The redeeming feature of Kaliningrad, like so many places in Russia, is that there’s no shortage of women. Help yourself. Take two.
If you’re shaven-headed and shorted, girls will flock on to your arm like falcons. If you’re naturally bald and trousered, just pretend you have money. There’s many a young dyev ready to play ’sugar [...]

The big downside of driving to Kaliningrad is your all-too-obvious foreign plated car. It’s an open invitation to be Ripped By Russians.A girl told me the other day that her grandfather was sent to the gulag simply for knowing foreign languages. This ingrained Stalinist mentality still permeates the Kaliningrad ‘hospitality industry’. You don’t really get a [...]

In Kaliningrad, the art of communist propaganda has not been lost. Happy workers, larger than life itself, are still emblazoned on the sides of apartment blocks.This comrade has just discovered how you can now text the complete works of Gorky via the new Soviet miracle of mobile telephony.

I’ve been travelling rather than blogging lately.  Of course, still down that same old dirt road to Kaliningrad.
 It’s easy to forget that the world’s most concrete city is surrounded by nature conservation areas. After 70 years of communism, even the wild life has forgotten. Local Soviet birds make their homes on high rise concrete piles [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Stanislovas Jucius went missing in Kaliningrad. One fine morning, when his driver came to pick him up, he wasn’t there.
Jucius has a name like a Roman emperor, befitting a Lithuanian Tycoon. He’s President of the Lithuanian Business Club. CEO of a slew of companies too.
This week the investigation was [...]

Sticky

Does anyone actually visit Kaliningrad? You’d be surprised. This is the Kaliningrad Express arriving in Vilnius. It’s a long, long, long train.

Konigsberg was overrun by the Red Army 1945. And any encyclo today will tell you it’s been part of Russia ever since. But as Raymond A. Smith points out, Russia has never held any formal legal title to the Oblast at all.
At the end of the war, Germany was being given away by the [...]

This season in Kaliningrad the look will be leggy and tacky. Just like last year and the year before. If you’re hitting the beach, light colours in light suede lend that summer feel.

Photo by gaech. More at the Flickr Kaliningrad Pool

Did you know that you can’t cross the Russian border on a bicycle?
Neither did I. But you can imagine how crucial this intelligence is to the Dutch. And it was indeed such a cyclist who brought this to my attention.
Amsterdam Mike at BikeRussia.com explains: