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Published: September 9th 2010
On the evening I arrived in Калининград (Kaliningrad), I had arranged to meet Staus, a CouchSurfer who had been particularly helpful to me online. He worried I might be tired from the trip, which I was, but I suspected I would need a really fundamental orientation to the city when I arrived, which I desperately did. It wasn't quite what I got, but I got something way more fun and memorable. Staus and his friend Anton (who did not, as far as I can tell, speak English) arrived late to pick me up, having gotten lost trying to find my hotel. This continued to not bode well for the location of the hotel. We walked toward the city, I pretended I wasn't struggling to keep up with young long-legged dudes, and we ended up at a convenience store across from the Калининградский технический колледж (Technical College). Staus bought me the metric equivalent of a forty of a local beer (thanks!) and we walked to a nearby park where he taught me how to remove a bottle cap with the non-business-end of a cigarette lighter and we drank our beers, illegally he told me, outside. Yes, I know I'm nearly 40 years
Technical College
I've heard of green buildings, but this is ridiculous.old and yes, it was absurd in the extreme at the time, too.
Staus encouraged me to practice my Russian, but he's an incredibly soft-spoken guy and we were in a noisy park where I had to struggle to hear him even in English. It's interesting - Russian has this really "soft" sound quality overall, without hard explosive consonants like English or German. I think it's difficult for me to distinguish Russian words even in ideal conditions. Which these weren't. I flunked my first sentence (involving the word "visit", which I would have thought I would know) and he gave up. Not encouraging for me, either.
Just about that time, two impeccably-dressed Russians (one a hot blonde with thick eyeliner, dressed in black, wearing Chuck Taylors) hurried past us in the park - friends of Staus' - and we decided to join them at the nearby opening of Клуб «Репортёр» (Club "Reporter") featuring some avant-garde DJ from Poland and a light show. I love electronic music, but it got off to a slow start, the club was loud and smoky, my uncool traveler's wardrobe was conspicuously dragging down the otherwise very high coolness level at our table, and
after drinking a metric-forty the last thing I needed was any more alcohol, so I took Staus up on his offer to call me a cab back to my hotel; he even negotiated the price for me.
I had to wonder if this was what Russia was going to be like for me. Or what CouchSurfer meetups would be like. It was fun, but also left me feeling tempted to hide under the covers in the hotel for the rest of my visit.
Fortunately, the next day I met Olga. Actually, two Olgas! I took a deep breath and decided to take CouchSurfer Olga M. up on her offer to show me around her city. What a great decision! She picked me up in her car - whew - and that's when I discovered that she was actually taking the afternoon off from her job... as a self-employed professional tour guide! She had an itinerary in mind, and carried an album of historic photos of Kaliningrad in her car to show me what various places looked like
before WWII. Having a visual impression in real-time was fantastic - that's just how my mind, such as it is, works.
I could also tell she does this a lot because she kept insisting on taking pictures of me, using my camera, in front of various sights. In a lot of cities on a lot of trips, I don't get those. (It isn't a language thing - I quit asking because it turns out random passers-by generally suck at it.)
Our first stop was the
Парк культуры и отдыха «Юность» (Youth Recreation and Culture Park - don't
"unnecessaryquotes.com" me, that's how they do it in Russia). This place was saved from destruction in 2004 and revitalized - made into a paradise for romantics, kids, parents and patriots - by the patronage of quasi-former Russian First Lady Людмила Путина (Lyudmila Putina), who grew up nearby. Across the street, an old derelict lakefront has been turned into a tidy park and promenade, soon to include a huge skatepark. As Olga and I strolled around these lovely parks, as well as the rest of the city later, I kept seeing adorable families with adorable little schoolgirls with honest-to-goodness giant white poofy bows in their hair, strolling around the park and taking photos.
The first of September, the first day of the school year, is a major
event in all Russia. Primary-school children are dressed in their finest clothes - girls in jumpers all trying to outdo each other with the biggest, whitest, most delicate hair poofs, boys in suits with ties - they take large bouquets of flowers for their teachers, and every school has a large welcoming assembly for the students and their families, outdoors if weather permits. After classes end, you can find Russian families all over the most picturesque parts of town, taking portraits of the kids on their special day.
Later, after a day of chasing photographs of the most darling Russian girls with the poofiest hair poofs in all Kaliningrad, I settled in at my hotel room to watch the Russian news channel on TV. That's when I came to understand the context and, for Russians, the true horror of the
2004 Beslan school massacre - which began on September 1 and ended in the deaths of more than 300 people, nearly 200 children, three days later. The high number of hostages taken, more than 1,200, was due to the attack happening during the school's welcoming ceremony.
Every parent in Russia celebrates September 1 in a more-or-less similar way and so
every one
of them could easily have imagined a terrorist attack at
their own child's welcoming ceremony. I don't know whether white hair poofs are the style in North Ossetia, but when I think of a gymnasium full of child hostages, that's what I visualize. It's quite devastating.
I'm glad I didn't remember about Beslan at the time; I just enjoyed the sight of happy schoolkids throughout the day in all the places we visited.
Our next stop was the площадь Победы (
Victory Square). Olga showed me photos from the 1980s when this area was pretty much Lenin, a car park and some vacant lots. Today, it's a huge plaza with fountains, a monument, several shopping malls, and the new Храм Христа Спасителя (
Cathedral of Christ the Savior). It was all very clean, and the fountains were lovely in the sunshine, and there was classical music playing through speakers all around the edges of the plaza. Later, other Kaliningradians I talked to, independently of each other, said it was a shame the city cut down so many old trees. So it's all a matter of perspective. (Lenin? He's still around - they moved him to a park outside the city center where he's still prominently
displayed. No, they did not sell him to
Fremont.)
We had sushi for lunch! Japanese names for sushi transliterated into Cyrillic - now that's a language barrier I can handle.
Olga is a former teacher, and over lunch we talked about the state of education in Kaliningrad. Now that she works as a tour guide, she's frustrated by the poor state of tourist facilities in their city. The Soviet-era visa system is cumbersome and quite expensive, deterring travelers from the EU, especially Germans who would undoubtedly be interested in visiting this former German city. (I found all of
them in Gdańsk.) The post-WWII city is spread out and hard to navigate, as I'd already discovered, and there aren't sufficient transportation options to move tourists around. My hotel's location isn't great, although I found that it isn't so bad, and it turns out none of the city's other hotels is really any better. Most frustrating for Olga, the vast majority of the population in Kaliningrad, including tour guides and hotel and restaurant staff, don't speak
any other language than Russian. This reminds me of the US, where foreign-language instruction is half-hearted at best. In most EU countries today, English
is a required second language and instruction starts at age 10; a third language of the student's choice is often also required in high school. (In the former East Germany, the required second language used to be Russian, and in Gdańsk many older folks still know German.) Refusing to learn other languages isn't just arrogant and embarrassing, it turns out. It's also bad business.
After sushi, we walked some more, and then Olga showed me how to ride a Kaliningrad tram. I took notes and was grateful for the orientation, but the actual result ended up being that I decided not to ride any more trams. In addition to having to jump on and off the tram in the middle of the street with cars speeding by - no platforms - well, let's just say that I
tried to take a photo of the tiny, tiny signs hanging from overhead wires that are the only indication of the existence of a tram stop - and I've searched through all my photos and I can't
find the tram-stop-signs in any of them. So there you are.
Our sushi lunch took longer than expected, which caused us to speed through
several other tour stops at a pace much faster than Olga would have liked. We were on a schedule, because I had arranged a coffee date with that other Olga, Olga B. - this time not a CouchSurfer, but the proprietor of the independent travel service and
blog through which I had obtained my Russian visa invitation and made other key travel arrangements.
So, we spent some good time at the Königsburg Cathedral and the Рыбная деревня (Fish Village), a shopping and hotel complex intended to look somewhat like the old German buildings formerly in that location, then drove past the maritime sights on Kaliningrad's waterfront (Olga M. was unimpressed to hear that a former Soviet submarine had also been docked and tourable for several years on the Seattle waterfront), then called it a day.
Olga B. also picked me up at my hotel, also in her car, and we drove a very short way to a lakefront café where service was, again, much slower than expected and the kitchen had run out of everything. Turns out restaurants are busy on September first, too. We had a very nice conversation. Olga B. works as a tour agent and also professionally as a translator. Based on my conversation with Olga M., I think she has job security in both areas!
Here I thought I was going to condense three days' worth of CouchSurfers into one blog post. Silly me. More CouchSurfers next time!
See all my pictures from Kaliningrad on Flickr:
Калининград 2010 Set A wonderful Featured Blog about CouchSurfing, by a couple I met through CS in Vilnius:
Free accommodation anyone!? Give Couchsurfing a go
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Eliece
non-member comment
Unnecessary quotes..
Is it wrong that what I really got out of this was five minutes of laughing at the pictures on unnecessaryquotes.com? Also, love it that you found the Olgas!!