Until 2010 Leah I lived in St. Petersburg and did not even imagine that I could move to the other side of the world. But everything was changed by her meeting with a priest from Australia, who flew to Russia for the congress of Orthodox youth abroad. A descendant of Russian emigrants called the girl down the aisle and took her to himself. With him, she became Mother Leah, a mother of three children and a real Australian. The wife of priest Alexander Paramonov shared her impressions of life in this distant country with AiF. ru.
On snake Street, in the house of lizards
In 2009, on the May holidays, Leah and her faithful friends were on a trip to the holy places, which began with a visit to Murom. There, unmarried St. Petersburg girls bowed to the Orthodox patrons of the family and marriage, St. Peter and Fevronia. And just a couple of months later, Leah, who speaks English well, was unexpectedly invited to a meeting with a delegation of Orthodox foreigners in St. Petersburg. She was asked just to keep up the conversation, and in the end she met her future husband there. As if the Murom saints really helped her to start a family and at the same time get to the end of the world.
A priest from Australia, Alexander Paramonov, whose ancestors emigrated after the revolution, immediately noticed a beautiful girl. In the conversation, he asked her to show the city, after that they talked for about six months on Skype, and without any romance. They were just interested in a friend with a friend. And then, after much thought, she accepted his invitationin & nbsp; guests for & nbsp; New Year’s holidays 2010 After that, Alexander also flew to the girl in St. Petersburg, where they eventually got engaged. And the wedding was already held across the ocean, in the Gold Coast city, in which Leah has been living since then. Now she is an Orthodox mother and a mother of three children. But even after more than ten years, Leah perfectly remembers her first meeting with a distant continent.
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The priest’s wife runs her blog on Instagram, called “Mother AustraLia”.
On her first day in Australia, Leah was with Alexander at a cafe with an open courtyard, where she experienced a shock. It was caused by an unfamiliar creature that suddenly looked out from behind the interlocutor. It seemed to the girl a monster, and she jumped up on a chair with a cry. But already in the next moment, she was struck by the lack of reaction from others.
“Everyone turns around, looks at me in surprise, sees the animal, and continues to calmly drink their beer,” Lia recalls with a smile. — Alexander also said that everything is fine, you don’t have to shout like that. As it turned out, it was a water dragon. He and & nbsp;looks like a real dragon & nbsp; & mdash; green, with thorns on back, with & nbsp; an impressive mouth. Only it is & nbsp; small, the size of a chameleon. There they walk along the streets, like cats in Russia. If you don’t bully them, then they won’t touch you either, so everyone is used to them.
Then she met another Australian animal, about which they tell terrible stories like those where they talk about toilets infested with snakes. Leah calls them & nbsp;greatly exaggerated, although & nbsp; admits & mdash;they have some truth in them. Most Australians live in private homes and therefore in the toiletit is indeed possible to meet an uninvited guest, but this happens very rarely. Leah herself has seen snakes only a few times all the time in Australia, and then from afar, in the wild. Basically, such meetings happen there in the hikes outside the city, where you just need to take precautions, which all the locals know about.
And here she finds spiders in the house often, but mostly they are not dangerous, especially large ones. Only once she was shown a terribly poisonous small spider, which even the locals looked at as a curiosity. Also, small lizards crawl into the house, but they are cute and not dangerous. Leah’s children love to play with them. Perhaps the biggest fear of Australians is sharks. Because of them, many do not even swim in the ocean, although it is quite safe on the beaches during the day. There are nets under the water, and behind its surfacethey are watching. According to Leah, the last time a shark killed a person was a long time ago. Although sometimes they cripple people, especially surfers. But all & nbsp;Leah and & nbsp;her & nbsp; husband without fear began to master surfing, which is famous for the Gold Coast. & nbsp;but crocodiles are not found in them because of the climate. To reach them, you need to go far to the north, where it is much warmer. There toothy reptiles live even in salt water, so you can’t swim anywhere. But the biggest danger in Australia is the ocean, in which people often drown.
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A post with a story of a Russian TV channel that showed a Russian family from Australia.
Adventurers without central heating
Along with the nature of Australia, Leah was very surprised by the people living there. The descendants of post-revolutionary emigrants, who are many among her acquaintances, seemed to her even more Russian than here. They love Russia, honor traditions, celebrate holidays and use old words that are little used by us. The priest’s wife mostly sees them at the church and at a private Russian school, which the Paramonov children attend once a week. By the way, so that they know their native language, it is customary to speak Russian at home in their family.
The social circle of Leah, who works in the financial structure, includes many ordinary Australians. She also discovered a lot of unexpected things in them when she learned to understand. At first it was difficult, because they speak their own dialect with an abundance of slang and they also swallow words very much. According to Leah, they hardly even open their mouths in a conversation, but they are very open themselves.
“Australians are in many ways similar to Russians, by which I mean here all Russian-speaking Belarusians and Ukrainians. — & nbsp;says Leah. & mdash; They are so & nbsp; open. Only Russians become like this when they get to know a person well, and the Australians somehow immediately. When they see you for the first time, they immediately smile and start talking. They have no barriers in communication and a good sense of humor. But & nbsp;theythey prefer neutral topics. They don’t talk about religion, politics, money and gender here. Now it is impossible to talk about gender, because there are a lot of same-sex stories in the country. Here it is necessary to be very careful & mdash; it is not clear what you will run into. They can even fire you if you don’t look at a person of non-traditional orientation that way. They felt great support from the state a few years ago, same-sex marriage was legalized here.
Most Australians know very little about the geography of the world, but they are very curious. They listen with sincere interest to Lia’s stories about Russia, ask a lot of questions. Very often people ask how we live in such a cold, and at the same time we are convinced that immigrants from Russia should never freeze.
« I & nbsp; try to explain to them that in the houses of Russians, although there would be batteries, — says Lia. When it’s cold outside, it’s warm inside and everyone wears T-shirts. And in Australia there is no central heating at all, everyone warms up as he can. It’s cold in our tropical state right nowtwo months. At night, plus five, plus ten degrees. It’s really cold, it’s uncomfortable at home. We turn on the air conditioner for heat or put a heater on. At such a time, we are wrapped up, and the locals, on the contrary, can wear T-shirts in plus five plus five. They do not know how to dress according to the season, they are not adapted to this.
When she was still communicating with her future husband on Skype, she often saw him sitting at home in a scarf and a hat. We had summer at that moment, and it was winter in Australia.
As a believer, Leah notes with great regret that it is very difficult to find an interlocutor for spiritual conversations among the locals, which is not a problem in Russia. According to her, there are a lot of atheists in Australia and many people will not even understand you if you talk about the soul. Mostly people there are interested in material things, says the Russian woman.Perhaps this is due to the history. Although convicts began to explore Australia, who were brought here from England even for minor offenses, Leah calls it first of all a country of adventurers. Such people poured into Australia during the gold rush, which began later than the American one. It is clear that they were only interested in money.
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Leah talks about kangaroos.
The country of rich plumbers
The Australian genes of adventurism give their advantages. Local residents are not afraid to change their profession and start all over again, even in adulthood. They easily take risks, invest money in different projects and even if they lose everything, then they start again. The luckiest investors become very rich, and in this regard, Australia is a countrygreat opportunities. Perhaps, in this way, it continues to attract immigrants. A third of the current inhabitants of the continent were born outside of it, and among them there are a lot of immigrants from Asia. According to Leah, Australia in general is becoming more and more an Asian country every year.
Interestingly, ordinary hard workers often live here richly.
“I was surprised when one day I went to give money to a plumber for repairs,” says Leah. — And I saw in what a gorgeous house he & nbsp;lives. It happens that some guy in an orange work suit gets into a very expensive car in front of your eyes. You think, wow! All this is because the working specialties here are very profitable. The services of those plumbers are not cheap, and they have enough work. Officially, you can’t even install a new outlet in the house without a license yourself, you need to call an electrician.
Salaries in Australia are an order of magnitude higher than in Russia, but prices also bite much harder. According to Leah, after all the spending, there is not so much money left. For example, only for water their family pays about a hundred thousand a year in transfer to our money. Renting a small house costs about 120 thousand rubles a month. And the prices do not stand on the spot.
“Over the past two years, prices for food products have increased very much here, inflation is really big,” Leah shares. — If earlier for one hundred Australian dollars you could buy a whole cart of food in a supermarket, now there are a maximum of two packages. Maybe prices are being raised because of reduced competition. Due to the coronavirus, the borders are closed, and there are much fewer imported goods.
After the realities of St. Petersburg, Leah was very surprised that the vast majority of Australians live in private homes. And this is a common thing even in the center of a big city, literally in a ten-minute walk from skyscrapers. She also noticed that public transport is very poorly developed in the country. In & nbsp;megacities with & nbsp;it is even more or less, but in & nbsp;small cities canwalk only one bus twice a day and & nbsp; everything. It is very difficult without your own car, but almost everyone has them, and the rights are issued from the age of 16. By the way, traffic violations are very severely punished in Australia, and the police themselves are extremely strict. According to Leah, it is impossible to joke with them in any case, and it is better to be silent at all if there is nothing to say about the case.
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A post about Lia’s acquaintance with her future husband.
They scold the authorities while sitting in quarantine
The low population density and the remoteness of Australia from the whole world in many ways helped it to avoid the severe consequences of the pandemic. Leah notes that there has never been a time pressure in hospitals in the country due to the coronavirus, and there are generally few infected people in comparison with other countries. But even with a small outbreak, the authorities introduce tough measures that cause a wave of criticism.
“There are a lot of dissatisfied people in the state of Victoria because of the actions of the state,” Lia splits. — & nbsp;There were entrusted to protect people who were sitting in hotels on quarantine to private firms, whose guards did not work well and themselves spread the disease across Melbourne. An outbreak began, after which the entire state was closedand & nbsp;canceled flights. Because of this, the flow of internal migration has sharply increased. People began to leave the big cities at the first opportunity. We have a lot of them in the Gold Coast, I know several families. They are tired of being quarantined for a whole year, when we are swimming here and almost don’t know what it is at all.
However, recently the Gold Coast was again quarantined for three days: a new strain of coronavirus is to blame, finding loopholes in all the barriers. Although Australia is closed to tourists, it continues to accept its citizens from abroad. A two-week quarantine, which upon arrival, everyone is obliged to sit in a hotel at their own expense, does not always help. According to Leah, such people have already spread the infection several times after the quarantine is over, as the virus is changing.
Vaccination in Australia has started recently and so far covers only at-risk groups. The rest can join the queue at will, and people under 40 years old are not even recorded yet. They say that they will not be vaccinated at all with the Astra Zeneka vaccine, which is common in Australia. Stories about & nbsp; thrombosis from & nbsp;her there also made a lot of noise. Young people are planning to put a drug from Pfizer, which has just appeared. There are also kangaroos in the countryanti-vaccinators and supporters of conspiracy theories, but there are a minority of such people. According to Leah, people laugh at stupid stories and are mostly determined to get vaccinated. Some people wait, like the Paramonov family, but they prepare persuasion measures for indecisive people. Plans are being discussed to introduce a ban on unvaccinated flights, which for many will be equal to an obligation. People surrounded by exotic things also like to travel, and it’s difficult to live in a country like Australia without planes at all.