Hello! My name is Lada Polyanskaya and I have been living in Kaliningrad for 6.5 years now. I was born and grew up in the city that is now called Yekaterinburg, although in my childhood it was Sverdlovsk. For as long as I can remember, I always dreamt of leaving Sverdlovsk for good. I disliked everything about it! In winter it was so cold that the whites of your eyes turned to glass in the frost. In the off-season — mud up to your knees. And on the day when summer happened, for some reason we were always either working or busy with other urgent matters. Summer was remembered mainly for the whine of mosquitoes and the smell of burning peat bogs. Because of all this, the windows had to be kept shut all the time.
Yes, the Urals have wonderful lakes and cliffs, but the forests are more like impenetrable windfalls, and from late spring to midsummer they teem with encephalitis ticks — I once had a vaccination against them that nearly killed me…
Although we lived in a residential district with well-developed infrastructure and excellent transport links, getting to the university, for example, took at least an hour and a half each way, provided the bus came quickly.
The high crime rate and the dominance of people from the former Soviet republics (I love people, but one day I suddenly realised that you simply couldn't hear Russian spoken in my city at all — on the streets, on public transport, in shops, in schools — there were almost no Russian people or Russian speech left!) were the last straw.
So the decision to move did not come out of the blue. It seems I was born with it.
That is why, whenever I came to a new city, I always looked at it closely and asked myself: "Could I live here? Does this city suit me?"
I tried living in Moscow several times. Altogether I lived there for three years. Not for me.
As for my attempt to move to Chile, you could write a whole separate book about it. Exactly six months later I returned to my homeland.
When I came to Kaliningrad to visit an old friend, literally on my second day in the city I realised that this was where I would move and this was where I would stay. Why? Because it was early November — rose bushes were blooming in the parks and bright maple leaves lay on green grass. It was warm. There was the sea. There were seagulls…
— "And you know what, in summer there'll be storks!" Storks? Good Lord, I'd only ever seen them in pictures…
There were tiled roofs, cobblestones, avenues of old trees along narrow roads.
— "And if you had a visa, we could pop over to Poland tomorrow evening, or to Lithuania, for a beer!" Pop over in the evening? Good Lord, I used to work a whole year to get a holiday and "pop over" somewhere…
Six months after that visit I came here with two bags, and ever since, for six years now, I have thanked God every morning for finding my Paradise on Earth.
I like absolutely everything about Kaliningrad. The climate. The compactness of the city. The historic architecture. The sea. The closeness of Europe. The beautiful trees...
But most importantly, in Kaliningrad I finally met the person with whom I intend to spend the rest of my life. We each sold our property very quickly, bought a great new flat in shades of grey, did it up, and that's where we live.
Of course, it wasn't without its difficulties. Finding a job here turned out to be very hard for me. At first the only job I could get was at a swimming pool — as the person who walks round the pool, gets in everyone's way and makes sure no one drowns… A little later I was taken on as a sales manager at one of the city's car dealerships, then I moved to another dealership, and a third…
I liked working at car dealerships. Always new people, new stories; some of my clients still call me, I made friends with some of them, and we keep in touch regularly.
True, there were some awkward incidents while I was adapting. One left a bad taste: I parked my car outside a company's office (literally for half an hour) in a public car park that was neither fenced off nor marked in any way, and went about my business, including a visit to that very office. When I came back I found my car in a truly awful state — wrapped all round in sticky tape. Plus a note that was a threat and a warning in one: "do not park your car near This Office".
A real "greeting from the 90s", honestly!
The company's employees refused to clean the tape off my car, were rude to me and generally spoiled my mood considerably. I filed a complaint against them with the police. But then "kind people" explained to me that Kaliningrad is a small city and you mustn't quarrel with "the powers that be". That was a "greeting from the 90s" squared! I was in shock. But I suppose there is no barrel of honey without a spoonful of tar. In my case Kaliningrad is the honey and this incident is the tar. I'd like there to be more honey from now on and, accordingly, no tar at all.
Getting back to the problem of finding work… Over time I realised that with so few vacancies the only logical solution left was to work for myself. These days I take tourists around the region and the neighbouring countries, showing them the places I have come to know and love. People write to me all the time asking me to drive them somewhere, tell them something, show them something, where to stay, how to get there and so on. There are funny questions too, for example: "From which spot is it best to photograph this church to get the most flattering angle?" The only thing I ask of my "tourists" is to let me know in advance that they are coming, because, especially in summer, practically every day of mine is booked up…
Besides that, I have gone back to an old passion of mine — I write books to order. My clients are mostly people who have something to tell but absolutely no time to write anything themselves, let alone run around publishing houses.
Each of these occupations gives me incredible pleasure and lets me plan my life as I see fit.
In Kaliningrad I slightly miss some more active involvement in public life. My circle of acquaintances is not very large, but I think new friends and new connections are a matter of time. I would like to be of more use to the city I have come to love as my own.
My husband and I travel a lot, not only abroad but around the region too. We love walking along the surf line, sometimes for many kilometres. I suppose the only thing missing to complete the picture is a dog.
What I love most is waking up early in the morning while the whole city is still asleep, driving off somewhere to the sea, switching on my computer right there and working, sitting in my car, looking at the waves and listening to the cries of the gulls. I think that is what happiness is.
Photos by the author
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
