touch it, but i started kneding it firmer and firmer, building up my tolerance, until I was applying some fairly strong pressure. And that seemed to help a little. Screw it, I thought, I'm going to put my shoe on and walk to the east side of the spit. I only had about forty minutes left to walk about two kilometers and back, but I figured I would make it if I walked briskly. And I was on the other side if the world, and when would I get this chance again? So I put my shoe on, blocked out the intense pain, and walked the two kilometers. But it was worth it. The dunes on the lagoon were beautiful, and the forest on the way there was amazing.


The last stop was the bird sanctuary,  where there was a big net to catch and band migratory birds, and there was a presentation where a ranger showed the different bands for the different birds and explained the procedure. He also banded a bird and set it free.


Though I was worried about the infected toe, I kept it monitored and massaged it frequently. If it had gotten worse, or if i had seen any radiating red lines leading away from it, I would have sought medical help. But it resolved itself on its own within a couple of days, thankfully. By the next day, most of the swelling had gone down, and while it was still painful to walk, it was much more tolerable, and by the second day, the pain was even less. I'd say three or four days later it was completely back to normal.


One of the highlights in Kaliningrad was the House of Soviets. This was a building that was built in the 1970s on the ruins of the former Konigsberg Castle. It was never completed and it was never occupied because it was structurally unsound. There was a fan area for the World Cup matches that was set up right in front of it. You could also see some of the walls of the demolished castle in front of it, tiward the street. There was also a really good vegan restaurant right down the street from it.  Fairly close to there was the Museum of the World Ocean which was spread out along the river.  I thought there would be a display of aquatic animals there, but it was mostly devoted to military maritime transportation. The was a submarine there, the B-413, that people could board, and that was interesting to see.


Right in the middle of the Pregolya River is the Island of Kant. This has a big park called Sculpture Park filled with sculptures. Before WWII, the whole island was covered with buildings and activity, and there are placards all over the park showing that was there before. On the island also are Königsberg Cathedral and Immanuel Kant's tomb, connected to the back of the cathedral.

There are a lot of forts around Kaliningrad, but many of them are not open to the public. One that I went to that was open was Fort Friedrichsburg, or rather, Friedrichsburg Gate. Most of the fort had been demolished, but some of the rooms in the entrance way and the courtyard are still there. There are also a lot of gates still around from the city's defensive walls all over town and I visited several of them. One of the weirdest and eeriest defensive structures was Grolman Bastion. The main building is not open to the public, and I got run off by a guard when I tried to go in one of the gates. But I went into another one, and nobody stopped me, though I couldn't get far, and only around to the back of the building for a bit rather than inside. There were some businesses that were installed in parts of some of some of the ancillary buildings. To the north and south, stretching out on lines like walls, were these long, fortified hills that had paths along the top of them and were wooded like a forest. I walked on the paths, and it was really creepy up there. There was nobody up there for a while except for a few kids running around, and quite a ways down the path, in the middle of the forest, I saw a couple of cops just incongruently sitting there. They were facing the other way so I just backed away quietly so as not to attract their attention. All along the hills stretching either way from the bastion, there were patially buried brick buildings, and vents to stuff that must have been underground. I could glimpse a walking path on the other side of the bastion down the back side of the hill, but it was too steep to get down in that direction, and I couldn't find any path down the hill to get there.


My plan was to go to Riga, Latvia from Kaliningrad. I went to the bus station in Kaliningrad to look at the bus schedules. But I found out there is only one bus that leaves every day from Kaliningrad to Riga, and it leaves late at night and travels overnight. I am not terribly keen on overnight buses, but I kept it in mind as a last resort. I saw there's another bus that leaves twice a week, but it departs really early in the morning, which I preferred not to do also, since I'd have to get to the bus station from the hostel really early, but it'd be better than traveling overnight. Also, since the bus only leaves twice a week, I would have had to extend my stay in Kaliningrad for three nights longer than I had planned. Now all of these options were doable, but not preferable.  But I cobbled together another option. There are domestic buses that go to Sovetsk, a town in Kaliningrad Oblast right on the Lithuanian border, just about every half hour. So I figured I would just go to the bus station and get a ticket on the spot when I was ready to leave, rather than reserving one in advance, I'd stay in Sovetsk for a couple of days, and then I'd catch the early morning bus to Riga from Sovetsk instead of from Kaliningrad, when it would arrive later in the day and not super early. That option would require me to either spend three nights in Sovetsk, or extend my stay in Kaliningrad another day and spend two nights. I chose to stay in Kaliningrad one more day, since Sovetsk is a small village and I figured Kaliningrad would be more interesting (though a woman who worked at the hostel told me that Sovetsk was an interesting town with lots of history). And this was a rare moment in my trip when I had absolutely no future plans already reserved.



So, with that plan in mind, I made some future plans in for the next few weeks, except for the bus to Sovetsk, which I planned to get at the bus station right before leaving. That was a bit risky because the buses could be full, but with buses leaving multiple times in the day, I figured there would be one that had space. And, in fact, when I got to the bus station, they sold me a ticket for a bus heading in three minutes, so I got on the bus and left immediately.


I stayed at: Hostel Akteon Lindros, Ulitsa Svobodnaya 23 apt 22, Kaliningrad,  236000, Russian Federation. The hostel would have been nice, but my room smelled horribly of pesticide, and it was nauseating. The place was otherwise decent. There were only Russian speakers staying there, and only one staff member spoke a little English, but she spoke Spanish much better, so we conversed in Spanish much of the time. About half of the people staying there seemed like workers rather than tourists. The hostel was easy to find and only up a few steps. You have to be buzzed in to get in, sometimes it takes a while, but there is staff there 24 hours. It had a nice kitchen, and refrigerator space seemed available the whole time I was there. Also there was little problem using the bathrooms though the were only two of them.

Monday, July 2, 2018

Minsk In A Pinch

I was not originally planning to go to Belarus because they have a difficult visa to get, and the previous time I had looked into it, which was about three years ago, I decided not to apply for the visa. Which turned out to be a good decision at the time, because I might not have been able to use it, since I got called back to the States on my last journey earlier than I thought I was going to return.  But a couple of months ago, I looked at Belarus again and found out that in the meantime, after the last time I had looked into it, they had created a visa-free way to visit, which was rather shocking to me for this country that is still very much modeled on the former Soviet Union. But I guess they had seen the tourist bonanza that the neighboring Baltic states had reaped, and decided to try to get a piece of the action. There are a few strings attached, or rather, there are some strange conditions to visiting visa-free, if you come from one of the countries that they will allow to do this. You can only go in for a maximum of five days, and you can only fly in and out, and only to and from Minsk Airport. And you can't come in from or depart to Russia. So what I did is I booked a return flight to and from Vilneus, Lithuania, which is probably the closest place to fly in from. I stayed for four days, just short of the five that I was allowed to stay. It was really only three days, but every portion of a day that you spend somewhere counts as a day, so it counted as four days.


I arrived in Minsk fairly late. I prefer to travel earlier in the day so I can have plenty of time to figure it how to get where I'm going, and to get settled. But I didn't have a lot of choices on cheap flights. So my flight got there about nine at night, and by the time that I got through immigration and got my baggage picked up, it was nearly ten. Getting through immigration was a lot easier than I thought it worked be. They just checked my passport, checked my health insurance on my phone (another requirement for the visa-free visit), and that was about it; I was through quickly. And there was no customs check at all. I was pretty amazed by how quickly and smoothly it went.


So now I had to get into the city. The airport is quite a distance from the city; about fifty kilometers. There is a bus that goes there, and since I got in so late, there were only two buses left to run for the day. A taxi driver offered to take me for twenty bucks, but I declined, saying I'd take the bus. I'm always leery about taxis in foreign countries, especially if I haven't been to that country before, because some of them can possibly be scammy or dangerous. I was in time for the penultimate bus, but it filled up before I got to the door, and the driver motioned that I couldn't get on. Come on, I motioned, I'll stand. But he was steadfast, and didn't let me on, too my disappointment. The taxi driver came up to me again, and I told him I would take the next bus. But I wasn't so confident about that. There was only one bus left for the day, and it wasn't for forty-five minutes. So I thought about it for a few minutes, and I found the taxi driver, and asked him, "Twenty dollars?" He nodded his head, and we were off to his cab.


But as we were walking there, a couple of Mongolian women came up to me and said they needed a ride into town, could we split the cab? I was OK with that, but the cab driver was negative about it. Why not, I asked him. I was thinking I would save some money, and I felt a little safer with a couple of other passengers, too. He grudgingly accepted, and the Mongolians said they would split the fare fifty-fifty; that was fine with me. I'd pay half and they would pay half.  Only one of them spoke halting English so I mostly talked with her, in a mix of her bad English and my bad Russian. She asked me if I had a hostel and I said yes, you can come to the hostel and see if they have spaces available. I gave the cab driver the hostel's phone number, and he called the hostel to see where it was; I had told him to ask the hostel if they had a couple of spaces too, but he didn't understand me, and didn't ask.


We arrived at the hostel about an hour after leaving the airport. Minsk was a lot bigger than I thought it was and the cab driver pointed out some sights on the way.  I paid for the cab and told the women we could settle up later, but they paid me shortly thereafter with a mix of US dollars and Belarusian rubles, which was fine with me. It turned out there were spaces at the hostel for the two women, so that all worked out.


Minsk was a lot colder than most of the places I had been recently (with the exception of a couple of days in Berlin), and it was raining a lot. I had been used to mostly t-shirt weather, but I had to break out the long sleeves and a raincoat. It was very late when I arrived at the hostel and all the places to eat nearby were closed, so I didn't get dinner, but I had some trail mix to munch on. I usually keep a constant baggie of nuts and dried fruits in my pocket; when it runs low, I'll go to a local store and find some more nuts, seeds, and dried fruits to add to the mix, rotating the mix for variety.


The next day I just wandered around and checked out the city. There are signs in many places telling people not to walk on the grass, and people seem to take this pretty seriously as I didn't see a single person walking on the grass; I kept in mind that Belarus still has a very active KGB. So, I figured, when in Minsk, do as the Minchyani do, and I stayed off the grass. I also didn't see any graffiti at all. Minsk has some beautiful parks, including Victory Park, its crown jewel, which follows the path of the Svislach River, and borders the monumental Palace of Independence, which contains a World War Two museum, or, as they call it there, The Museum of the Great Patriotic War. Also, there is Gorky Park, which contains many amusement park rides (including an enormous ferris wheel which is supposed to have some of the best views of the city, but the amusement park was closed when I went there, so I didn't have a chance to ride it), and a large sports complex.



Outside the Palace of Independence, and around the city in various locations, crews were preparing for Belarus' Independence Day, which falls on July 3.  But this was no ordinary Independence Day, it was an Independence Day dedicated to Belarus' one hundredth anniversary of independence from the Russian Empire (notwithstanding their later inclusion into the USSR), so they were celebrating their centenary. In fact, all of the Baltic states are celebrating their centenaries as well this year. Unfortunately, I was already scheduled to leave Minsk on July 2, so I missed the main event capped by a huge concerts, theatrical events, and a parade, though I did catch many of the street concerts leading up to the big celebration, including a jazz concert in the area near Minsk City Hall.


Another attraction in Minsk is the Island of Tears on the Svislach River. This small island has a bridge that leads to it and had a small memorial to the mothers of lost soldiers.



The next day I hung out with Howie from NYC and BethAnn from Melbourne and we trudged around the city in pouring rain and considerably colder temperatures. The day before, it had rained sporadically, but on this day (July 1), it poured down for most of the day. I had a raincoat, and so did Howie, so I let BethAnn use my umbrella. We checked out the interior of the Great Patriotic War Museum, which I gazed walked by the day before but hadn't entered, and we found a little nook for some authentic Belarusian food. One interesting thing that the three of us saw was a trolleybus driver who reconnected a pole that had gotten disconnected from the wires above, cutting off the electricity, and bringing the trolleybus to a halt. The driver jumped out and repositioned the pole back on the wire using a long pole tool that was specifically designed for that task. I always wondered how the trolleybus drivers kept their vehicles close enough to the wires to stay connected, since they drive on the street and not on tracks like many trams do. Apparently they can stray a bit and get disconnected. We also wandered around the central city area and then Howie went off to meet some friends to watch one of the World Cup matches while BethAnn and I sauntered through the big underground shopping mall.


The next day, on July 2, I had to fly back to Vilneus. I was going to take the metro to the bus station, and then take a bus to the airport, but it was pouring rain again, so I decided not to walk with my backpack to the metro station, and I took a cab to the bus station instead. Taking a cab to the bus station was much cheaper than taking it all the way to the airport, about four dollars, though the metro to the bus station would have cost about sixty cents. And the bus to the airport, which was the bulk of the trip, was only about three dollars.


I stayed at: Trinity Hostel, Starovilenskaya Street 12, Tsentralny District, 220116 Minsk, Belarus. You need to take your shoes off at the entrance, which is common in countries in the Russian sphere. It was delightfully social and international, and had staff members who spoke very good English, and one who even spoke fluent Spanish; I conversed with her in Spanish for quite a while. The rooms were nice but mine was a bit cramped, but there were outlets for every bed and nice, decent wi-fi in the common area the first day but it barely extended into my room (but cut off frequently in the room); wi-fi didn't work after the first day but a staff member set me up with an alternative method that only worked near the front desk. Bathroom time was sometimes difficult but not as bad as some places I've stayed. It was in a really great central location, right on Trinity Hill near the Island of Tears and right next to the Svislach River. Transportation to the bus station and train station is easy to arrange via metro and about a five-minute walk to the metro station. Getting to the airport is a little more involved (see above for my descriptions of how I got in and out), but still fairly easy. No free breakfast, but many restaurants nearby. Nice kitchen, but crowded, you might not be able to get in to cook when it's busy. They advertised tours of the surrounding areas, but the tours are contingent in getting people together and happen sporadically; none materialized while I was there, which was a slight disappointment, but there was plenty to do in the city. It's not a huge party hostel, which is a plus for me, and drinking is in fact not allowed on the premises. I'd recommend it just for the social atmosphere as it is a good place to meet a wide range of people.