LETTER FROM KALININGRAD/Frank Shouldice: Torrential rain played havoc with the city's drinkers last night. For once the streets and parks were deserted and bus shelters turned into impromptu saloons.
Kaliningrad might have a reputation for AIDS, TB and mafia, but the first thing you're likely to notice is public drinking on a breathtaking scale. Numerous kiosks operate as off-licences, helpfully providing an opener for take-aways.
Each bottle is meticulously priced, including a dubiously-sourced dark ale called "Dublin" marketed by a green leprechaun hat and clay pipe. Also stocked is Konigsberg lager although that's probably the only accepted reference you'll find to the city's Prussian past.
There's a visible but declining body of evidence that this was ever part of Germany. It's in the cobbled side streets, the needlepoint spires of red-bricked churches or the architecture of buildings that survived second World War. Their stonework is unmistakably German and likely to outlast the grey horizon of Soviet-built apartment blocks which house the city's 750,000 residents.
A fringe benefit of the downpour was to lift a heaviness blanketing the city. Humidity here traps the waft of the port's vast refinery, saturating the air with diesel, while freight bulk carriers clank through the port railway day and night.
Garishly flanked by neon casinos, Lenin still commands Victory Square but Kaliningrad's drabness provides stark contrast with images of the city in its pre-war elegance. It's as though a baroque port-city, a cross between Amsterdam and Vienna and resting place of native philosopher Immanuel Kant, took centuries to build, months to destroy and was given just a few years to rebuild.
Konigsberg Castle was its magnificent focal point but that was flattened by the RAF. Its last remaining turret was cleared in 1967 to make way for something special: the Communist Party headquarters for the region.
Swedish contractors were brought in but after two decades, the project ground to a halt for lack of funds. Moscow was distracted by events unfolding in the Baltics and the proposed 18-storey monolith stands Ceausescu-like, a shell to dominate the skyline and little else.
The area below it has become a car park. In a region sundered by poverty, numbered slots are allocated to top-of- the-range Mercedes, BMW and Lexus models with local registrations. There is money here. Somewhere.
It's hardly from tourists travelling to the wild west of East Prussia. Visitors are presented with a Byzantine set of visa procedures including, for some nationalities, an obligatory AIDS test. There is no tourist office.
With the break-up of the Soviet Union and accession of Poland and Lithuania to the EU, Kaliningrad no longer shares a border with its motherland. A travel corridor through Lithuania is proposed to enable travel from one part of Russia to another.
This will serve its purpose but psychologically, the city has been cut off. "I don't know what's going to happen," shrugs a restaurant manager. "We are proud to be Russian but in a way we feel Moscow has abandoned us."
A visit to the national museum presents a journey back to the Soviet era. The top floor boasts a panoply of hand- made dolls and crafts as though some sale of work was declared a patriotic treasure.
Under the stentorian eye of burly female attendants, I wandered into the museum's newest addition. Smiling photographs of young men from Kaliningrad along with personal effects and military medals. All of them were dead. "Chechnya!" explained the attendant, as if anyone needed reminding that even west of the EU, we were still on Russian soil.