UK via Gdansk - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

The art, science and agony of waiting: a round trip from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk, Poland

Updated 5 January 2024 | Published: 19 January 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

In November 2022, my wife Olga and I travelled from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk. It was the first time I had made this journey since the advent of coronavirus.

This account should be read in conjunction with my post How to Get to Kaliningrad from the UK and treated as an addendum to the information contained therein. It is hoped that it may help you to decide whether or not to take this route in the future and what to expect if you do. To be forewarned is to be forearmed ~ not that to be forearmed will do you any good.

Passage to and from the UK to Kaliningrad via Gdansk Airport is, in the post-apocalyptic coronavirus world, now the era of unprecedented sanctions, a realistic if not tedious alternative to the other options available to you. By no means the most traveller-friendly route, nevertheless as an A to B expedient, with a great deal of fortitude and more of patience you will eventually arrive at your destination without incurring the need to navigate every letter in the traveller’s alphabet.

Recently, in November 2022, this was the route we took to travel to the UK. Pre-coronavirus we always took a taxi from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. At a cost of approximately £100, of the two options, bus or taxi, the latter, of course, was the more expensive, but what it lacked in economy it more than made up for in comfort, door-to-door convenience and, most importantly, a smoother, less traumatic transition at the Russian-Polish border.

Our November trip was the first in which I would take a bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. Kaliningrad Central Bus Station is a wonderful Soviet incarnation, built, I should imagine, circa 1970s. It is neat, tidy, user-friendly and surrounded by shops and refreshment facilities.

There’s nothing to bussing it from Kaliningrad: You just pass yourself and your luggage through a scanning system, buy your tickets in the usual way from the counter ~ thankfully staff-manned, not machine-oriented ~ and when it is time to catch your bus, brandishing your barcoded ticket, off you go through the gates.

Not one for using minibuses on any journey except in town, I was relieved to find on the day of travelling that we were blessed with a proper coach.

We were required to load our cases into the luggage compartment ourselves, which was no great shakes as we were travelling light. Even so, if you happen to be an old codger suffering from comorbidities or a damsel in distress, you may find that you need to enlist the kindly services of a fellow-travelling Sir Galahad, since loading luggage of any kind does not come under the driver’s remit.

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

The journey to the Russian border in Kaliningrad is an effortless one, taking around 30 to 40 minutes in all. From the other direction, Gdansk Airport, the distance is the greater of the two. But travelling isn’t the problem; it’s the waiting you have to worry about.

Whether you travel by car or by bus, prepare yourself mentally for an indescribably protracted period of boredom at both border checkpoints. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a competition between the Russian and Polish authorities to see who can make your stay at the border more drawn out and uncomfortable. In days gone by, when Russians flocked to Poland to buy sausages and the Polish nipped back and forth to Kaliningrad to smuggle in cheap vodka and fags, crossing from either direction, Russia to Poland, Poland to Russia, was a traffic-queuing nightmare. But at least then it was understandable why it took so long.

Now, in the New Normal ~ in the coronavirus aftermath and knock-on effect from the troubles in Ukraine ~ queues at the border, which is to say magnificent queues, are largely a thing of the past, but interminable waiting is not.

For example, on the day that we travelled, there were two cars in front of us and no one behind us, but still it took four hours to cross from Russia into Poland.

By taxi the process is quicker, not substantially so, but it is quicker and a lot less painful. On both sides of the border, Russian and Polish, our driver would take it upon himself to hand over our passports to the authorities whilst we sat in the car until summoned to appear before the border officer’s window.

This procedure is strangely daunting. It has its equivalent in the unfounded guilt you feel (and I am certain that you do) whenever a copper walks by (“Evenin’ all!”). I find that it both helps and doesn’t if, whilst standing under the border officer’s partly hidden officious eye, you imagine yourself in the leading role of one of Len Deighton’s spy novels.

One other thing, other difference between the taxi and the bus, is that when you take a taxi your bags are checked in the car. A uniformed man or woman with stern features out of a can, asks you to open your bags and then studiously looks at your underpants (hopefully those in the case, not the ones you are wearing!). He, or a colleague, will also bring a dog along to sniff around for drugs (in your cases not your underpants) which, of course, we never have (drugs, that is, not underpants) except, perhaps, if you can call them drugs, a vintage bottle of Bile Beans which, through force of habit as well as nostalgia, I carry for good luck. Get away! You don’t! Do you?

By bus the procedure though similar is far more demanding, obviously because the vehicle you are travelling in contains more people and more people means more documents to process but also because each passenger is required to lug his, her or its own luggage out of the bus, across the tarmac and into a bland and impersonal room.

Here you queue obediently, waiting for the inquisition before the border officer’s cubicle. No smiling, this is serious business, so why on earth do I always feel an uncontrollable urge to laugh? Eternity comes and goes and suddenly stamp, stamp, stamp, they are inking little official things in the pages of your passport. This is music to your ears, for next they will dismiss you, and you’ll suffer to drag your heavy cases across to the waiting conveyor belt in order to have them scanned for all those things that you shouldn’t have stashed, and didn’t stash, inside.

Admittedly, this hiatus in your journey does provide you with the opportunity to pay the bog a visit, making it not entirely a waste of time. The problem is, however, that you can almost guarantee that one or more in your party are either not in possession of the prerequisite travel documents or are carrying something in their bags in contravention of regulations. When this happens, as it did for us, your wait at the border can be delayed to such a frightful extent that by the time you eventually move, you have forgotten what movement was. Thus, do not be surprised if you have read War and Peace from cover to cover, experienced a couple of birthdays and your restless arse is covered in cobwebs by the time the bus starts rolling. Naw, it’s not as bad as all that; but believe you me, it is bad enough!

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival a bus in cobwebs

Whilst we all know from experience that the wheels of bureaucracy tend to grind slowly no matter where we are, what kind of mentality is it that oils the cogs of rudeness?

It is sad to admit, but all the same a regrettable fact, that border security on both sides of the fence, be it the Russian or Polish side, can be, and mostly are ~ with one or two exceptions ~ how can I put it? ~ beyond officious. Let us just conclude that anyone working for border control is unlikely to be considered for a post in the diplomatic core and prudently leave it at that.

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

So, you have been stared at, stamped and waved on, survived death by terminal boredom and at last the wheels are turning. The bus that you are travelling in, which contains people a lot more stressed and impatient than the ones you started out with, trumps off up the road, gets stuck, for extra harassment measure, at two or more sets of traffic lights and then trundles forward a few more yards before grinding to a sickening halt on the Polish side of the border.

And it’s here we go again: the only noteable difference being the cut of the uniforms and insignia on them.

By the time we arrived at the airport we were veterans in the waiting game, but even our rigorous introduction was insufficient to prepare us for what was yet to come.

I will say that as far as design is concerned, I personally like Gdansk Airport ~ all those tubular steel struts, asymmetrical folds and sweeps and the way that the ceiling soars like giant birds in flight. Great visuals and expressive atmosphere; shame about the security staff. They are as rude as rude, but there is entertainment to be had in being to them what Manuel was to Basil in Fawlty Towers: “Qué?”

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival Waiting at Gdansk Aitport

Above: I can’t stand the waiting any longer; you’ll have to go by yourself!

On the day that we travelled through Gdansk Airport nothing short of utter confusion reigned. The flight was scheduled for 3.10pm and our bus driver, who would normally have deposited us at Gdansk bus station, realising that those of us who required the airport were in danger of missing our flights because of the long delay at the border, drove us on to the airport terminal. We sailed through Gdansk airport security system, bought a couple of bottles from the duty free and checked the electronic flight boards. Everything was fine; but then it wasn’t. The flight at 3.10 had become the delayed flight to the UK departing at 4.30! A Jack Daniels with ice helped.

We were sat close to gate 27, where we should have been, when, suddenly, it was ‘all aboard’ but at gate 28! The flight time has also changed to 4pm, but at 3.50pm they are opening the gates, and we are all on our feet and queuing. Our so-called priority passes, which do nothing more than allow you to queue lower down the stairwell than those who have been smart enough not to pay for the privilege, put us in this position, where we stood with mounting impatience for nigh on fifteen minutes, before it was announced that we had to return to the waiting area.

As we passed one of the company’s representatives, I asked why? What was happening? His reply: “We are waiting for a new captain!” Good heavens, I thought, I hope he qualifies before next spring. I did offer to fly the plane myself. Humouring me, the man asked if I had a licence. “Dog or TV?” I replied. Flying licence! “Well,” I said, “I’ve got a kite and an airman’s hat.”

Back in our seats, where we were fast becoming super-waiters, I hoped that the ‘new captain’ was not in fact the old captain, whose delay was due to one too many. I disclosed my fears to Olga, who thought she had caught a glimpse of someone wearing a battered captain’s hat and nothing else, being dunked in a bath of ice-cold water behind the airport’s dustbins, which is only a stones (or stoned) throw away from the airline’s Lame Excuse Department.

The electronic score board now informed us that the next flight from Gdansk to the UK was rescheduled for 5.30pm but, as before, it lied. Lucky for us we were far too tired to be somewhere else in the airport, for at 5pm we were off again, through the checkout and down the steps.

By now everyone without exception was suffering from chronic waiting disease. Many of our fellow passengers had found consolation in the bottle and as a result resembled zombies hired from Rent a Misfit.

At long last, it happened, but it didn’t: We, and the worse-for-wears were sitting on the plane but wait a moment … a moment … a moment … the pilot had not arrived. Was he waiting to be awarded his model aircraft flying diploma or had he got stuck in the bathtub?

At last it did happen! We had lift off! Shame that the same could not be said for the airline’s credit/debit card system. I presume it must have died from something like airport terminal waiting. And why was there no vodka on board? Hiccup! This is your captain slurring.

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

We landed at Luton Airport ~ now there’s a relief ~ where everything, I was pleased to find after almost three years’ absence remained delightfully British. Of course, there are obvious visual exceptions to the definition of what constitutes British, but the prevailing wind continues to blow in the direction of British standards. One contributory factor is that apart from the airport’s security guards, who are tooled up and reinforce-vested, London-Luton’s border control and its customs officers do not do military; smart and corporate is the name of the game and even the airport’s immigrant staff can scrub up satisfactorily when they put their mind to it. I’m not sure if the airport retains classic British salutations such as ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ or whether it has succumbed to pseudo-liberal pressure for gender-bending woke alternatives. But what I can say categorically is that as far as first impressions count, London Luton hits the spot.

The second thing you will notice at Luton Airport, indeed any airport in the UK, apart from the majority minorities, is that no sooner have you retrieved your cases than mugging your purse and wallet begins. UK airports are hideously expensive. London Luton’s Airport carpark must be run by the mob, as the cost of a two-minute stay in the so-called drop-off and pick-up zone is protection-racket extortionate. Yes, I think we can all agree that there’s nothing like England’s welcome mat, but once you have crossed the threshold you know that the meter is ticking.

Return journey

A piece of cake our trip to England certainly had not been, but the return journey took the biscuit. When we were outward bound, we had purposefully travelled light, but going back our extremely large cases were stuffed to the gills with items unobtainable in Kaliningrad, such as 40 jars of marmite, decorative retro metal wall signs, plus numerous gifts and souvenirs.

Having overdone it on shopping sprees, on visits to the pub, on workouts, on late nights and on generally trying to cram too much into too little time, our cases may have been full, but I was travelling on a half empty health tank ~ nothing like a good holiday to set you to rights, I say! And it was grim: the 4.30am start required to catch our flight from Luton was grim, but at least it was uneventful.

The real problems for us began when we arrived in Gdansk ~ and here is something you should bear in mind, especially if you are Russian.

Olga’s daughter had booked our return from Gdansk bus station using an online booking system. The bus was scheduled to depart at 6pm, but it was about 11am Polish time when we arrived at Gdansk airport. This disparity between the flight’s arrival and the bus’s departure had been purposefully contrived, as, although there was an earlier bus at one o’clock, the excessive delays on the outward journey had caused us to act with caution. Sod’s law had it, however, that the return flight was bang on schedule, and we were back in the business of waiting again.

Our immediate destination from the airport was the bus station. We would go there by taxi, stash our bags in the left luggage department, presuming that they had one, and then idle our time away.

Gdansk bus station is reminiscent of Corby dole office in the 1960s, even down to the stink of piss. It is a concrete catastrophe from that era, constructed on two levels, decorated with pigeon shite and a lift that does not work. The left luggage department is not a department as such, but a big tin thing on the station’s lower level split into different sized lockers with doors that need coins to operate them*. Consequently, we had a twofold problem: (1) Karting two incredibly heavy cases down umpteen flights of steps and (2) obtaining Polish coins in the correct denominations.

The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service.

One thing that Gdansk bus station did have going for it was that it had a cafeteria*. I use the term cafeteria because it reminded me of somewhere I once had the misfortune to visit on a school trip. I think it was the canteen of an up-North pickle factory. Our school was short on education but inventive in saving funds. {Apologies to Headmaster Lowe. I am not referring to the Prince William School but Chalky White’s secondary modern!)

*Please note that when I was in Gdansk in September 2023, both the left-luggage canisters and the cafeteria had ceased to exist, thus making Gdansk bus station an even more horrible place than it was before. Thought I’d better warn you. They haven’t closed the toilets yet, but it costs 5 zlotys a pee!

Knock the school if you like, but let’s don’t knock the cafeteria. At least it was somewhere to sit, to have a hot drink and a snack. Cosy, it was not; friendly, it was not. There are still some things to be said for England! But first we needed zlotys (that’s Polish money, if you did not know it).

The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service. We had no zlotys for tea, and we had no zlotys for the left-luggage lockers. Gdansk Bus Station Information office had no information. Exchanging tickets? An earlier bus? Don’t ask us, we’re only the information office.

We were both cold, tired, hungry and I was feeling ill.

I volunteered to go and seek out a ‘hole in the wall’, even though I instinctively knew, erroneously as it happened, that the location we were in was unlikely to be furnished with such a crucial convenience. Whilst I was gone, Olga said she would contact her daughter to see if it was possible for her to exchange the tickets online. It turned out that it wasn’t.

One 20-minute walk later, I espied the kind of hole I was looking for. It was not a hole in the wall exactly, but a hole protruding from a shop window. I did not like the look of this hole when I saw it from a distance and liked it even less at closer quarters. I certainly had no inclination to entrust my debit card to it in case the machine had been ‘got at’.

Flustered, and not relishing the thought of returning to Olga with mission unaccomplished, nevertheless this is what it amounted to. The real rub was that when I did return, Olga asked me why I had not used the cash dispenser at the front of the bus station? Doh! I had only walked straight past it! What a kick in the nuts! And the words of our old friend Barry, who had accompanied us on our trip to Kaliningrad way back in 2004, echoed across the decades, “You pair are a walking disaster!” ~ to be said in a northern accent.

Too tired to exonerate myself, I followed Olga’s directions but with the gravest misapprehension. The hole in the glass window which I had not used because it had looked dodgy was a paragon of virtue compared to the one at the bus station. The Perspex screen was scratched, it reflected dull orange in the LED light with which it was lit and the options that it displayed were almost indiscernible. It took four attempts to get it right, to extract money from that mean machine and throughout the entire dispensing experience I felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was a mean little machine in a mean hollowed-out husk of a building, and it also refused to provide a receipt.

Have zlotys will eat, we took refuge in the café. There we would buy tea from the miserable woman behind the counter, change some zloty notes into zloty coins to use in the left-luggage piggy bank, dispose of the bags, go for a walk.

It was a cold day but at the time of our walk it was blue skies and sunshine. We decided to return to Gdansk old town where we had not been since my first journey to Kaliningrad at the turn of the 21^st century (makes me feel like Dr Who ~ the man version, not the PC one! {There was only one Dr Who and that was William Hartnell!})

Gdansk ‘old town ‘is, in fact, a perfect facsimile of the old town, since the old town underwent extensive modification thanks to Adolf Hitler and his Luftwaffe architects. However, if you ever go to Gdansk, the new-old town is well worth visiting.

Mick Hart expatkaliningrad in Gdansk 2022

We took in the sights and found food and warmth in one of the many restaurants, but now the sun had gone, leaving in its wake a sharp and chilling cold. With one and a half hours to kill, we made our way back to the bus station. We had no idea from which bay the bus we needed departed, so Olga did the logical thing, she returned to the bus information office.

As before, the information office which had no information about exchanging tickets had no information about our bus: Which Bay does your bus depart from? Don’t ask us we’re just the bus information service. We eventually worked it out for ourselves; not which bay we needed but that from the official information office to the average man on the street, once they tumbled that Olga was Russian, your Polack turned deaf and dumb. I suppose like every EU member, Poland is waiting for Biden to tell them when they can be polite again.

The second information office, which lay inside a concreted labyrinth of subterranean walkways, went one better. Not only did they not know from which bay our bus departed, they denied its very existence and the existence of the bus itself, although we had tickets to travel! It was beginning to get amusing.

Dragging the heavy cases from the lockers up two flights of steps and then loitering in the bitter wind was not so funny. We asked a couple of Polacks on the street the bus question for which we could get no answer, and one of them was so appalled or frightened when he heard the Russian lingo that he practically dashed away.

We decided we must divide and conquer. I went to reconnoitre the bus park to see if I could spot the bus, whilst Olga, having clocked a small group of people huddled against the wind behind the back of the bus station, went to ask the dreaded question.

My mission was unsuccessful (isn’t it always!), but on my return I found that the group that Olga had approached were waiting (note that word ‘waiting’ again) for the same bus as us. Like us, they had little or no information to go on, but thought that the bus would depart close to where we were standing. The girl who Olga was talking with then added, in a low whisper, “It’s probably better if they (‘they’ meaning the Polacks) don’t hear you talking in Russian.” Well, now, this was what I call information! And it seemed to improve my Russian no end, because, having been warned to the contrary, Russian words and phrases were flying out of my mouth like economic migrants spilling from small crammed boats across the length and breadth of Dover’s shores.

Therefore, it was probably fortuitous that, struggling to contain my new-found language skills, my eye alighted on a bus hidden away at the side of the road. There was no bus bay and no other way of knowing whether this was our bus or not, but working on the hunch that it wasn’t speaking Russian, we decided to investigate. And hey presto, Fanny’s your aunt and Bob’s your unfriendly Polack, was I right or was I right!? (for once!).**

** In September 2023, I discovered a piece of paper taped to the wall on the inside of Gdansk dole office, sorry I mean bus station, stating the bay number from which the bus leaves for Kaliningrad. Then it was bay 11. Bay 11 is not really a bay as such but a number painted on a piece of tin stuck on the corner of the bus station. Although the destination from bay 11 is a place or a town in Poland, as stated on the piece of tin, and Kaliningrad is not mentioned, three people have since corroborated that this was the bay they used to travel by bus to Kaliningrad. The best way of locating this ‘bay’ is not to ask at Information, as they’ll either grunt or will not tell you. Exiting from the front of the station, with the railway lines in front of you, hang a hard left and then left again, and walla! ~ bay 11!

Relieved that we had discovered our transport out of Poland, I was less excited by the fact that our chariot of deliverance was a minibus, even less so when the answer to the question ‘Where do we stow our heavy bags?’ was in the Skibox clipped to the back of the bus. Though the driver made the mistake of lifting our heavy cases into the Skibox for us, he never made the same mistake twice, neither at the border crossing or later when he put us down in Kaliningrad. And who can really blame him?

The cases did have to come out again when we arrived at the Russian border, and, naturally, we had to go through the same rigmarole of standing in front of poker-faced officers sitting in little square cubicles, but that inquisition apart the process though tiring was fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, we would have to endure another hour of waiting when some woman was detained either because she had the wrong travel documents, the wrong items in her luggage or who can say what else was wrong with her? But something was not quite right.

Finally, back on home territory, all we had to do now was lug the cases into a waiting taxi and from the boot of the taxi into the house.

The return journey, which had begun at 4am British time, ended in Kaliningrad at 12 midnight. Ahh, back to a nice warm house, which no doubt it would have been if the fuse box had not tripped out owing to some electrical fault or other.

In conclusion, the Kaliningrad to UK or UK to Kaliningrad route via Gdansk Airport and by bus is not as direct as one would like. However, it gets you there in the end and on the way tests personal virtues, such as patience, diplomacy, tact, resourcefulness, stamina and so forth. Yet, those of a nervous disposition are advised to approach it with caution. Prepare yourself for the journey. Perhaps an hour of meditation and a course on anger management before you leave the house?