Karaganda

It was a relatively short train from Astana to Karaganda, at least compared to the trains that I've been taking lately. It was only a five hour voyage, and it only cost around four dollars. When I got to Karaganda, I found that bus #43 went to Mira Blvd., which was only a few blocks away from my hostel, so I took the bus. But at first I was waiting at the wrong bus stop...it was a bus stop only for out-of-town buses. I figured this out after a couple of buses stopped there with placards indicating they were going to other cities. I walked down the road a few blocks to the next bus stop, and had success.


Karaganda's history is intertwined with two nain things: coal and gulags. Karaganda's economy has historically been dependent on coal mining, and I saw more than one monument around town that had some heroic figure(s) triumphantly displaying an enormous lump of coal to the sky. And to some extent, it is still dependent on coal, though the immediate area has been pretty mined out to near depletion. There are some serious environmental consequences from the coal mining. The former mine tunnels are filled with chemically laced water, and the ground around them is too unstable and polluted to build on. There are some sections of the city that had to be relocated because there were mine tunnels underneath that could collapse at any moment. And there are large bodies of water all around that look like lakes, but in reality they are collapsed mine tunnels, revealing the water in the tunnels that came to the surface after the tunnels collapsed.


And the second legacy of Karaganda is gulags. The Kazakhstan gulags were where many intellectuals from across the Soviet Union were sent for anti-Soviet activities, and many of them were forced to ply their professions in the camps, so scientists made many discoveries, doctors ran infirmaries, and engineers and architects designed many wonders that were built by laborers, all directed from behind barbed wire and shadowed by guards. Artists and musicians created their art; the artists were not allowed to sign their works so many of the paintings and sculptures are of unknown origin.



Despite these grim marks on their history, Karaganda is kind of a charming place with upbeat, friendly people. The first day, I mostly wandered around the vicinity of the main street, Buqar-Jyrau Avenue. It was cold, windy, and rainy, and sleet fell for a short while, but it switched back to rain. There was an immense monument to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and many sights along the main avenue. There was a monument to Kazakh Independence, a big, sprawling Central Park with a long walking street adorned with glitz, an amusement park, and a lake in the middle.


I had been corresponding with Anastasia, who went by Nastya, who was an English teacher at a local school there. I had been introduced to her by my friend Pete in St. Petersburg, who was introduced to me by Dave in Missouri; they had all been English teachers at the same school there. Actually, I think I've met five people now in different corners of the world who taught at that school. Nastya set up dual adventures for me; a visit to Karlag, the headquarters of a vast forced labor camp that covered an immense part of the Kazakh SSR's territory in Soviet times, and an authentic Kazakh meal prepared by her mother-in-law. It was great meeting Nastya and her husband; it's always nice to have a connection in the cities I visit. Both of them were from Karaganda and knew a lot about the area.


The next day, I had planned to visit some parts of the city that I hadn't been to, but I came down with a violent stomach bug. I must have gotten a local bug from some food or water. So I started in my room and waited it out. Then I remembered I had some psyllium in my pack, so I started taking a small spoonful every few minutes or so, along with some baking soda in water to douse the sour stomach. Sure enough, the psyllium soaked up all the demons in my belly, and I was feeling much better. It was too bad I didn't make it out that day because the weather was mostly better.


But the next day I had to move on to Almaty. This time I walked to the train rather than taking the bus; it was about an hour's walk. Sometimes I don't feel like walking that far with my full pack (it weighs about 25 kilos), but sometimes I don't mind.


I stayed at: Gostinitsa Alians, Jambyl Street 43, кв 1-7, Karagandy, 100000, Kazakhstan, telephone +7 701 772 4466. This was a guesthouse rather than a hostel. I had my own room there, though it had three beds in it so I am unclear as to whether I booked the whole room or just a bed and nobody else showed up. But I'm fairly sure I booked the room; that's what it looked like in the online booking. Also, there was a huge Kazakh wedding there so it was packed over the weekend (the first two days I was there), so if the were more beds available, I'm sure they would have filled them. The rooms were very economical, about eight dollars a night, but lacking a lot of basic amenities. There was no toilet paper at all the first day I was there. I probably could have asked the front desk for some, but I had some in my pack, so I just used it. But toilet paper showed up in one of the bathrooms the next day, and I had to ask on the third day. Also, it got really cold in the room at night. It got down to near freezing at night, and there was no heat, so I had to get up in the middle of the night and put on thermal underwear and steal another blanket from one of the other beds. Apparently most Karaganda houses don't turn on the heat until October and bear any cold that arises until then; they really need it for the winter when it regularly gets down to 30 below zero (it doesn't much matter at that point whether we're talking C or F; it's bone-chilling cold). And there was no kitchen to prepare food, though they had a restaurant with reasonable prices. I was hoping for a kitchen, though, because I had brought a lot of food with me. The wifi hardly ever worked. It would come on weakly for a few minutes, and then sputter out. There were adequate electrical outlets for me near my bed, but no light near the bed. There was decent storage but no big storage and no lockable storage, though the room door locked. The guesthouse was decent to middling shelter from the weather, but nothing fancy at all, and some might find it lacking, though I did appreciate a private room for a change.

From Yekaterinburg to Astana

I left Yekaterinburg early in the evening on this old Uzbek train that looked like a museum piece. In fact, many of the trains I saw running throughout Kazakhstan looked like they belonged on pedestals. The Uzbek train had a schedule showing the old Soviet name of Yekaterinburg, or Sverdlovsk. The train also made a lot of stops that weren't on the schedule; I guess the schedule just listed the major stops. At 10 pm, the lights suddenly went out on the train. Oh, well, I had my cell phone flashlight at least. But then after a while, they came back on while I was asleep, so I woke up and turned off my cabin light. It got fairly cold on the train at night. The Russian trains are usually heated, but this Uzbek one wasn't. And there were no blankets in the compartment so all I had to cover myself was a thin sheet.

The train crossed the Russia/Kazakh border at around 5 am, and stopped for a while, and Russian Authorities boarded the train. When they got to my compartment, they asked me some questions, took my migration pass, and they stamped my passport with an exit stamp. I was waiting for the Kazakh officials, but fell asleep. I woke up later and the train was moving. I realized, in shock, that I was fairly far into Kazakhstan and no Kazakh officials had stamped my passport for entry. I was wondering how that was going to work. But a few minutes later, right before the train pulled into Petropavl, a Kazakh official came into my compartment. He had this odd, retro-looking box with a keyboard on top, and it apparently had a camera inside, because he used it to take my picture. He also stuck my passport into a slot in the box, I'm guessing to scan it. He typed a bunch of stuff on the keyboard, asked me some questions, and then stamped my passport. I had never had my passport stamped so far inland into a country before.

I fell back asleep on the train, and was awakened by a guy who asked me in Russian if I wanted "plokh". Or that's what it sounded like. I had no idea what that was, he repeated it several times, and then said it was soup. I asked him how much it was, he said it was 200 rubles. Oh, good, they were still taking Russian money, because I had no Kazakh tenge yet. So I said yes, and he brought the soup served in what looked like a ceramic teapot, but with no spout. It was a very hearty and delicious soup, loaded with vegetables and garbanzos. When I order soup in a former Soviet country, I never know if I'll get something hearty and substantial, or minimal and watery with no flavor. Usually it's the former, but you never know.

I arrived at the main train station, Astana-1. I was really weary when I got there. Usually I will try to find a bus to the hostel, or just walk, but a taxi driver asked me if I wanted a ride and I accepted. The hostel was about 5 kilometers from the bus station, so the ride was not too long. When the taxi driver dropped me off at the building where the hostel was, I couldn't see any sign of the hostel in the building. I had to walk around the building several times, and ask some people, and nobody seemed to know anything about a hostel. I tried to call them on Skype with the number listed in my confirmation email, but I couldn't get enough signal for Skype to work. Finally, a local guy helped me out by calling them, found out that I had to get in a back door, and then, when inside, push the “4” button on the list of offices in the building, and they would let me in. Man, that took nearly a half hour. I wish these hidden hostels would send instructions with their confirmation emails as to where they are in the building and how to get in.

Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan, and has only been the capital since 1997. All over town, there are large signs that say "Astana 20", left over from last year's 20 year anniversary. Astana is divided by the Isham River into two sides, the New City and the Old City. I was staying in the Old City. Frankly, both sides looked equally new to me. Both sides had a city center that consisted of a whole bunch of buildings that looked like they had been built fairly recently, and put up fairly quickly. The old Soviet style of architecture was only visible in some of the older apartment buildings, and the newer buildings looked quite intricate and complex, though maybe somewhat slapdash. My first exploration was in the Old Town, just briefly. And the first thing I did was search for a Kazakh SIM card for my phone. I found it in a building called the Business Center next door, I went with the carrier Beeline because the guy who sold it seemed to think I'd get the best deal on data with it. I had been using my US carrier, T-Mobile, for roaming data everywhere I had been, and for several years, that worked great, and it was just seamless from country to country that I would receive data, though it was fairly slow most of the time. But I recently got a shocking text from them saying they are going to cut me off from roaming; apparently they have changed their policy so if more than 50% of your use is not in the US, you don't get to roam any more. And, in calling them, there appears to be no appeal, it's just the way it is. Apparently everybody who is a long-term traveler is just getting cut off. Well, this completely sucks for me because now I'm going to have to get a new SIM card every time I get to a new country. Some things I really don't like are that now I'm going to have to watch my data (I use a lot) because the SIM cards I get will have limits. Also, I use my US phone number for authentication for some things, and that is going to be a huge morass once I can't do that. But, on the plus side, the data will be faster, and probably cheaper, in most countries I'm in.

The next day, I walked to the new town, and on my way there, there was a spot that jutted up on the sidewalk, and I tripped on it. I wasn't able to catch my balance, and tumbled to the concrete. I had some minor abrasions on one hand and one knee. They were not too bad, but were actively bleeding, so I decided to try to find a pharmacy. It wasn't that easy to find a pharmacy; I had to poke around for about an hour, but I finally found one by asking some locals, and it was hidden inside a building, with no outside sign at all. I got some bandaids and some hydrogen peroxide, patched myself up, and continued on my journey.

The New City had a long walking boulevard on it called Nurzhol Bulvar that seemed to be the highlight of that side of town. It started along the main road that crossed the bridge from the Old City to the New City, and ended at the Presidential Palace. In between, there was an awful lot going on. It seemed to be the big hangout place for people. There is one tall building called the Ministry for Transport and Communications, but locals call it “The Lighter”. There are three green towers called the Northern Lights, and an assortment of other buildings along the way. There are also a lot of sculptures, and vendors selling food and other assorted items. There is a large tower topped by a round ball called the Bayterek Monument, and it is flanked by two golden towers. The Presidential Palace is at the end of the boulevard, and I arrived there after night fell, so I saw it all lit up at night.

I wandered around the New City at night, marveling at the light show that the city provided. A lot of the buildings are lit up with amazing colors and patterns. I wandered around for a couple of hours, but it was getting late, so I headed back to the main street to try to take a bus back to the hostel. I got almost to the stop, and I saw two buses that I knew headed in the right direction leave before I got to the bus stop. When I got to the bus stop, it was about 10:40 at night, and the schedule on the side of the bus stop indicated that the buses all stopped running between 10:30 and 11. Oh, crap, I had just missed those two buses that were the last ones. Then another bus pulled up, and I had no idea where it went, but I hopped on, hoping for the best, and it was pointing in the right direction. Well, it turned shortly after that, and I did go to the Old City, but in an entirely wrong direction. I asked the conductor if it was going to turn, and she indicated that it would, but it didn't turn far enough to go anywhere near where I wanted to go. But a woman on the bus saw my predicament, and motioned for me to get off the bus at the next stop. So I did, and she got off with me, and walked over to a cross street. I asked here if there was another bus there, and she said, no, we were going to take a taxi. In Astana, “taking a taxi” is not actually taking a taxi. It consists of putting your hand in the air to basically hitchhike from every passing car, and then bargaining for where you want to go and the price. But it is a very successful strategy. She put her hand up, and it was the second car that stopped. She talked to them in Kazakh, pointed to me, and told me they had arranged to take me for 500 tenge, or about a dollar and a half. I agreed, and got in, and she got in too. They drove me right to my hostel, and when I tried to pay them, they refused to accept it. I tried to be insistent about it, but they wouldn't hear of it, sending me off by saying, “Welcome to Kazakhstan!” in English.

I spent the rest of my time in Astana exploring the Old City some more, and it was interesting, though it didn't seem to have as many iconic sights as the New City. When it was time to leave, I found out the #3 and #10 buses went to the train station, so I headed to Respublika Ave., the main street to take the first one of those I could catch, and it was the #3.

I stayed at: The Barrel Hostel, 9 Imanbayeva Street Kvartira 4, Astana, 010000, Kazakhstan, telephone +7 717 223 9076. Aside from the problems in finding it, it was a nice, comfortable hostel. You just have to enter the back door furthest to the right and push the “4” button; someone will buzz you in. There seemed to always be someone there to buzz you in; at some hostels that is not the case. The bathrooms were nice and clean, and I never had trouble using one. The shower is strong with good hot water. There is a filter tap on the sink for filtered water; I drank it and it was just fine. The beds are nice, with a shelf for your stuff and two outlets. There are very large lockers shaped like barrels with combo locks built in. You have to take your shoes off and leave them at the front.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vilnius

Well, I'm in Vilnius, Lithuania. The center of action seems to be Stotis. You want to be near Stotis, but just about all the buses will take you there. Stotis has the Iki, and is walking distance from Senamiestis. And a really cool place is Užupis. I hear that Šnekutis is really happening, too, but I didn't make it there, and might not have time to go there on this leg of my trip.


Odds are that you have no idea what I'm talking about. Here I am, in a part of the former USSR, though I don't think that most of the Lithuanians were all that happy to be in the USSR. The Lithuanian language is in the Baltic family, distantly related to the Slavic languages, and just weird and incomprehensible to this native English speaker (even though I speak bits and pieces of a bunch of languages). In fact, I don't know a single word in Lithuanian for actual communication as of when I'm writing this, other than the words I used above for some locations. Not "yes", not "no", not any numbers, not "thank you" (which is probably the most important one). I just give a nod for "thank you". I tried. I looked up some commonly used words, but they were so unlike anything I'd ever seen that they just didn't stick in my head. I might give it another pass at some point. The Lithuanian language is apparently about the most unchanged language from Proto-Indo-European, so it's popular with forensic linguists. I have seen a few words in the street that are like words in some Slavic languages, but not many.


But let me decode some of the words I used above.  Stotis is the bus and train station. My hostel is near Stotis. Just about every bus that comes back to the center of the city is headed for Stotis, and it's also where you catch a train. It also seems to be near where all the street prostitutes in Vilneus hang out, if you're into that. They aren't terribly bothersome or aggressive like they are in some cities. 


The Iki is a huge supermarket. I've seen other Iki stores around town also. I think "iki" may be a Lithuanian preposition because I've seen it in some sentences and it appears to fulfill that niche. But I really don't know; I'm just guessing.


Užupis is an artist and musician colony where there are a lot of squatters, and it has purportedly "seceded" from Lithuania. It has its own "government" that issues visas (though nobody checks them) and a Constitution on display in the streets with some truly interesting and bizarre clauses. The center of Užupis has a huge sculpture called the "Angel of Užupis". And Šnekutis is a local bar and restaurant that supposedly has some of the best Lithuanian food. I haven't made it there yet, and might not on this trip here, but I'll be back here in a few days, and might check it out. I have been mesmerized the last few days by this Lithuanian pancake restaurant that has all different varieties of pancakes. I've already eaten there twice. The buckwheat pancakes are especially delicious. They have all kinds of fillings, and you can order different dipping sauces for them. Instead of being made from buckwheat flour, they appear to be made from the groats just fused together, with a crispy veneer of a crust on the outsides. Man, they are good.


Vilnius is an amazingly beautiful city. Every street in the center, centered around the Old Town, or the Senamiestis, has wonderfully constructed really old buildings. It has a very European vibe with a flavor of old Soviet utilitarianism left over. The travelers here at the hostel are definitely more Eastern European than most of the places I've been so far in the last few months, which makes sense, since this is Eastern Europe.


Vilnius also has this homey quirkiness, exemplified by the aforementioned Užupis, and things like the Museum of Illusions, and the Frank Zappa memorial statue. There's even a commercial center called Zappa Square across the street from the Zappa memorial. Vilnius is a great place to just wander aimlessly in. Its tiny little Old Town twisting streets have some interesting surprises, and you never know what kind of ancient stuff you will run into. The old City Wall is mostly gone, but a few sections of it remain, connected to the antique Bastion, which is now a museum, and the Gate of Dawn, which is the last remaning gate of ten gates in the wall.


Today I'm leaving for Minsk, Belarus for a few days, then coming back to Vilnius. Some of the people in the hostel were telling me this morning that Minsk is a place where the Soviet Union never stopped existing; it was described to me as being very much like the USSR in the 70s. I'll guess I'll see for myself when I get there. I talked to a woman from Minsk at the hostel yesterday,  and was telling her about my round-the-world journey; she seemed mostly sad and curious about the fact that I was alone on my quest. Yes, it's lonely at times, I told her, but worth it to see the world.

Second Trip To Lisbon

I made it back to Lisbon for the second time. This time I stayed for five days. The first thing I did was go to the DHL office to see if I could get my replacement debit card. There had been a delivery attempt at the hostel's building that was refused. The first time I called DHL, I asked the person I talked to if I could pick up ther package at their office, and they said that was impossible, because the sender did not allow for that possibility. Frustrated, I tried to explain that that there was never anyone at the delivery location, but I hit a brick wall with the idiot I was talking to. I wanted to say, "Isn't it your job to make sure people get their packages?" But, luckily, my Skype call got cut off, so I called back and talked to a second person who told me that it would be no problem to pick up my package at their office in Lisbon. I don't know why some people want to use the rules to interfere with you, and some people try to use the rules to help you.


So, armed with these two contradictory pieces of information, I took a metro to the DHL office immediately after checking into the hostel, not knowing what kind of person I would have to deal with at the DHL office, and not completely certain that I would get my replacement debit card. But, luckily, my debit card was there for me. I then set out to find an ATM, and couldn't find one for a while. But I remembered I had seen one at Sete Rios train station, so I took the metro there. I had been getting seriously low on cash, and most places outside of Lisbon did not take credit cards, so I had been really conserving my money, and was down to my last few euros. I could have done some other stuff to get money if I had needed to, but it didn't come to that.


I spent the remaining time in the day wandering around Lisbon, and I treated myself to dinner in a restaurant since now I had money.  I had pre-reserved a return trip to Coimbra on the train for the next day, so I got up really early to make that journey. It was a pretty long train trip, and was pushing it for a day trip. But I enjoyed my visit to Coimbra, though I was a bit burned out by the end of the day.


After returning to Lisbon late at night, the next day I spent all day unexpectedly backing up the SD card on my phone, as I found it was almost full. It took me all day and waking up several times throughout the night to back up all the data. But I was glad I had a spare day available to do it. I didn't even leave to get food, since I was tethered with my phone to my laptop, backing up the data to both a hard drive and Dropbox. At least it only took a day; when I had done a similar thing in Hanoi, it had taken me three weeks of constant connection to the Internet with my laptop to back up my SD card.


So now my backup had been accomplished, and I had a way to get money. I decided to take a day trip to Sintra, which is a beautiful medieval town bordering forested mountains filled with fairytale castles and whatnot. On the train to Sintra, there was a guy playing accordion, accompanied by a guy playing the tambourine. Why do accordion players always play "Besame Mucho"? I wonder.


I looked up some sites to see, found about nine places that were good candidates to visit, and figured I'd get to about seven of them during the day. Ha, ha. The was no way I would get to that many places, especially since I spent half the day just wandering around. Sintra is not like most other Portuguese towns where everything is in a very compact place; all the sites are very far apart, scattered across forested mountains.


When I  first got to Sintra, one of the first things I saw was a regional bus that went to [Cabo], which is the westernmost point in Portugal and in Continental Europe. My first impulse was to jump on that bus, but then I thought that I could do that later in the day. I didn't get the chance again, because by the time I returned from sightseeing, it was too late to head out in that direction, because I wouldn't have had time to catch the last bus back. Oh, well.

I actually only had time to see two sites of the several I had picked out, which were Castelo dos Mouros, and Palacio da Pena. Both of them were phenomenal places. Castelo dos Mouros was right at the top of the mountain facing Sintra. There were some incredibly heavy winds there, with gusts that I would describe as hurricane-strength, on the way up to the main tower. I was blown over onto a huge pile of rocks on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire by winds that strong, and ended up covered with blood, so I tend to be a leetle bit careful with strong winds on craggy mountain tops. Especially, as was the case here, where there are precipitous drops on both sides of the rocky stairs.


Probably one would have to spend at least three days in Sintra to get a good visit of the attractions and surroundings. It's not really the kind of place that lends itself to a day trip, but in one day, I did manage to get a sense of the way the place feels. Some towns are optimal for day trips, some are not.



On my last day in Lisbon, I visited the Belém area, which is by the waterfront, and is a nice place to visit, though kind of touristy. I tried to get into the Jerónimos Monastery, but the line was really long, so I went into the attached church, which had no line, hoping that the line for the monastery would die down. When I got out of the church, the line was much, much longer, so I abandoned the plan to visit the monastery and just wandered around Belém.


I left the next day on a flight to Barcelona. I would have liked to have planned to see more of Spain, but the fact that the Schengen zone only gives me 90 days out of 180 days to stay there makes it so I can't wander as much as I would like. Maybe the next time I visit Europe I'll be able to see more of Spain.

One Million Steps

I've now taken one million steps since I left on my journey in March 31 of this year. My shoes are holding up pretty well. I've found in previous travel that I need to change shoes about every six to nine months with heavy ambulation. This time, I bought some pretty good walking shoes for my trip, instead of getting what is on sale at Payless. So maybe they will hold up better than previous shoes.  Eventually, though, I'll possibly have to buy whatever shoes I can find to use. I can't really buy an extra pair, because I just don't have room to store them. Shoes take up a lot of room in a backpack. So I can't really buy another pair until these are ready for the trash bin, or unless I'm living in a semi-permanent location like an apartment, which won't happen for quite a while.


And, let me qualify the million steps. I've actually walked much more than that, because the app on my phone has been shorting me steps for quite some time. When I started out, it was quite accurate, but now it fails to register somewhere between 10% and 30% of my steps, according to my interval testing. From what I've read online, it's probably due to either a system update or another app that creates a conflict. Honestly, I don't care that much, it's just a rough estimate, and maybe there is an x multiplier of 1.3 or something. But some of the people talking about this in online forums act like crack addicts who have just been cut off cold turkey. Fitness obsession is a funny thing.

Circling Around Portugal

I flew from Porto to Lisbon, since I had found a relatively cheap flight, but I wish I had taken the train instead. The flight was only an hour, but airports are always a hassle and you have to get there early and wait (and pack everything in a special fashion beforehand), so I probably spent almost as much time as I would have with the train. Plus, I probably could have stopped in another place in the way.


When I got to Lisbon, it was easy to take the metro in from the airport, but there was a hugely steep hill between the metro station and the hostel. It wasn't too bad, but with my full pack on, it was some pretty heavy exercise. The hostel was very pleasant. My first day there, I took a walk around the area near the hostel, and it wasn't terribly interesting. But in the next few days, I went to much more interesting places in Portugal's capital. The city is VERY hilly, and if you walk around for a few minutes, the chances are that you will be soon climbing up a very steep hill.


The metro system is easy to use, and if you buy a day pass, you will have access to not only the metro system, but also the buses and the trains as well, as well as more esoteric forms of transportation, such as funiculars (called elevadores) and the Santa Justa Elevator (Ascensor de Santa Justa), which is a unique form of public transportation...it's an elevator that gets you up one of the steep hills. The day pass won't get you on the regional transportation, such as the trains to Sintra or any other regional trains, buses or ferries, but it is great fir getting around the city of Lisbon on days that you will be moving a lot. If you're not using a lot of public transportation on some days, you might want to consider just buying single trips. If you buy a single trip, you have a certain amount of time to change your mode of transportation within the city for no charge. Either way, you'll want a Viva Viagem card which you can load up with either a day pass or money for individual trips. You can also load single trips for some of the regional trains on the card.



I spent three days in Lisbon, just checking out the city. Probably the most interesting neighborhood was Bairro Alto, which is up a very steep hill from the waterfront area. You can either take a series of staircases there, or take the funicular called the Elevador da Glória; I did it both ways over the course of my visit. I had a metro day pass on the day I took the Elevador so it was covered in the day pass. Since Lisbon is so hilly, you can look at Google Maps, and it is hard to tell when you will be climbing very steep hills. Something that is three blocks away on the map might be quite the heady climb. If you're lucky, it might be downhill, but then you eventually have to face the trip back up.


I didn't get to see a whole lot in the three days I was in Lisbon, but I'll be heading back there again soon. I did make it to the top of the Amoreiras Tower, which is supposed to be the highest place in Lisbon, to see the views of the city. It looked from there that there might have been higher mountains surrounding the city, though. I also managed to take the iconic Tram 28. There was a huge crowd lined up for the tram, and people kept cutting in line, so it took a long time to shorten. This antique tram would be difficult to replace with a newer model, because the tracks are very narrow, and it goes up very narrow, winding streets with sharp turns and steep inclines. The tram was packed, and only had small rows of single seats and standing room only in the aisle. It sounded like metal was grinding on metal at times.


On my last day, I took the metro to Sete Rios train station to catch a train to Faro, in the Algarve region at the south tip of Portugal. When I was taking the train from Lisbon to Faro, I accidentally missed my scheduled connection by jumping on the wrong train. The train before mine was late, and showed up a minute before mine, so I thought it was my train. I found it it wasn't the right train just as the doors snapped shut and the train took off, so it was just a second or two too late to get back off. I was bummed. My ticket was reserved on a specific train and was non-refundable, and now there was no way I would make that train. And that was the first specific travel reservation that I've missed in either the last world journey I was on or this one! Which is pretty amazing, considering all the travel I've done in the fast few years. I got off at the next station, asked which train to take to get back to Sete Rios Station in Lisbon, and took the train back.


I went to the ticket window at Sete Rios, sheepishly explained that I had missed my train because I got on the wrong one (it was now about forty minutes after my train had left), and asked what I could do. The ticket seller was very helpful and sold me a ticket for the next train for the difference between the original cheap non-refundable fare and the regular fare, but unfortunately, the next (and only) train to Faro for the day was four hours later. And I definitely couldn't miss that train. Not a huge deal, I just had to wait at the station, but I used that time to plan out some future travel and make reservations, so it was put to good use. And I'd still make it to my hostel in Faro that night.


It was a lot hotter in Faro than it had been in Porto or Lisbon, which were coolish in temperature. Faro is in the Algarve region on the southern edge of Portugal, and the climate is definitely warmer in the Algarve. Faro is kind of a mellow little sleepy town with a small town center.


I took a day trip to Albufeira, which was VERY touristy. But it had some beautiful beaches with magnificent cliffs, so I mostly spent my time walking in the beaches, wading in the water (there were signs saying swimming was prohibited ir discouraged, probably because of dangerous tides). Wish I had spent more time in Faro, because I could have checked out the Algarve area more, as there were buses and trains running throughout the region.


I took the train from Faro to Évora, and it changed at Pinhal Novo, a few miles southeast of Lisbon. But the first train was running late due to some delay along the way. It was a very fast train, running over 200 kms. per hour, but for some reason it only ran about 20 kilometers per hour for about half an hour. It was supposed to arrive at 5:22 pm, and I was supposed to catch my connection at 5:48 pm at Pinhal Novo. But 5:22 came, and then 5:30, and we still hadn't arrived. I was getting a little nervous about whether we were going to arrive on time. When one of the train ticket checkers came by, I asked him what time we were going to arrive at Pinhal Novo; he shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know, but it was the next stop. It didn't help that Google Maps was completely malfunctioning for me, and showing that our location was hundreds of kilometers from where we actually were. About 5:42 we hadn't gotten there, and there was no announcement, so I was afraid I was going to miss my connection. I gathered my backpack and put it on so I could dash out the door when we got there. Finally, there was an announcement. We stopped at 5:46; I had two minutes to spare. I just jumped off the train, full of adrenaline, and started running as fast as I could with my full backpack on. Luckily, I passed a screen saying that the train I needed to be on was arriving at track 2, so I sprinted to track 2, running and puffing up the stairs. I got to the train that I needed to change to with about twenty seconds to spare. All that leisure time; I guess you could say I ran too fast. Of course, I wasn't on the right car, but at least I had made it on the train. I found my car and my seat and sighed a breath of relief.



I arrived in Évora, and it smelled like rain, so I put the rain fly on my backpack. Sure enough, it started pouring like crazy. I took out my umbrella, and it was about a half hour walk in the rain to the hostel, mostly uphill. Not crazy steep uphill like it had been in Lisbon, though.

Évora is a beautiful, small, sleepy town, and the town center is completely encircled by an outer wall, and an inner wall that is mostly gone now, but there are still some remnants of it. The town center encircled by the wall is very compact and small, and there are a lot of narrow, snaking alleys thst are barely big enough to allow a medium sized car; some even won't fit car traffic. There is an ancient aqueduct that passes into the town.  It seems like it has more buildings built into its arches than most of the aqueducts I've seen. It also gets lower and lower in the town until it disappears.


In the town square in the center of Évora, there is a Roman Temple constructed in the first century to commemorate the Emperor Augustus. It is called the Temple of Diana, though it really has no known connection to the goddess Diana. Across the street, the Garden of Diana offers some beautiful views of the town from atop a hill. And right around the corner, bordering the same square, are the Cathedral of Évora, on which construction started in 1280, and the town museum, with many interesting archaeological remnants.



One of the highlights of my visit to Évora was an archaeological tour I took just outside the city to three megalithic stone sites. Mario was our guide, and he was supremely knowledgeable about not only the archeology of the area, but also about much of the geography and biology of the area. The first site was the Cromleque dos Almendres site. It is near the village of Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe. This megalithic stone formation is built in a symmetrical ellipse, but has many stones missing. It predates Stonehenge by about two millenia. The line that bisects the site leads due east to where the sun rises during the equinoxes, and there are two marker stones some distance from the site that indicate where the sun rises on the summer and winter solstices.



Next, I went out to one of the standing stones of Almendres (Menir dos Almendres). This single stone is several kilometers away from the ellipse of stones that make up the Almendres Cromlech, and is the marker stone that signifies where the sun rises on the summer solstice, as viewed from the main site.


And, finally, I went to the Zambujeiro Dolmen site. This was a burial mound for Neolithic people of high status, constructed around the time Stonehenge was built. It has been shored up and supported due to problems with structural integrity. There are bricks and wooden structures supporting the stones, and a metal shelter covering the site. The site is close to collapse, and these were meant to be temporary support measures constructed in the 80s, but have stayed there since.



I took a train back to Lisbon after four days in Évora. I have had some anxiety for about a week and a half due to the fact that my debit card was apparently cloned, and somebody tried to use it in Houston to take money out of an ATM. Fortunately, the attempt was unsuccessful, so I didn't lose any money. But the bank cancelled my debit card, and is sending me a new one. I had just taken out some money before the card was cancelled, but now my reserves are dwindling. I checked the tracking on the web, and apparently an attempt was made to deliver the card to the hostel in Lisbon, which I will soon return to, but the delivery was refused. I'm pretty sure that the delivery person rang a bell at the site (there are several bells there and the hostel is on the third floor), and some person from another floor unrelated to the hostel answered the door and refused it. Also, there is rarely someone on site at the hostel; it's not one that is staffed full-time, just when needed to greet new arrivals. So I contacted the carrier, and hopefully I'll be able to pick it up at their delivery warehouse when I get back to Lisbon. I still have butterflies about it a bit, though.

Some Future Plans

I've been making my plans kind of in a piecemeal fashion. Usually I will plan one thing far ahead of time, and then I will fill in the gaps of what to do until I get there.  My last big thing was the flight from Edinburgh to Porto. I was just kind of bouncing around, looking at flight calendars. Most days, this flight was around €150, but I found one day when it fell to a little over €30, so I pounced on that day. Of course, it ended up being a little more expensive than that, because it was with Ryan Air, and that price does not allow a checked bag. So I ponied up about €20 more to bring my big backpack, and carried on my little one. My REI Grand Tour 85 pack has a detachable little bag which I usually use as a carry on. So all I had to do is fill in the gaps in the UK until the flight.



My next big move will be a cheap flight from Lisbon to Barcelona in about two weeks. I'm in Lisbon now, so I'll circle around Portugal and come back again for the flight. I think the next time I come back to Lisbon, I'll mostly devote that time to day trips to other places in the region, and I'll devote this time to exploring the city of Lisbon.  I already scheduled one day trip for when I come back to Lisbon, to Coimbra. This will be pushing it, because Coimbra is almost three hours away. But I'll leave really early in the morning, and come back very late at night (and hope that I don't feel like crap that day and am up for a marathon). I had to finesse this journey,  because there were a couple of discounted tickets on the day I'm going, but I had to get them at the train station, because they weren't available online. I'm pretty sure any of the other day trips I'll take can just be arranged cheaply in the day I want to take them; this one to Coimbra was an exception.


I made the reservation for the flight to Barcelona quite a while ago. Now I'm starting to realize that the French rail strike is really going to fuck my lunch along the way. I mean, the workers deserve more, as workers always do. But I need to be really careful, or I'll get stranded, which could turn out to be a real problem. The strike is affecting trains across France, a pretty good deal of trains in Spain, a fair amount of trains in Italy, and probably other countries as well, because the French trains are not only in France, they go internationally as well. So, to be on the safe side, and also to not cross a strike line, it looks like I will take buses from Barcelona through France, maybe into northern Italy if I go that way. I'm not sure yet.  The upside is that buses are cheaper; the downside is that they are slower.



But I did plan my next big move. It's a combo. I found a cheap flight from Berlin, Germany to Vilnius, Lithuania about a month and a half after I arrive in Barcelona, so I'll have to figure out what to do in that time between Barcelona and Berlin. My original plan was to go to Northern Africa after Barcelona, and then come back into Europe through Sicily or Sardinia, but then I found the cheap flight originating in Berlin, and decided to pivot.


Then a few days later, I'll fly a round trip from Vilnius to Minsk, Belarus and back. The reason for this is that Belarus recently started allowing US citizens to visit for five days without a visa, but only if they fly in and out of the airport in Minsk, and only if they are not going to or coming from Russia. So, Belarus, which had previously been relatively off the table, is now on the table, but only if I do it this way. Then, by the time I get back to Vilnius, I'll have about a week left in the Schengen Zone. Actually, I'll have a bit more time, but I was to reserve about a week for any unplanned transit back through Schengen to somewhere else.


Let me explain about Schengen. Europe allows US tourists 90 days out of every 180 (the 180 days counts backwards from whatever day today is) to be in the Schengen Zone. The Schengen Zone roughly corresponds to the EU, but not quite. Some countries in the EU have opted out of Schengen, and some countries outside of the EU have opted in. So once you have used up your 90 days, you can't come back to the Schengen Zone for another three months, or you risk being fined, deported, and banned (possibly for five years, but the fact that you were banned stays on your record permanently). If it weren't for this restriction, I'd just kind of merrily saunter across Europe without much attention to the time. But I only have 90 days, or really, about 80-85 because I want to save a few days in case I need to return back through Schengen for transit to somewhere else.  Also, I may do a three or four day excursion briefly back into Schengen later. So I can still haphazardly wander, just not in Schengen until three months after each three month period there. So the French Rail  strike and the Schengen restrictions are kind of shaping things that I wouldn't do otherwise, but reality always seems to intervene somehow. Honestly, I'd love to spend more time wandering through Spain, France, Germany, and in other countries in the vicinity right now, but that may have to wait until the next time or the time after that. I don't think I can afford to dip up into England and Ireland for three months because they are too expensive, and I want to head towards Russia to use my Russian visa while I still have it. I have to plan things so expensive countries are balanced with cheaper countries. And it would be nice at some point to have a little more comfort than what is provided by rooms full of bunk beds, with bathrooms and kitchens (if the place has a kitchen at all) you might have to wait your turn to use. I lived in a tent for six months in Austin before making this trip, so obviously cushy comfort is not a huge priority, but nice to have when available.



There are a lot of European countries, and countries close by, that are not in Schengen. England and Ireland are not in Schengen. Bulgaria, Romania, and most of the former Yugoslavia are also not in Schengen. The Middle East and Northern Africa are also places I could go in my three months of Schengen exile, as well as Turkey and most of the rest of Asia.



My plan right now is to go into Russia from the Baltic States; ideally, I'd like to be in Russia by July-ish. Russia will give me more time; I can stay for 180 days at a time, and my Russian visa is good for almost another year. I probably won't stay that long, but I could go in and out of Russia from Central Asia for a while. I think I want to be out of Russia before the winter comes, and maybe go someplace warmer.  So we'll see where the path takes me; all of these plans are subject to change and/or disruption that could alter their course.


One shitty thing that just happened is that my debit card got canceled because somebody tried to fraudulently use a cloned copy of it in Houston. Luckily, the transaction was not allowed. This is the debut card that has been my primary ATM card throughout my trip. So my bank is sending me a new one. I hope it gets to Lisbon before I leave.