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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s Saturday and I’m in a Saturday night’s all right for fighting mood. I’m cross with myself for backhanding the militsi 400 Euro. I should have gone to Russian prison and had something meaningful to write about. I feel I’ve let down the whole blogging community.
Anyway. After a couple of red wines, there she is [...]

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 [...]

This wonderful Soviet-built sleep factory is the Hotel Baltika. Since it’s centrally located in the middle of nowhere, outside Kaliningrad city limits, it’s about the silliest base you could choose for your visit to Kaliningrad.
How did it get here? Well, you have to remember that Kaliningrad was a closed town for forty odd [...]

Kaliningraders have made a few giant leaps towards mankind since the Soviet era. Yes there are bankomats and now kitchen roll is appearing in many shops. But be aware that this is still a third world country.
With more tin-roofed shanties than Kingston, Jamaica, overflowing drains, pain threshold border crossings and utterly corrupt police, it’s a [...]

Kaliningrad has many old forts and ramparts. Konigsberg was a fortress city. But only a couple have been restored.
Some of the old gates, like the Sackheim gate above, don’t really lend themselves to happy snaps or history rambles. Which is a pity, since the whole of the Litovsky Val - formerly Litauer Valstraat - has [...]