a (too short) visit to Kaliningrad
I'd arranged to go to Belarus for a week with a tour group, and after booking it I saw that I could add on a pre-tour extension of a few days in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad at a pretty good price, so I did so. I'm glad I did, as it was an interesting place to visit, although the trip was too short which was frustrating, as I'm sure I won't have the time or money to re-visit to see the forts, cathedrals, museums, etc that we missed. To be fair, we missed the first scheduled half-day, as we waited six hours at the Lithuania-Kaliningrad border crossing for some of our group to get through. We had been warned that it could be a difficult crossing, and some (male) members of our group were held for many hours whilst the Russian border guards searched their phones and their social media accounts for anything incriminating, and in a few cases asked them to remove their tops and roll up their trousers so that their tattoos could be examined. One (Portuguese) tour grou...