Had any sentimental expatriate taken 25th December off work and attempted to have a peaceful family Christmas day at home, he would in all likelihood have soon wished he hadn’t.\u00a0 For nowadays it is almost impossible to spend a quiet day at home in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and unfortunately this often applies to the weekends as well.<\/p>\n
The economic boom which Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is enjoying is on a par with that of Moscow or St. Petersburg in relative terms, if not in absolutes.\u00a0 Whilst many far-flung Russian towns and cities are collapsing both physically and metaphorically, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is an exception thanks to its proximity to the enormous oil and gas reserves lying helpfully off the north shore of the island.\u00a0 Despite the protestations of\u00a0many Russians, environmentalists, and\u00a0the anti-globalisation crowd\u00a0in the West, the local residents are doing extremely well as a result of the foreign oil and gas companies setting up shop in their town, and when you compare their fortunes to most of the Russian Far East they could be forgiven for thinking they are the chosen few.\u00a0 As I mentioned<\/a> when I first arrived, rental prices for apartments are between $2000-$3000 per month, in\u00a0a country where the average wage is only a few hundred dollars.<\/p>\n So where is all the money going?\u00a0\u00a0For those at the top of the money tree, much of it is ending up in St. Petersburg or Moscow real estate.\u00a0 There is at least one billboard in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk advertising apartments in St. Petersburg, and my friend in that city who works as an estate agent tells me an awful lot of the money being used to buy the properties comes from the oil towns of Siberia and the Far East.\u00a0 But for those Sakhalin Islanders who find\u00a0a million dollar apartment on the Finnish Gulf slightly\u00a0beyond their\u00a0reach, they are all doing what the moderately wealthy in Moscow and St. Petersburg have been doing for the past few years: renovating their own apartments.<\/p>\n Home refurbushment has hit Russia in a big way, and it has landed in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk with the speed and force of a meteorite.\u00a0 Having spent 30 years living in dingy apartments which had seen no maintenance or improvement since they were built, Russians have (very sensibly) decided that the best way to spend their cash is on improving and decorating their homes.\u00a0 They are also very wary of keeping large amounts of cash, most having lost an awful lot in the financial crisis of 1998, and ploughing Roubles into property can insulate against this type of thing in the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first things to get ripped out are the rotten wooden windows plugged with paper to keep the draught out, to be replaced by ultra modern triple glazed UPVC windows, adverts for which are on every street and every TV channel.\u00a0 Then the ceilings\u00a0are painted, the walls repapered, the\u00a0light fittings\u00a0swapped for ones more modern, and the Bakerlite switches and\u00a0plug sockets tossed in the bin to be replaced by white plastic ones.\u00a0 Unfortunately, folk\u00a0sometimes overlook the wiring and\u00a0it\u00a0is still very common to see an entire apartment run off a\u00a0few hair-thin wires connected to a handful of\u00a0wobbly plug sockets at waist-height\u00a0in the walls (why they never put them at ankle height I don’t know).\u00a0 At the same time, the decrepit internal doors are thrown in a skip to be replaced by much nicer ones with glass in and proper handles (the external door remains the half-inch thick steel job installed in 1991, it being sturdy enough to survive the building itself by a century or more).\u00a0 Lastly, the floor is repaired and covered, often by the carpet which has spent the last 30 years hanging on the wall (this is Asia, after all).\u00a0 If the occupants then save for a few more years, they will refurbish the bathroom, toilet,\u00a0and kitchen and the apartment will be like new.\u00a0 Those with a bit more money sometimes tear out all the internal walls and replan the whole place to make the most of the available space (Russian apartments are not as unreasonably small as we are led to believe, they are just appallingly planned for space).\u00a0\u00a0A tough decision\u00a0is made\u00a0as to whether the toilet and bathroom should be combined (more space) or left separate (more convenient).<\/p>\n All this means that on any given day in any given apartment, your head is rattled by a cacophony of smashing, sawing, hammering, drilling, scraping, and planing.\u00a0 The chap who lived next door to our pevious apartment must\u00a0by now have a living room wall like a collander, such was his enthusiasm with a drill.\u00a0 And lo and behold, in our new apartment\u00a0 the next door neighbour is having major renovations\u00a0carried out,\u00a0making so much noise that our stuffed toys have checked themselves into a hotel.\u00a0 Sacks of rubble keep appearing by the lift and lengths of splintered, rotten timber get tossed on the landing.\u00a0 The apartment buildings being huge, single structures noise carries along the walls and floors with ease, so if the noise from next door was bad enough you have all the other work going on in the building to contend with too.<\/p>\n I suppose all of this is a good sign,\u00a0as it shows that lives are improving for\u00a0some Russians and they\u00a0can now afford\u00a0to live in a much nicer home.\u00a0 But for anyone trying to enjoy his turkey in peace last Monday, he’d have wished his neighbours spent their money in the casino.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Had any sentimental expatriate taken 25th December off work and attempted to have a peaceful family Christmas day at home, he would in all likelihood have soon wished he hadn’t.\u00a0 For nowadays it is almost impossible to spend a quiet … Continue reading