{"id":258,"date":"2007-01-15T10:10:39","date_gmt":"2007-01-15T06:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=258"},"modified":"2007-01-15T10:22:50","modified_gmt":"2007-01-15T06:22:50","slug":"of-nuclear-submarines-and-dentistry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/258\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Nuclear Submarines and Dentistry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Isn’t life full of the unexpected?\u00a0 Five years ago I’d never have believed I’d be living in Russia in five years time, especially not in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 Last week I’d never have believed I would find myself\u00a0on Saturday evening celebrating Old New Year<\/a> sitting in the apartment of a chap who used to be the captain of a nuclear submarine based out of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky<\/a> during the\u00a0final years\u00a0of the Cold War.\u00a0 Our host had spent 15 years in the Soviet navy, most of them on Typhoon Class<\/a> submarines which held around 150 men and were at sea for 78 days at a time, with each person having a shower and change of clothes every 10 days.\u00a0 His job was to patrol the seas looking for evil Yanks and Brits to blow out of the water, or\u00a0more probably\u00a0just listen to.\u00a0 He finished his service with a dozen medals on his chest, some of which he showed me with a promise that he’d dig the rest out later.\u00a0 He also showed me his service pictures, when he was a submarine captain at 35 years of age.\u00a0 Nowadays he works as one of the top lawyers for the Russian security and police services in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 Needless to say, he doesn’t get too much hassle\u00a0from the road police, and nor I suspect from anybody else.<\/p>\n

My wife had met him and his wife when she found herself stranded by snow at Khabarovsk airport on the way back from St. Petersburg last month.\u00a0 They have two daughters, one studying in Moscow the other in St. Petersburg, and they were on their way back from visting the latter when they met my wife.\u00a0 Needless to say, in typically superb Russian tradition, they invited us to their place for dinner where\u00a0they\u00a0served enough food for\u00a0the husband’s entire former fleet, tipped\u00a0buckets of alcohol\u00a0down our necks, and were very disappointed that at 1am we had to leave so early, seven hours after arriving.\u00a0 I think they miss their children and are searching for a replacement.<\/p>\n

On a completely unrelated note, I feel I must dispel a certain myth about Russia, or at least Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, concerning the standard of dentistry available.\u00a0 Having had a complete check-up, cleaning, and\u00a0three fillings performed<\/a> only last May when I was still in Dubai I thought I’d be okay for a while, but the other day I found that when I drank cold or hot stuff I got a sharp pain in\u00a0an upper molar (one that had been repaired in May).\u00a0 It didn’t help that the last few mornings have been below minus twenty.\u00a0 Being a fan of getting these sort of problems solved here and now rather than putting them off for six years and digging out blind at the pain, I got my local sidekick to sort me out with an appointment at the dentist.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps not surprisingly given the Russians’ ability to move swiftly and efficiently when there is a possibility of being paid, I got an\u00a0appointment\u00a0immediately.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was\u00a0extremely relieved to find myself\u00a0in a\u00a0practice as modern and well equipped as any I have found in the West, or in Dubai for that matter.\u00a0 I will refrain from commenting on the appearance of the (female) dentist, because the enormous bollocking I got from my wife when\u00a0I broached\u00a0the subject during the description of my wisdom teeth removal<\/a> is still fresh in my memory, and it was more\u00a0painful than any tooth extraction.\u00a0 But let’s just say that the dentist was not an ex-miner called Boris and\u00a0the drill had not been borrowed from Comrade Nikolai who fixes roads for a living.\u00a0 It was all very civilised, very pain free, and above all, pretty cheap at $62 for a drill and fill (about half what it cost in Dubai).\u00a0\u00a0They didn’t speak any English though,\u00a0but having metal instruments in my mouth can hardly make my Russian accent any worse.<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, many\u00a0Brits leave the\u00a0country to have dentistry work carried out, or wait until they’re back home.\u00a0 Yet judging by my experience today and from what I hear about the current state of dentistry in Britain, I’m surprised\u00a0they’re\u00a0not flocking in the other direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isn’t life full of the unexpected?\u00a0 Five years ago I’d never have believed I’d be living in Russia in five years time, especially not in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 Last week I’d never have believed I would find myself\u00a0on Saturday evening celebrating Old … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}