Tag Archives: Self-isolating in Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad a Green City

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees

Published: 23 May 2020

Unlike in the UK at present, there is no sudden uplift in the weather, nothing to tempt and entice one to cast caution to the wind and go wassailing off to the coast, but we were blessed with a gradual hike in temperature, somewhere around 15 degrees, and this blessing, together with a light breeze in  association with Mr Blue Sky and a sun that had its hat on at last, were altogether alluring enough to winkle me out of self-isolation for the novel pleasure of stretching my legs.

Previous articles:
Article 1: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 1 [20 March 2020]
Article 2: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 6 [25 March 2020]
Article 3: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 7 [26 March 2020]
Article 4: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 9 [28 March 2020]
Article 5: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 10 [29 March 2020]
Article 6: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 16 [4 April 2020]
Article 7: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 19 [7 April 2020]
Article 8: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 35 [23 April 2020]
Article 9: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 52 [10 May 2020]
Article 10: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 54 [12 May 2020]

As part of our exit strategy, we first had to run the gauntlet of passing without mishap from our garden to the road beyond. For the past three to four weeks, our house, and those in the immediate vicinity, have been subject to what I have christened in my diary ‘trench warfare’.

The Trenchmen cometh … I can’t help thinking that we would have been better laying that new block paving later …

Cable-laying has been going on, and a narrow but deep trench, deep enough to dislocate or break should a wrong step occur, dissects the pavement at the front of our abode and at right angles to it, extending along the neighbours’ boundary to the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind which sits a very large dog.

From the vantage point of my bedroom window I have been able to observe (intermittently, you understand, as self-isolation has not left me wanting in occupations of an interesting kind)  this work in progress and to chalk up the differences between how a job of this nature is handled in Kaliningrad compared with its UK equivalent.

From the outset, and for most of the work period, the construction crew consisted of three lads and a young woman, armed with a couple of spades, shovels and a wheelbarrow. The young blokes did most of the digging whilst the young woman, with her workman’s gloves tucked professionally in her back pocket, appeared to have an overseeing role, an inference corroborated  later when a clipboard appeared in  her hand, but praise where praise is due: at one stage in the game, she too rolled up her sleeves and took a turn on the shovel.

Considering that there were at maximum four workers armed with nothing more mechanical than their arms, they did pretty well. Weather conditions ~ lots of rain ~ were unsympathetic, but after a week’s hiatus the original band was joined by a veritable armada of labourers, who were not only trenchers but also there to lay the cables which, as with the aggregate, had been dropped off on the central island ~ a grassed oval section of land in the middle of the thoroughfare overlaying a German bunker built in World War II.

The temptation to go off at a tangent at this juncture and elaborate on the many surviving monuments to WWII that exist in Kaliningrad and the surrounding region is difficult to resist, but as global tourism has yet some way to go before it can get off of the back foot of coronavirus, I will focus for now on my outing.

Kaliningrad a Green City
Green & cobbled streets of Kaliningrad

We had crossed the trench and this accomplished were now walking along the original cobbled streets of Königsberg. Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, had assured us that ‘green’ Königsberg was a myth. Königsberg, at least the oldest parts of the city, was  never green. The streets were narrow, the buildings high and brickwork and cobbles had been the order of the day. The outlying districts, the suburbs laid down in the early 20th century and developed in the 1920s through to the mid-30s, had been designed with green in mind. The houses and the plots on which they stand have their equivalent in England’s 1920s’ suburbs, where homes were sold on the back of the catchy and appealing advertising slogan, ‘A country home in the city’, or words to that effect.  Every home in these outlying districts had a small front garden with a larger plot at the back, and on the streets where these airy new houses stood trees lined either side augmented, where space allowed, with a neat grass verge between the pavement and the road.

Nevertheless, as photographs and postcards testify, though most of the streets in Königsberg’s expansion districts were avenued with trees, they were, of course, saplings, newly planted. In their day, they would have formed graceful vistas but with nothing like the leaf foliage that adorn those selfsame trees now that they are mature.

You see, this is what happens when you self-isolate: everything, every simple detail, every once commonplace and taken-for-granted minutiae undergoes an amplification process, so acutely rendered to senses locked indoors that before you can safely say facemask you cannot see the wood from the trees ~ or, in my particular case, the trees from Kaliningrad’s leaves.

No matter; we had now crossed the road, just in front of that peculiar waterside café, that abandoned monstrosity which, with its fake lighthouse, Captain Ahab perched on the roof doing something over the side and a lot of marine-like crustaceans daubed upon the walls, resembles something sneaked into Russia from an amusement park in Skegness.

I have seen postcard photographs of the building that stood here originally. Admittedly, it, as with the lake and everything around it, was monochrome ~ they obviously did not experience bright sunny days in the early 20th century ~ but even though the world then was black and white (as things used to be black and white before coronavirus) the Konigsberg building had all the ennobling features bestowed by Gothicity and was, in its setting, a sight for sore eyes rather than a sore sight for tearful eyes, which is as good as it gets today.

Kaliningrad a Green City
Across Kaliningrad’s lakes (ponds)

Kaliningrad a Green City

Passing quickly by this ‘thing’, we wended our way, more happily now that it was behind us, along the block-paved path that runs around the lake perimeter. Old photographs show that the lakeside (apologies purists, I mean, of course, pond sides) had banks well stocked with natural vegetation, and trees abounded plentiful. In a black and white world some details are lost ~ atmosphere reigns supreme, but some details are lost ~ but in the photographs that I have seen of this area, it appears as if a small winding pathway, most probably gravel surfaced, curled through the trees at the edge of the lake in the early 1900s. This track has subsequently been lost, replaced through a gentrification process by block paving typical both in colour and character of 21st century urban design. Much of the original foliage, by that I mean the wild and natural, has been dug out and substituted with mown greens and municipal flowerbeds, but although block paving in all its imaginative shapes, patterns and sizes, along with children’s’ play parks, public lavs, and even an exercise quadrangle has colonised what used to be, the Königsberg trees that line the side of the road and the odd gnarled or venerable specimen dotted amongst the newer plantations, some Soviet others millennial, contribute in this neck of Königsberg’s woods to Kaliningrad’s attribution of being a very green city.

As much as I was enjoying and being distracted by that which I am phenomenally good at ~ mental rambling ~ we were on a mission, and this meant putting my tree-hugging propensity on hold and focusing for a moment on finding a wall with graffiti on. Not that this endeavour would be difficult in Kaliningrad. Sadly, graffiti  is another of those unwanted imports that has made its way from the West.

Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins in Kaliningrad
Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins in Kaliningrad

The graffiti we were looking for, however, was not one of your run of the mill deface, vandalise, degrade and then aggrandize as ‘urban art’ jobs, it was truly an original piece, a real work of art, featuring none other than Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter ~ but more of that on another occasion. We found what we were looking for, and my wife made good with the camera.

Kaliningrad: Not all graffiti is equal
There is graffiti and graffiti …
Work of an anonymous but talented Kaliningrad artist
Mine’s a vegetarian

“For old times’ sake,” that’s what my wife called it. I wondered what she was asking me?

She wanted us to walk closer to the lake, taking in Flame restaurant as we did so. The ‘old times sake’ was a reference to recent history, which, in the New Normal, is as lost to the world as dinosaurs. Aahh those glorious days ~ so happy and carefree ~ when we would walk to Flame on an afternoon or evening for a meal and a pint of brew. What had become of them and will they ever return?

Like every other pub/bar victim of coronavirus, there stood Flame, dark and extinguished. However, a nice touch, and a reassuring one, was that in keeping with its tradition Flame, although closed to the public, continued to play music through an external speaker system situated on its alfresco area. It was more like an overture of hope than the band playing on as the Titanic hit the watery skids.

Now that the shops ~ some of the shops ~ had officially opened their doors again, we had a small errand to do. As we crossed the road from the lake, emerging at the side of Flame, it was evident that whilst we had been hibernating Kaliningrad’s construction workers had not: the new shopping centre at the end of the city market had gone from being a shell of incomplete concrete pieces and knotted wire to a three or four-storey series of profiled platforms. Ordinarily, back in the days of the old normal, something like this seen on a day-to-day basis would have excited little more than a passing glance, but incarceration, whether self-imposed or not, has a sharpening effect on the mind, so much so that in looking on this building, at its Phoenix-like transformation, I felt a kindred spirit in Rip Van Winkle at the moment of his awakening.

Errand done, we set off on our homeward journey not by retracing our steps ~ I think having to pass Flame again would be more than the drinker in me could stand ~ but with a view towards returning on the opposite side of the lake. This route took us to the busy crossing in front of yet another landmark bar, the one housed in the historic Rossgarten Gate ~ CLOSED!

Luckily, by way of distraction, on the opposite side of the road, on one of Kaliningrad’s large, open WWII monument squares, I saw a man with his hose in his hand. He was leaning nonchalantly from his truck window, playing his hose over some of the prettiest city flower beds that you could possibly imagine. “Hmm,” I thought, “It’s not only the bars that are dry.”

Watering the flowers in the green city of Kaliningrad
A lovely day on which to have your hose out

Kaliningrad a Green City

Our walk back around the lake was a pleasant detour. There is only so much of novelty in strolling back and forth day and weeks upon end from your kitchen to the living room, and, let’s face it, though unarguably indispensable, the twin water features of bath and bog hardly compete or come close to the natural scenerific beauty imparted by rippling lake under a clear blue sky. And you can be sure that, as on the other side of the lake, there were trees in abundance here and in such variety and of different ages that I amused my obsession for the past for a while in attempting to determine which of the trees had been planted in Soviet times and which belonged to Königsberg.

The wise old trees of Königsberg-Kaliningrad

Trees, lakes, shopping centres rising from out of the ground like mysterious midnight mushrooms, men with their hoses dangling quaintly out of truck windows, a light breeze, a blue sky and off to the shop to buy some tomatoes. Very nearly back home, just now the trenches to cross.

Copyright © 2018-2020 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Staying At Home in Kaliningrad

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 10 [29 March 2020]

Published: 29 March 2020

‘People are people everywhere’ is an expression the meaning of which we can quite confidently assume is that, irrespective of country and culture, hopes, fears, joys, sorrows and other defining proclivities shared by human kind are more or less the same the world over. From this precept stems a universal truth, and one which I am sure a certain philosophical gentleman would ratify if his remains at the side of Königsberg Cathedral allowed, which is that among the common characteristics that we the people possess there lies in equal abundance attributes many of which we can be proud and, by default, flaws, shortcomings which, whilst they cannot promise to dismay some, those who are wanting in commonsense, will certainly dismay if not confound others.

Article 1: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 1 [20 March 2020]
Article 2: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 6 [25 March 2020]
Article 3: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 7 [26 March 2020]
Article 4: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 8 [28 March 2020]

Staying at Home Kaliningrad. Do not go to the coast!
(Photo credit: https://pixabay.com/ 😮[Sorry, silly sanction block ~ link removed] )

Staying at home in Kaliningrad

For example, events as they unfold in the new coronavirus age beg the question, what is it about the simple phrase ‘Stay at home’, that is not so easily understood? Is it so difficult, so impossible to comprehend? Perhaps it contains some encoded subliminal message, such that when uttered by governments, medical services and scientists it immediately translates, albeit to a minority, into ‘please hop into your car and sail off down to the seaside’.

Staying at home in Kaliningrad & everywhere else

Life, as they say, is too short (and is getting considerably shorter) to dwell too studiously on matters so abstruse, which is possibly why I have been whiling away my self-isolation time with place-name wordplay, taking the name of that well-known and popular British seaside resort Skegness, and integrating components of it with Svetlogorsk and Zelinogradsk. The result is not that bad: Skegogorsk still has a must-go there ring to it and Zelinogness is quite blissfully irresistible, whilst Skegness certainly increases its pulling power as Svetlogness, and Skegnogradsk is somewhere you would have to go to even if you didn’t and especially were told that you shouldn’t.

Self-isolating in Kaliningrad

Self-isolating in Kaliningrad

Published: 17 March 2020

With no broadcast TV, no social media accounts, no newspapers and trying to ween myself off Google News, I was, as the lyrics say, “Happy in the haze of a drunken hour …”, until, that is, our neighbour asked my wife, in the context of coronavirus, whether I was still frequenting Kaliningrad’s bars. I came down to earth with a jolt.

I have no problem with self-isolating or social distancing, I have always been anti-social, but after all these years, a lifetime in fact, of shunning at-home drinking for the unparalleled joy of the pub or bar, it is more than one can bear.

As far as I am aware, to date we have five cases of coro in Kaliningrad, and about 450 self-isolating, some at home some under observation. Many schools here have switched from attendance-learning to distance-learning. The Polish and Lithuanian borders are closed, except for freight*, and there will be ‘no entry for foreigners from 18 March to 1 May’ . So, apart from a transit corridor through Lithuania, allowing people to return to their homes, which is scheduled to close on 19 March**, this small tract of land will be virtually cut off from the rest of the world.

Whilst there seems to be less people on the streets and on public transport, I have yet to hear of anything akin to the bizarre events unfolding in the UK, namely hordes of people descending on shops like locusts on laxatives to devour the shelves of toilet paper. I can only imagine how these people’s mind’s work. Perhaps they are thinking, he who laughs last laughs longest, and when the dire moments comes (let’s hope it is not the diarrhoea moment!), when the rest of the nation is down to its last piece of tissue, begging and imploring them to sell at any cost a 2-inch square, they will turn the other cheek. What an absolute bummer!

We have two small supermarkets in our locale, which I usually let my wife use, as I would not want to impinge on her leisure time, but, out of curiosity, I accompanied her recently. And when I got there the shelves were not bare (I feel a touch of poetry coming on.).

I have noticed, however, a funny thing. Your reflection in the window, you all cry. Well, that too, but more unprecedented is that whenever I go to these shops (which, as I have said, I don’t do very often because it’s a woman’s job, isn’t it), security always sidle off to form a cordon around the bog-roll shelves. Hmmm, they must know I am from England.

This blockade was unnecessary, however, as my only purchase interest was in medicine, which I was able to snap up, using my 25% discount sticker+, for the bargain price of two quid.

Self-isolating in Kaliningrad
Self-isolating First Aid kit

Prevention is better than cure, as they say, but just in case I bought some beats as well, as Russian borsch is highly recommended as an effective ‘morning after’ pill.

Sources
Accessed 17 March 2020:

*https://www.dw.com/ru/закрытый-калининград-из-за-коронавируса-российский-эксклав-оказался-в-изоляции/a-52796414
**https://www.newkaliningrad.ru/news/briefs/community/23609508-na-karantine-po-koronavirusu-v-kaliningradskoy-oblasti-nakhoditsya-450-chelovek.html

Note
+Some supermarkets in Kaliningrad present you at checkout with a little slip of paper on which are adhered reusable sticky labels. These are discount stickers, each sticker marked with varying percentage discounts. Off you go with your stickers and the next time you visit the shop, you can run round and stick these on the items of your choice, thus cutting the cost of your favourite drinks, I mean products. Promotions don’t usually work on me, but this one does!