Have any DLers ever been to Kaliningrad?

Yes. I spend my summers there.

I've always thought it'd be interesting to go too, OP. Will be interested to hear of any experiences here.

It should be part of Poland.

Polish men are hot.

Königsberg

I been there and it's a typical charming Baltic town, like Riga or Tallin. Just occupied by Russians.

It's a cesspool of drug and human trafficking. Maybe they've cleaned up the surface since I was last there, but the rot and the pollution go deep, as do the bunkers under every square.

Fun fact: its Castle was the place where the legendary Amber Room from the Catherine Palace was last seen, before the Soviets bombarded it all to smithereens in 1945. Now it's a myth, like El Dorado...

The place is unbelievably ugly since pretty much all of the buildings were destroyed during the war or right after. There are a couple of mock-medieval buildings the Soviets erected and a restored Gothic cathedral which looks a bit out of place amidst all the ugly post-war blocks. The poster above who compared it to Riga and Tallinn is deluded.

The only place of interest in the whole exclave is the Curonian Spit but you can easily visit that one from Lithuania as well.

I find this unfinished building to be fascinating. They’re finally just giving up and tearing it down.

Yes, there's virtually nothing original left. Unless you are a Kant (he never went further than a few miles away from the place) or Kathe Kollwitz obsessive, there's really no plus about the place.

It's kind of strange to think of this strange skinny swath of northern Poland being continuously occupied by Germans (Prussians) for nearly a thousand years. Danzig (Gdansk) and Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) are so far from the contiguous area of German-speaking peoples, it must have always felt a little precarious for residents. They surely all had to learn enough Polish to shop and to travel. Likewise, that little sliver of Russia is so obviously there to try to intimidate the Poles and the people of the Baltic Republics, and to gain some sort of strategic position on the Baltic Sea, but the Russians there also have to feel isolated.

No, r11. Danzig, Stettin and Königsberg (among many other cities, like Breslau and Posen) were squarely inside the large contiguous area that was Germany before 1918. There were Poles living in the area, I'm sure, but all the government administration and most of the schooling and shopping would have been done in German.

See the map below -- everything within the red border was Germany.

Not unless they have a pavilion at EPCOT.

Actually, that map above represents the partition of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria that happened between 1772 and 1795. NONE of those areas east of the Oder were ever majority German-speaking areas, except as I mentioned, the narrow swath along the Baltic. .

R11, my great grandparents were German and lived in that area in the 1800s. When they immigrated to the US, their immigration papers listed their languages as German (primary), Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian.

The Russian Trolls on Data Lounge get bolder every day.

DL only gets the low cost trolls assigned to it. In fact they mostly work out of kaliningrad. Other than Ludmila from Minsk.

Assuming one could hire sufficient security to go there safely...

how big would the penises be?

Have at it op. The most interesting thing is it's history.

I remember reading an article about it a few years ago that made it sound beyond awful: saying that it's crime-infested would be a serious understatement, and as others have already pointed out rampant prostitution, drug-related crimes, and human trafficking are out of control. In addition to having the highest per capita AIDS infection rates in Europe.

R20 rude.

R17 the Data Lounge trolls are retarded and tedious. One million Alok threads speak to their incompetence and lunacy.

[quote]rampant prostitution, drug-related crimes, and human trafficking are out of control. In addition to having the highest per capita AIDS infection

Sounds like Provincetown in the summer.

I’ve been to Kaliningrad but I’ve never been to me.