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.
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