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If you take Poland’s imaginary motorway to Berlin, you’ll discover that - contrary to the encouraging and optimistic road signs, you get thrown off at Nowy Tomysl, where the motorway comes to an abrupt end.

However, you can always capitalise on this opportunity to visit Swiebodzin, a town of incomporable time-warp charm. It’s best enjoyed with a night at the Hotel Luboski.

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Q. What’s butch, bitchy and into camo?
A. A Latvian Border Guardess.

People often ask me: ‘is it safe to cross from Kaliningrad to Mother Russia? If you are British and barely speak Russian, I’d have thought, ‘a breeze’. But apparently not.

At the border, a Paramilitary Miss flips the Russian visas in my passport. ‘So. What were you doing in Russia?’

‘Tourism.’

‘But you’ve visited Russia more than once?’

This is really a hilarious answer, given the Russian hospitality industry’s remote likelihood of ever attracting repeat business. And, yes, fair enough. How long does it take to see Red Square and the Bolshoi. However, suppressing a chortle, I say:

‘Umm . . . Russia’s a big country. Eleven time zones, you know.’

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Curonia! What kind of Edward Lear place is that. Sounds like somewhere the Jumblies might live. They might as well, since no one else lives here.

This ‘nature conservation area’ of the Curonian spit (Kurshskaya Kosa) is notable since it’s the one region of Kaliningrad Oblast where the militsi don’t jump out from behind trees with a stop sign and a swag bag. Instead, tourists are fined at a border post before entering. Presumably the money is later divided up amongst the militsi at some annual Policeman’s Ball.

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Unlike their European counterparts, Russia’s city dwellers do not sort their rubbish into various green bins, blue bins and colour-coded bottle banks.

That’s because there are no bins to start with. For years, Russian apartments have been constructed with a central waste chute and a catch all on every floor.

According to the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation, only 30 percent of total waste - 3.5 billion tons a year - is recycled or processed. As for municipal waste, only 5 percent is recycled.

Without the help of residents sorting domestic waste, it isn’t easy to improve on this figure. But how could colour-coded chutes be added to all those Soviet apartments?

How about the solution adopted by architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano for the Centre Pompidou? Imagine. While improving recycling, it would cover up all those ugly buildings.

Before

After

I think it was Little Miss Moi who started this game of blog tag.

I move around a lot, but many posts are emanating from the 15th floor of an apartment block on the Petrogradskaya in Novgorod Veliky.

On a clear day, you can see the Power Station.

This rear apartment view highlights the Russian approach to ‘zoning’. In many Russian towns, tall apartment blocks on the main roads lead you to believe that you are in a residential area. In fact, the tall apartments just cover up all the industrial vomit behind.

I took many creative photos from this balcony, such as: ‘Sunset Over The Lada Repair Shop’. But probably, the art world isn’t ready for them just yet.

In some parts of Kaliningrad, with selective vision and eyes half-closed, you can imagine you are back in the old Konigsberg.

This bridge house and the little terrace behind it somehow survived the terrible firebombing of 1944.

Purists may quibble about the restoration of the bridge house. No, the roof isn’t tiled, it has the new ‘Prussian Tile Look’ coated metal sheeting, which is becoming quite a popular building material in Kaliningrad.

You know you’ve been occupied by Soviets too long when you build a concrete camping. Unbelievable.

This is Vilnius City camping. If it looks more like a car park, that’s because it is - sectioned off from the vast parking area for Lit Expo.

With no shade or shelter, it’s kind of hostile at most times. Any lightweight, camping-quality plastic cup or plate is quickly windswept next door into Latvia.

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There probably isn’t a bigger symbol of post-Soviet decay than Novgorod Veliky’s theatre. Though weedy, flaky, rusty and crumbly, it’s definitely one of the better Soviet era buildings and hardly deserves the neglect.

This isn’t just any old lump of concrete. (That’s the Intourist hotel next door.) This is concrete clad in off-white marble tiles. Colour photos don’t really do it justice.

If the design looks a little disjointed, it’s because it’s the work of three architects: one did the main hall, another the superstructure, another the appendages. Each one tried to incorporate a citadel feel in keeping with the character of Novgorod’s Kremlin.

For the record, Novgorod Veliky was a trade Kremlin rather than a military fort. Given the number of businessmen who are blown away in Russia, the idea of fortified office space could well come back into fashion.

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There’s a lot of Sovietica to trip out on in Kaliningrad. Something that does it for me are the iron and concrete roadsigns.

Make no mistake. This is art and not to be confused in any way with functional industrial design. For a start, the signs are neither illuminated nor reflective and they only work from one approaching direction. So if you can’t read cyrillic backwards in the dark, you’ll be none the wiser. Unless of course you happen to drive smack into one.

It’s a big concept.

Dawn over the Kaliningrad-Polish border. In the night, we moved four car lengths.

Just when you are ready to run screaming out of Kaliningrad, you find you can’t.

I spent 40 hours in the queue at the Kaliningrad-Polish border at Mamonovo. Here they practice a kind of ethnic cleansing by lanes. There’s one lane for Russians and one for Poles and foreigners. Foreigners may get into the ‘less slow lane’ by shelling out backhanders - a facility that isn’t offered to anyone with Polish plates. But by the time I got back to the border, I’d had enough of handing out Euros to Kaliningrad’s corrupt.

The Mamonovo crossing is bordering insanitary, too. There’s just one toilet for a line of cars stretching as far as you can see. No one uses it, because it might be just the one time in two hours that the line moves, and no one wants to risk losing a place. So the immediate verges are a human waste dump. I wrote before that Kaliningrad is a third world country and, quite honestly, a couple of Red Crescent patrols wouldn’t go amiss here, along with a WHO slug clean-up programme. Early AM, it’s fairly slip slidey off-piste.

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