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Published: September 12th 2010
Well, here it is, my first real chance to travel somewhere non-touristy, and I'm sad to say I'm being a total wimp about it. I still hate the hordes of tourists in places like Prague, and I still prefer hanging with locals or otherwise trying to blend in, but here on my own I'm missing little conveniences. Specifically, right now, a bottle of fizzy water.
I know it's a source of humor regarding Americans and our free refills of everything, but seriously, I do not get how Europeans manage to be anything other than permanently dehydrated. And this is coming from me, who at home am well-known for being mostly dehydrated. One of many ways to easily spot a tourist in Europe is if they're carrying any kind of water with them.
In Gdańsk, my hotel thoughtfully provided little bottles of still water in my room, and I threw one in my bag each day. Initially, I was glad to see that the hotel in Kaliningrad seemed to have done the same. Until I got home Wednesday evening from an afternoon of walking around the city and tiny, expensive, non-refillable drinks at restaurants, and opened up the bottle of
SovLit, and the mouth of the bottle tasted intensely
salty. Hmm. Maybe it's natural mineral water, and all the minerals collected right there for some reason. But no. Further sippage revealed that the entire beverage tasted fizzy and salty. A Google Translate investigation, one word at a time, confirmed it:
"Tильзитская" won't translate. "Tilsit" turns out to be a place; specifically, it's the original Prussian name for the city now known as Советск (Sovetsk). Unhelpful, at least to me.
"Хлоридная" = chloride
... not liking where this is going...
"Натриевая" = sodium
... AHA!!
"Газированная" = fizzy
Seriously, WTF? Salted drinking water on purpose? I respect local delicacies, but in thousands of years of human history, cultures all over the world have united around the knowledge that salt water isn't drinkable and have fought wars over access to the scarce bits of water on our globe that are fresh.
Also, it's yucky.
I down about half the bottle anyway, in order to take some ibuprofen to quiet my swollen and sore knee, which is apparently unhappy about trying to keep up with speedy Russians for two days.
Thursday morning, I
Can you spot the tram-stop sign in this picture?
Hint: those people seem to be waiting for something.decide to sleep in and wallow in my misfortune. 😊 At least the wi-fi is working.
Thursday afternoon, I decide to get a grip, and I arrange to meet up with Aleksandr at the Youth Park, to continue with the sightseeing. After several drives back and forth, and one hurried walk where I wasn't paying close attention, I've started to suspect that my hotel isn't as far away from everything as it seems. So I set out to walk to the Youth Park, which I think isn't too far, plus I'm going my own pace for a change.
Along ул. Тельмана (Thalmann Street), the main drag leading to my neighborhood, I spot my first big solo win in Russia, just a few blocks away: Продукты!! Literally, yes, it seems to mean "products". In practice, I now understand, it means "convenience store". Woohoo! I race inside and locate the
unsalted, fizzy mineral water. I buy two bottles, one for now, one for later. Take that, SovLit!
Near the Продукты, I see people queued on the sidewalk and I spot a tiny tiny tram-stop sign on the wires overhead. I know this tram goes where I'm going (there's only
Oh, there it is.
All I needed was the 12x digital zoom. By the way, #8 doesn't run any more. You have to just know that. one tram here), but I also know it's like one stop away, so I decide to walk it instead. Good decision. I arrive at the Youth Park and have been wandering around photographing the attractions for several minutes when I notice one of the previously-queued persons just arriving from the tram. And as you've heard, I don't walk very fast. OK, good saving of 10 рублей (rubles) there. That's about 33¢. Go me!
I could have sworn Olga B. told me that her friend was getting married today outdoors in the Youth Park at this time, but I look all over and can't find them. After half an hour, a wedding party appears: the family drinks champagne while the photographer poses the bride and groom all over the park. Charming! Later, I find out that Olga B.'s friend's wedding isn't until Saturday, so I've been stalking some random Russian family in the park for no reason. Oops. Glad I kept my distance!
I sit on a bench and wait for Aleksandr, who is a bit late and arrives all flustered. But, hooray! He has a car! And when he has a day off from his full-time job in
More from the Youth Park
Best part is the little Dom Sovetov reproduction. the Russian military (!), he's also self-employed as a professional tour guide. I start to suspect that
all of the English-speaking people in Kaliningrad oblast work as tour guides. (Like, all 6 of them.)
I had been a bit wary of meeting Aleksandr. Let's just say in his CouchSurfing messages he comes across as a pretty strong character. On the other hand, I know, I know, and I survived drinking beer illegally in a park with kids literally half my age, how much worse could it get? This all works out wonderfully with Aleksandr, because he's a great tour guide and a delightful person! But definitely a character. For one thing, he's obsessed with Elvis. (You know me and Indigo Girls? Yup, like that.) He proudly shows me a brand-new white T-shirt he's just had made with a very nice image of Elvis from the
That's the Way It Is live album. He explains that white T-shirts get dirty, and they're never as white after you wash them, so he likes to just make new ones. He proudly shows me his
Lada, figuring (correctly) that I've never ridden in a real Russian car. He's about to fit it with a brand
new Elvis window-sticker he's just had made, as well. Driving around Kaliningrad, we listen to Toby Keith - ha ha, just kidding, Elvis - and he quizzes me on the meanings of the song lyrics, particularly
Polk Salad Annie, which I have no clue about but suspect must be a Southern thing. (I look it up on Wikipedia later, find that I was correct, and send him the link plus the Russian translation of "pokeweed" (лаконос).)
"'Can't help falling in love' - what does that mean? Does it mean 'can't do anything against it'?"
It's like this for the rest of the day. 😊 Over dinner that evening, he's fascinated to learn that "
Bridge Over Troubled Water" was written by someone else, and carefully writes down "Simon" and "Garfunkel" on a piece of the placemat to investigate later. He wants to know what it means. My phrasebook doesn't have the Russian word for "metaphor".
One reason Aleksandr is so keen on CouchSurfing and touring Kaliningrad with visitors, it turns out, is that his job in the military doesn't permit him to travel outside Russia. At all. I don't ask for any more details, just in case the
FSB is listening in.
Not terribly surprisingly, therefore, Aleksandr is a true Russian patriot: at one point he expresses his strong support for Putin and Belarus' Lukashenko, saying, "that's my opinion, and I know you feel the same about your country, and you can't change my mind and I respect that I can't change yours". Which is a good start, but it motivates me to explain that it's a bit more complicated than that, since I do have problems with a lot of things my country does, and I'm not shy about saying so. He doesn't reciprocate. At the end of this conversation, I feel a little guilty that he might have enjoyed it more than I intended. 😉
Oh, Kaliningrad? Yeah, we did see stuff, didn't we?
Königsberg/Kaliningrad used to be surrounded by a ring of massive defensive forts. We visit the ruin of
Fort Number Five, the best-preserved after WWII. Walking through the fort (often blindly through unlit tunnels with uneven floors), Aleksandr would regularly stop, point to some odd artifact, and quiz me: "What do you think that is? Use your imagination!" "Tank tracks?" "Yes! Very good! Those were used here for..." Delightful.
On our drives around the city, I
Lost on Fort No. 5
It's a jungle in there. remark on all the European and American cars I've noticed on the roads here - more luxury models, and bigger and shinier than I guess I had expected. Aleksandr tells me that most people buy them used from western Europe. In conversations with others later, I piece together more details. Until recently, circumstances in Kaliningrad were unique: Kaliningrad isn't geographically connected to Russia, and import duties on cars "imported" from "Big Russia" were often as much as, or more than, on cars imported from foreign countries. Kaliningradians turned instead to an extensive
grey market for European and American cars, brought in by small/private sellers through other eastern European countries. To be clear, a grey market is
legal, but for an American who's accustomed to interacting in very structured ways with very large corporations, it couldn't be more foreign. "Oh, it did have some damage, but they fixed it in Lithuania as part of the purchase price." I wonder what
some damage means. Are substandard or unsafe - or
stolen cars being patched up to sell to uninformed Russians? As it turns out, no - Kaliningradians have access to Carfax and use it to check the VIN history before they
buy! So is this really a measure of how wasteful Americans are about perfectly good cars with years of life left? Considering that some friends of mine back in the U.S. were forced to total an entire, otherwise great car because
its airbags deployed, and the cost of
replacing airbags was greater than the value of the car, I have a strong suspicion about the answer.
For dinner we eat at a great pub called ХМЕЛЬ (which doesn't seem to have a website), serving traditional Russian food, overlooking the Victory Square in the Кловер Сити-центр (Clover Citycenter) mall. People here keep not letting me buy their meals, even after an afternoon of hospitality and petrol!
Aleksandr is fascinated by my Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook - in fact, everyone I've met in Russia so far has been. Lonely Planet books are cheeky, and I'm not sure Aleksandr fully appreciates that some of the cultural stereotypes, like the page of actual James Bond movie villain quotes translated into Russian, are
intended to be humorous.
After that, he grills me about US economic data. He wants to know average income. Average housing cost, including utilities. Average taxes. Cost of gasoline,
which we attempt to convert from dollars-per-gallon to rubles-per-litre using equations scribbled on the ХМЕЛЬ paper placemat. He describes to me a documentary he's recently seen on Russian TV in which America's prosperous image was deconstructed and shown to be an illusion masking widespread poverty, crime, drug abuse and depression. It was called "American Dream?" It sounds
exactly like Soviet-era anti-capitalist propaganda. Between that, and the nightly reports of agricultural production and governors' visits to bakeries and tractor factories that I see myself on local Russian TV at my hotel, I'm seriously wondering which decade we're in right now. Oh, wait, I know it's 2010 because the table of agricultural production statistics for Kaliningrad Oblast had really nice graphics and high production values.
Anyway, it seems to me that Aleksandr is trying to use all these facts and figures to compare for himself our countries' standard of living. Or perhaps he's an FSB spy. Either way, I don't know accurate answers to any of his questions and I don't have wi-fi, so I'm mostly guessing or making stuff up and I verify later online that I was wildly wrong on most figures, including
way off the cost of gasoline. I guess I should say "Yes" more often when those fuel pumps ask me if I want my receipt. Anyway, take that, FSB, and/or, sorry, Aleksandr!
He gives me a ride back to my hotel in his Lada and makes several suggestions for my trip tomorrow to Baltiysk and Svetlogorsk, and then I settle down in my room to sip plain fizzy water and watch the latest news about the mayor stopping in to inspect the local cheese shop...
See all my pictures from Kaliningrad on Flickr:
Калининград 2010 Set A wonderful Featured Blog about CouchSurfing, by a couple I met (later) through CS in Vilnius:
Free accommodation anyone!? Give Couchsurfing a go
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