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.
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