To put it briefly: this place is in Russia - Europe is far away.
We went there because we got an invitation from this hotel (needed for the visa) which means they deal with your entry and departure visa and all the other bureaucratic stuff I got no idea about. Very practical - especially if you don’t speak Russian.

Hotel Baltika is supposed to be a *-hotel - the hostels we’ve stayed at the weeks before were much more luxurious…
As there are doubled prices for foreigners a double room would have been about 100 €. But we wanted to stay six days so we decided to go to the only camping ground of the city (despite the 4 °C at night….brrr!) which was nothing but an unguarded meadow right behind the hotel. Anyway - it was about 5 € per night for two persons and we had a lovely sight on a lake so there was nothing to complain about. You can pay there in euros or in rubel.
The sanitary arrangements turned out to be the bathroom of a single room in the hotel.

There’s Internet access as well - a slow connection but it works….unless there’s another power breakdown. But no need to fuss: the staff is used to this so soon there’ll be lots of candles everywhere which is actually quite romantic….if it weren’t for the drink prices :-/