People Like Us

The Age

Thursday June 23, 2005

Deborah Cameron, Tokyo correspondent, Helena Iveson, Martin Daly, Victoria Kyriakopoulos, Helen Womack, Claire Halliday

How good is life in Melbourne? We compare the daily existence of a family here with similar families in five of Melbourne's sister cities: Osaka, Tianjin, Boston, Thessaloniki and St Petersburg.

(OSAKA)

CITY Osaka, Japan (pop. 2.6 million)

WHO Miho Matsumoto, a homemaker, her husband, Yoshitaka, a fabric dealer, and their three children: Junko, 14, Yuichiro, 10, and Yukako, 2

HOME Cramped three-room flat in Central Osaka, close to family business

PROS Bustling street life, shopping

CONS Tiny flats, high population density

With her sleepy two-year-old daughter on her knee, Miho Matsumoto sits down at a small square dining table pushed tight against the kitchen wallpaper. A bottle of iced green tea, the little girl's favourite, is within reach. Her elder daughter, who has spent the morning at baton-twirling practice, and son, just home from singing at a Shinto shrine, take their places between the sink and the fridge. By squeezing together they make room for their father who, full of enthusiasm, offers to pull out the table's extension. Startled looks all round stop him in his tracks. There is nowhere for the extension to go.

Japanese family life doesn't get more intimate than this. Five people, with all of their stuff, in a three-room apartment. Whatever you have heard about Japanese minimalism, the sparseness of homes, the economy and significance of beautiful possessions, the elegance of a neatly compartmentalised life, you should forget it. It is a hoax pulled by magazine editors.

This is the real picture. Dishes draining on the sink. Papers, envelopes, notices, files, pamphlets, documents and magazines, stacked high and listing heavily on a shelf just inside the door. A 20-kilogram sack of rice that won't fit in the cupboard; a box or two to hold groceries; a few precious bowls in a narrow glass cabinet; four seats at the table, two of them stools; and a baby's highchair. A two-burner stove with a grill for frying fish but, typically for Japan, no oven. In another corner of the room a flat-screen TV, a microwave and an electric pizza warmer. It is here, usually after his wife and children have eaten, that Yoshitaka Matsumoto reheats dinner before sinking into his futon between 1am and 2am. Though it is both the kitchen and the living room, there is no sofa. Indeed, there is no room even for one soft armchair, no matter how minimal.

They pay Y90,000 per month ($A1,100) for the first-floor apartment, putting up with cramped rooms to save money for mounting school fees. Their car, a 10-year-old Ford Mondeo station wagon, is garaged in a multi-level across the street at a cost of Y30,000 per month ($A365). Getting it down from its spot is a balletic procedure of button pushing that makes a forklift rise up, collect the car, put it down on a big metal turntable for a spin that leaves it facing the right way when roadside yellow doors glide open. Mrs Matsumoto, who does not drive, often does her errands and shopping on a bicycle.

Around the corner from their place is the family business, a five-storey brown rendered warehouse near the centre of Osaka, Japan's third-biggest city. As a dealer in ribbons and woollen felt, Mr Matsumoto rarely takes more than one day a week off. "Just two or three days before he died, my grandfather asked me to follow in the family business and to carry it on," Mr Matsumoto says.

At 15, he gave his promise. Now aged 46, it seems unlikely that he'll ever get to work overseas, which he says he'd have loved. Too late also to be Japan's first taco entrepreneur, a brainstorm he had more than 20 years ago after a year of living in the United States and eating at Mexican restaurants.

The business remains a family concern. Mr Matsumoto's mother, 72, cooks her son a spicy lunch every day and his father, 76, keeps busy at the shop. "I want him to stay involved, if he retires, then he will lose his marbles," says Mr Matsumoto. The only tool of their trade, a short-bladed knife for cutting felt to length, has not changed in generations.

Mr Matsumoto spends his mornings taking orders and the afternoons buzzing around Osaka in a small delivery van. He drops off bright coils of ribbon, rolls of felt and pre-cut toy kits to craft stores.

Osaka, bombed almost to ruins by the Allies in World War II, has been rebuilt on a modern grid. The streets near the Matsumoto warehouse are wide and full of small businesses. Roads and an aerial spaghetti of flyovers carve up the city. Below ground there is virtually a second metropolis that is a pedestrian zone, networked around the subway system, and made up of vast shopping malls and food halls.

The city's social life centres on Dotonbori, a visual and auditory battlefield. It has walls of neon, dazzlingly bright games parlours, pachinko halls, nightclubs, brothels, restaurants and bars. Rivers of people pour through it night and day. For street food it is hard to pass up the local specialty, takoyaki - octopus balls. At one vendor there are four cooks working either side of a long cast-iron griddle. Flipping the tasty pieces of batter - each with a chunk of octopus in the centre - until it is gold on the outside and hot but soft in the middle, they cannot keep pace with a growing lunch queue.

Despite the abundance of choice and the energy of the city, Mr and Mrs Matsumoto have not been out together alone without the children since they married. It seems to surprise them when they think about it, but life gets busy and, well, you know how it is, they say. They have started to spend savings put away before they married as the bills for educating the children start to mount.

Fourteen-year-old Junko goes to the city's best private girls' school six days a week. The fees, at Y550,000 ($A6,700) a year, are a big drain on the family income but her parents are delighted, especially because it is prestigious and was her mother's alma mater. Junko passed tough exams to get in and was tutored intensively beforehand at a carefully chosen cram school.

The couple met back in 1988 through a matchmaker. She is younger - by 10 years - and says that the big age difference made them an unusual match.

"But I thought he was interesting because he had travelled so much and I loved hearing him talk about the world outside of Japan," says Mrs Matsumoto. After a six-month courtship they married. When he organised for their first homestay guest, a Malaysian, to visit them, she cried with panic. Since then they've had more than a dozen.

And what attracted him to her? Did he think that his wife was beautiful when they met? He looks at her and fumbles, she laughs and playfully dares him to be honest.

"Um..." he says.

"Um? What do you mean, um?" she says. She shrugs, smiles, and leans back. Behind her is a rainbow of felt samples.

-- Deborah Cameron, Tokyo correspondent

(TIANJIN)

CITY Tianjin, China (pop. 10 million)

WHO Wang Jian, a teacher; her husband, Li Zhiqiang, who works for a bank; and their five-year-old daughter, Li Yuqing

HOME Spacious, modern six-room apartment in Hexi, an inner-city suburb

PROS Rapidly improving lifestyle

CONS One-child policy, high-density living

Tianjin is just 90 minutes from Beijing, but locals say it feels much further. Not that Tianjin is some sleepy backwater. It's one of China's biggest cities, with 10 million people, a substantial number of foreigners working in trade, its own dialect, style of cooking, and a reputation for friendliness. Wang Jian lives in Hexi, just west of the Haihe River, which has provided the city with much of its wealth. With her husband, Li Zhiqiang, and their five-year-old daughter, Li Yuqing, they are just a few kilometres from the city centre.

Their slate-coloured apartment block - only the very rich live in detached houses in a city bursting at the seams - is in what's considered a "good" neighbourhood, with Tianjin's best schools, brand-new high-rises and shopping centres. Neon lights from restaurants, mid-market clothes stores and mobile-phone shops light up the pavements, and in the distance, a gigantic TV tower dominates the skyline.

In their living room, there's a Winnie-the-Pooh tricycle and a huge bottle of Hennessy XO Whiskey displayed behind glass cabinet doors and a large fish tank against one wall. The other five rooms, including a study, lead off from the living room, and the whole place feels modern, light and airy, though a chorus of vehicle horns can be heard outside.

Born here, Wang Jian and Zhiqiang met at university and say they have no intention of leaving Tianjin. Zhiqiang, 34, has worked at the Agricultural Bank of China, one of the country's main banks, for almost 15 years now. He earns around 7,000 yuan ($A1100) a month plus a yearly bonus - "A little higher than the Tianjin average," he says. Wang Jian, 32, teaches Chinese at a secondary school. This is her busiest time of year, as she coaches students for the national university entrance exam. "I do enjoy the teaching, but at this time of year, the stress is difficult," she says. Her salary is about 4,000 yuan ($A630) a month.

Every weekday morning, the whole family sets off together in their gleaming little Xiali. The total journey is only four kilometres, but with traffic can take nearly an hour. The car was made in Tianjin (in a joint venture between Toyota and a local company) and bought outright two years ago for 50,000 yuan ($A8000). Before then, they caught the bus. Yuqing is dropped off at a government-run kindergarten which costs a little under 10 per cent of the couple's monthly income, with bills for tuition, food and art supplies, as well as the annual health check, compulsory for all children attending school. "We think it's a good place as they don't focus on education, but on playing and getting used to being with other children," Wang Jian says. In the evening, Zhiqiang collects his wife and daughter. When the weather is fine, they often go kite flying at the small park near their flat, which is full of other young families enjoying the greenery they don't have at home - they don't know anyone who has a private garden.

Weekends are a time for family and revolve around Yuqing. On Saturday mornings she studies traditional Chinese dancing while Jian goes to yoga or uses the gym in their building. On Sunday mornings, Yuqing goes to private English classes, and Zhiqiang waits in the car reading while Yuqing learns to count. "Right now, she's very proudly telling everybody she's five in English," says Wang Jian. Yuqing's uncle has emigrated to Canada and the whole family want to visit in a few years time. "We want her to translate!" laughs Wang Jian. In the afternoons, they head to a local private arts centre for drawing class. While Chinese parents have a reputation for over-ambitiousness with all their hopes invested in their child, Yuqing's parents are adamant she will not be one of the country's "little emperors" (the media often bewail the generations of only children, a consequence of China's one-child policy).

Every weekend, without fail, they spend time with both sets of grandparents, who live within easy driving distance. "Family is very, very important to us," Wang Jian says. The two adults rarely spend time together without their daughter. As Wang Jian says: "We're very aware that we won't have another five-year-old, so we want to spend as much time with her as we can." Most of their money goes towards Yuqing's education. They bought their flat new in 2001 for 400,000 yuan ($A63,000) and have a 30-year mortgage that they're repaying at 1,700 yuan ($A270) a month. They own everything else outright. Like many Chinese, they don't have credit cards. "We prefer to wait rather than be in debt," says Wang Jian.

Food isn't too expensive, with bills averaging around 300 yuan ($A50) a week. Nearly all of that is spent on fresh produce rather than packaged meals. "We make sure we eat healthily. We have to be careful, especially with Yuqing being so young," says Wang Jian, who does the cooking - "Yes, me always! Though at the weekends, he does help," she says. Rice is their daily staple and Wang Jian cooks in the traditional Tianjin style - sweeter than food from other regions - with the evening meal often consisting of a soup, one meat dish, and a couple of vegetable dishes. Trips to McDonald's are a once-a-month treat, but that's mainly because Yuqing loves the restaurant's adventure playground.

The room goes silent for about a minute when the couple are asked what would improve their lives. "I'd like to work fewer hours and have more time in the evenings and to go on holiday as a family," says Wang Jian. They would also like another child, but the law prevents them even contemplating it. Five minutes later, Wang Jian comes up with what she'd really like: "I'd love a garden - then I'd be really happy."

-- Helena Iveson

(BOSTON)

CITY Boston, USA (metropolitan Boston has 600,000 residents; Greater Boston has close to 6 million)

WHO Academic Jill Harrison Berg and her teacher husband, Erik, and their two children: Maceo, 6, and Althea, 8

HOME Two-storey detached Victorian house with eight rooms in the old Boston neighbourhood of Jamaica Plain

PROS Clean, green city

CONS Expensive houses, cold winters

Beacon Hill is an affluent enclave of 19th-century brick row houses, antique shops and street lanterns that burn 24 hours a day. Bordered by the Charles River, its streets are lined with trees that retain their splendour even when bare. There's a restaurant at the foot of the Hill appropriately named Upper Crust. Nearby is Fi Dough's Pet Bakery and Boutique. A laundromat advertises "wash, dry and fold" at $1 per pound, an apparent concession to low-income earners. In the window is an ad for an apartment. The asking price is $US4,999,000 ($A6,570,000).

The fact that a $US5-million apartment is advertised in a laundry that elsewhere would spruik secondhand lawnmowers says a lot about Boston and the widening social divide in one of the most privileged and expensive cities in the US.

"A decent life here can be all about the cost of buying a home," says Jill Harrison Berg, a teacher and mother of two who lives about eight kilometres from Downtown in Jamaica Plain - once Irish/German, now increasingly Latino and gay - and watches the beginning of what she fears could be the disintegration of her neighbourhood.

"Some of our friends and neighbours have packed up and left because they cannot afford to buy a house here," says Jill, "and they cannot continue to pay the rising rents. And our children are losing their friends."

Boston, nevertheless, is a thriving city. It's said to rank only behind Silicon Valley in terms of technological innovation. Unemployment is 4.8 per cent. The city is friendly, clean and ordered, a "walker's city" with lots of parks. Like Melbourne, Boston has embraced the harbour and the river and developers are building high-price apartments with water views. The city is rich in the arts and culture. Ninety-seven per cent of Boston children, one study found, live within a kilometre of a public park.

The city is also known for its chaotic traffic, trains that run late, aggressive drivers and snow-bound winters.

Jill, 36, and Erik, 37, have been married for 13 years. They came to Boston as students, fell in love with each other and the city, and decided to stay. They live with their children, Maceo, 6, and Althea, 8, in a typical Jamaica Plain wood-frame house. It's two storey, detached, and has eight rooms and a substantial garden. There's a verandah on one side where Jill sits and shouts "hello" to newcomers who park outside her house. "I shout out again if they ignore me," she says. "I don't want our neighbourhood to be turned into a place full of people with money and no children who park outside my house and don't even say 'hi'. But that's what's happening, because only people with money can afford to live in neighbourhoods like ours now."

The Harrison Berg family didn't think they could afford to live there, either, on teachers' salaries when 10 years ago they paid $US138,000 ($A180,000) for the "fixer upper" on Sheridan Street, and lived downstairs while renting the second storey to finance the conversion to a family home when they had children.

Their house is now worth about $US750,000 ($A980,000), mainly because their garden is big enough to build another house in. They're paying $900 a month on a 15-year, $100,000 loan, at 6 per cent a year. "We basically got lucky. No way would be able to buy it now," says Erik, whose $76,000-a-year salary is $6000 below the Boston metro median of $82,000 and who thinks the tax levels in the US are too low relative to the poverty he sees every day as a public school teacher.

"But we're embarrassed by what our house costs now," says Jill, who gave up full-time teaching for doctoral studies in education at Harvard and a series of part-time jobs as an education consultant, specialising in the public sector.

Last financial year, the family earned $110,000 including Jill's income of $8000 from Harvard (her tuition is also paid) and about $17,000 as an education consultant, and for work she does with schools.

The family generally wants for nothing. They buy a lot of their food in bulk to cut costs and will sometimes buy second-hand clothes, but will spend heavily on quality items that are meant to last, like furniture or the recently bought $19,000 Honda Civic hybrid petrol/electric car. Their other car, a Saturn station wagon, cost $13,000 in 1998. They go away about six times a year, including interstate three times a year to visit their respective families. They go to local city beaches, holiday locations like Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod, museums and galleries and they go camping in scenic country for $100 a week. "We can't complain about anything," says Erik.

They save for essential items and for the future. Erik, as a public employee, pays $70 a month health insurance - his employer pays $1000 a month - which covers the family for everything from a visit to the doctor to major surgery, all for $10 a time. They spend $70 on petrol, $100 on electricity, and $100 a month on their landline and mobile.

Car insurance is $2000 a year - for many it's a lot higher - and Jill pays $20 a week in parking fines because it's cheaper than paying $20 a day to park, as she only gets booked, on average, once a week. "There's not a lot left over," says Jill.

They know how expensive their city is but they love living here and are prominent members of their community. "We relate to it deeply," says Erik, a member of the neighbourhood council, who along with Jill is an advocate of more affordable housing for low-income families.

Their day begins at 7am. Erik leaves for school at 7.45, which is 10 minutes away by car, against the traffic flow. He arrives by 8am and starts teaching at 9.15. He cycles on some days; four kilometres of the route are on a bicycle track. He leaves two days a week immediately after class, at 3.30pm, to get home in time to take care of the children, who are dropped off by bus. On three days a week, they stay in after-school care until 6pm because their parents are at work. The cost is $17 per child per day.

Jill works on different days at Harvard, or six blocks from her home at a public school. Driving in Boston is stressful, but Jill, who drove a lot in New York, can handle the ferocious driving habits of her fellow Bostonians. "I'm a relatively aggressive driver," she says. "I am not easily intimidated."

Transport, shops, schools, parks, the zoo - a family favourite - and lakes are close to their home. There's also a great restaurant scene locally, which helps when nobody wants to cook. They eat out or have takeaway about once a week.

They send their children to a public school with an alternative curriculum and students of mixed race because they are committed to state education, which is free, and because they want their children to be exposed to different races and cultures. But Erik fears that as only 15 per cent of white families send their children to public schools in Boston - when whites are 50 per cent of the population - segregation may be creeping back into education.

"It's not a money thing," says Erik of their decision to use public schools.

"It's more about the idea that education is not a privilege," adds Jill. "Every child is entitled to an education, and if there are problems with public school education, you fix them. You don't buy out by sending the kids to private schools and leaving the rest for people who have no money."

-- Martin Daly

(THESSALONIKI)

CITY Thessaloniki, Greece (pop. 1 million)

WHO George Michalopoulos, information technology manager, his wife, Cleopatra, kindergarten teacher, and their three children: Odysseus, 9, Nefeli, 7, and Filippos, 4 HOME Three-bedroom apartment with shared backyard in bayside Kalamaria

PROS Night life, good government schools, close to beautiful countryside

CONS High unemployment, old city choked with cars

Most evenings, you would be hard pressed to find a seat at one of the myriad cafes whose tables spill out onto Thessaloniki's grand squares and line the city's waterfront. Families stroll along the esplanade from the port to the historic White Tower, the former prison that is now a museum and the city's landmark.

Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, may play second fiddle to Athens, the Greek capital, but the northern city is no less sophisticated and arguably a more relaxed, stylish and liveable place.

A 70,000-strong student population at two of Greece's biggest universities gives the city a lively, student-town feel. Thessaloniki's boutiques rival Athens' and it is renowned for its good cuisine and night life and its rich intellectual and cultural life - the prestigious Thessaloniki International Film Festival is one of its biggest annual events.

George, 43, and Cleopatra, 36, live in the bayside suburb of Kalamaria, five kilometres south-east of the centre of Thessaloniki, with their children Odysseus, Nefeli, and Filippos. George and Cleopatra met in 1989 on her 20th birthday. She came to Thessaloniki from the northern Greek town of Ptolemaida as a student. They married nine years ago.

George's grandfather bought a 300-square-metre block in Kalamaria in 1929 and until 1981 the family lived in the house he built and enjoyed a big yard. After a major earthquake in 1978, the house was demolished to make way for an apartment block - as became the custom in every major Greek city during the urban population boom of the '60s and '70s.

George and his family live on the same floor as his brother, while his parents live downstairs and a cousin lives in another family apartment. Four other apartments were sold off but the owners have lived there so long it is like one big family home, sharing the small garden in the backyard where the children play. George's 110-square-metre, three-bedroom apartment is worth about 150,000 euros ($A248,000), just below the average price for a similar sized new apartment in the city.

George, who works as an information technology manager at SAE (a non-profit, non-government organisation for Greeks abroad), earns about 2300 euros per month ($A3800). Cleopatra's 1200-euro monthly salary as a kindergarten teacher is at the higher end of average wages in Greece. "We are very lucky that we have stable full-time jobs, as unemployment is very high in Thessaloniki," says George (it's 25 to 30 per cent).

Kalamaria is a well-serviced neighbourhood and working close to home significantly reduces the family's transport costs and greatly enhances their quality of life.

"My office is about a five-minute drive away and I usually travel to work by car or with my motorcycle when the weather is good," says George. "Cleopatra works at a local kindergarten about 150 metres away from our apartment so she walks to work. I hate going downtown because of the traffic, but this is an unsolvable problem because Thessaloniki is an old city and there is no way to create new roads. Parking is also a major problem and cars are routinely parked on the pavements after 7pm or 8pm."

They nevertheless own two cars, a small sedan for getting around town and a big family wagon for long road trips to their holiday house, about 40 kilometres outside of Thessaloniki, on the stunning Halkidiki peninsula. They spend three months there during the summer with their extended family, driving back to the city every day for work on the new highway, which makes it a 25- to 35-minute drive.

Like most Greek children, the Michalopoulos children attend local government-funded schools - less than 10 per cent go to private schools. "I believe it's much better for the kids to grow up in a local environment with local friends," says George.

As is commonplace in Greece, extended family plays an important part in the Michalopoulos's daily lives. Often the grandparents walk the children to school and regularly look after them when the couple go out. "We are very lucky because my mother and father live in the same building, so we have a baby-sitter available five minutes after we make the phone call," says George.

Most days the family cook at home and they admit they eat well. "Like all Greeks, we spend a lot of money on food. Not only for daily cooking, but we often go out for a dinner with or without the children. We also like to meet friends for a drink and chit-chat."

George has set up a home theatre and regularly invites friends over for movie nights or a football match. His other major pastime is running a local non-profit wireless network he established with a group of fellow tech-head friends, which covers 70 per cent of Thessaloniki. He says the network is among the 10 biggest in the world.

George believes the city has become more inhumane. "It is a very congested city and there aren't many neighbourhoods with parks and greenery. You can't go out on a Saturday night because everyone is out and the traffic is atrocious. On the other hand, you have a lot of facilities and schools and great shopping and technology, so you have all the good and bad of a big city. Thessaloniki is a pretty old lady but we have to do more to prevent the city from being ruined. I was born and raised in this place, which means that this is an incentive for me to stay and fight for my neighbourhood."

-- Victoria Kyriakopoulos

(ST PETERSBURG)

CITY St Petersburg, Russia (pop. 4.2 million)

WHO Alexander (Sasha) Veselov, an accountant, his wife Yelena (Lena), a stage designer, and their two children, Fedya, 19 (pictured), and Misha, 17

HOME Small two-bedroom apartment in central St Petersburg

PROS Arts and culture, improving lifestyle

CONS Traffic, gulf between rich and poor

The Veselov family are renovating their flat on Tuchkov Lane in central St Petersburg.

The kitchen has been painted an arty shade of red and beside the modern oven and microwave, the old stove has been tiled beautifully. Through the window, they look down onto a yard so grim that the BBC found it perfect for a location when filming Crime and Punishment. The Veselovs can do nothing about the yard. They may have achieved a middle-class lifestyle for themselves, but all around, their neighbours still live as if in a novel by Dostoevsky.

St Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad) was once Russia's capital, and is still regarded as the country's cultural capital.

Alexander (Sasha) Veselov, 45, and his wife Yelena (Lena), 42, have worked very hard indeed for their place between the upper-crust of super-rich Russians and the vast mass of the poor. (In Russia, some of the poorest people are those who would be middle-class in the West, such as teachers, doctors and artists. This is because the state no longer supports health, education and the arts as it did under Communism.)

The Veselovs have struggled to succeed not because they are hungry for material possessions but because they want their two sons to "have interesting lives" and because, after years of suffering privations, they want "interesting lives" for themselves. The two boys are both musically gifted. Fedya is studying the piano and Misha the cello in the hope of having careers in music.

Sasha, who came originally from Siberia and trained as a theatre director in Communist times, realised during the years of market reform under Boris Yeltsin that he would have to change profession if he was to support his family. He had always been good at maths, so he went into accountancy. He is now chief accountant at a company that provides services for the national railways and earns the equivalent of $US2000 ($A2600) per month (compared with an average salary of around $US400). The responsibility for looking after the boys has mainly fallen on Lena, a St Petersburg native, who also takes on freelance work as a stage designer.

The Veselovs have recently bought a jeep (borrowing $US33,000), which they see not as a luxury but as an essential because every summer they drive long distances on bad roads to their dacha (country house) in Karelia. Lena is the one with the driver's licence and when she can, she drives Sasha to his job through the morning traffic jams, clogged with Soviet-era Ladas and clapped-out cars imported from the West. It should be a 15-minute drive from their flat on Vasilievsky Ostrov (island), one of the oldest districts of St Petersburg, dating back to the time of Peter the Great, to Ligovsky Prospekt, down by the railway tracks, where Sasha has his office. But if the traffic is heavy, the drive can take an hour or more.

When Lena is not available, Sasha has to do battle with the crowds on the municipal buses or queue for the cowboy mini-vans that ferry the proletariat to their jobs in the factories and offices of St Petersburg. The port city of 4.2 million people was part of the Soviet military-industrial complex, but is now reviving its cultural heritage and working to attract tourists.

Sasha sets off for his office at 7.30am and officially ends work at 5.30pm, although often he is at his desk until 11pm and sometimes works weekends as well. "The commuting is not so bad early in the morning but there is a terrible crush on public transport in the evening," he says. He hates close physical contact with strangers and will often walk for an hour-and-a-half to reach home rather than endure being packed in a sardine can on wheels. "He is very tired, nearly dead when he gets home," says Lena.

She is not on quite such a treadmill. When there is an order from a theatre, she will work on costume designs, going to nearby museums for inspiration.

When the boys were small, Lena took them by metro to the local state school and music lessons after school. Now she has a very long commute with the boys, a 10-hour drive down the highway from St Petersburg to Moscow, where they are studying at the Chopin Music School in the hope it will lead to them entering the prestigious Moscow Conservatory.

All education, from kindergarten to university, was free in Soviet times and even now, Fedya and Misha get their main education for a nominal rouble fee, although their parents have to pay in US dollars for any additional master classes.

These master classes, plus the cost of renting rooms in Moscow where the boys stay during term-time, plus the renovation of their own home - they still need new flooring - are the main drains on the Veselovs' budget.

They are lucky to have inherited a piece of prime real estate, within walking distance of the famous Hermitage art gallery, as a result of an apartment exchange made nine years ago. They privatised their flat back in the Yeltsin era and it now has a market value of $US100,000 ($A132,000). It is not large, with a combined kitchen/living room where they spend most of their time, and two bedrooms. They own a TV, video and DVD players and a stereo.

Small shops and supermarkets are just a stone's throw away. The Veselovs spend 6000 roubles ($A280) a month on food. Plov, a central-Asian dish of meat and rice made by Lena, used to be their favourite, but now they can also afford to try out restaurants and Italian has become their cuisine of choice (though the quality of pizza and pasta can vary greatly).

They don't do any sports in the city, preferring to wait for summer when they can fish in the lakes and hike in the forests of Karelia. But they have friends over at weekends and go out to the cinema. The last film they saw was Bridget Jones's Diary.

To mark their forthcoming 20th wedding anniversary, Sasha is taking Lena on a trip to Spain, which would have been unthinkable when they were young, poor and stuck behind the Iron Curtain. They have also been on visits to Prague and Vienna.

"We are happy within our family. We know that happiness is not in material things," says Lena. "But we do not like what we see happening in our society; the brutality and poverty of spirit."

In Tsarist times, when bourgeois family happiness was perhaps the norm, Tolstoy wrote: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In modern Russia, with its violence, high divorce and mortality rates, alcoholism and poverty, it might be truer to say that unhappy families are all alike, while happy middle-class families like the Veselovs are still a social rarity.

-- Helen Womack

(MELBOURNE)

CITY Melbourne, Australia (pop. 3.2 million)

WHO Andrew Lazarus, a recruitment executive, wife Renate, who runs a children's clothing business, and their three children: Max, 6, Holly, 3 and Isaac, 10 months

HOME Double-fronted brick Victorian house in Richmond

PROS Close to work and schools, easy drive to beach

CONS Busy childcare routine

Andrew and Renate, both 37, bought their house in Richmond almost eight years ago. It is in a quiet, semi-industrial street that is made up of Victorian-era housing, still-operating businesses and warehouses that have been turned into homes. They paid $350,000; a recent valuation suggests the house's value has doubled since.

It has a large garden and inside, the slightly worn warmth of a lived-in, much-loved home. There is a formal dining room but, for now, it is curtained off from the adjoining living area to make a home office for Renate's two-year-old business - a children's clothing label named Max and Holly, in honour of her children. As the business grows, the life of a working mother has added its share of guilt. "There are several mothers at Max's school who work but there are also quite a few women who are housewives and have time to get involved at the school more than I can," Renate says.

Andrew and Renate expect their children will eventually go to private school, though it's not an option at the moment, even though Andrew does earn an above-average salary (around $150,000) in his job as a recruitment executive.

Each Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Andrew leaves at 7.30am in his 1998 Volkswagen Passat for the 20-minute drive to his St Kilda Road office and Renate juggles the three children into their own routines. Max is dropped at school and Holly is taken to a local childcare centre before Renate returns home in her Volvo station-wagon, to work as much as she can in between baby Isaac's feeds. The other two weekdays, Renate has both Holly and Isaac home with her while she works, and collects Max from school at 3.30pm. "Max and Holly didn't start childcare until they were about 18 months old but, even though I feel really bad about it, Isaac will probably start at the end of this year. I just need the extra days for work," Renate says.

Andrew's family live in Point Lonsdale, which they visit regularly, and Renate's family are in Sydney, so child care is a large expense (around $174 for Holly's childcare and $30 for Max's three afternoons at after-care). Renate collects the two older children around 5.30pm and heads home to a meal that she has usually prepared earlier in the afternoon. "The children love a roast. They have quite adult palates so they love things like tacos, stir-fries, curries, pasta and risotto. Andrew and I eat our dinner together - usually similar food - after they're in bed. Wine is essential."

Andrew does the majority of the shopping, picking up most of the family's $250 weekly groceries at the local supermarket, with extra supplies from a butcher, a greengrocer and a specialist deli. The couple, who have been married for eight years, bought a holiday house in Point Lonsdale three years ago, to be close to Andrew's parents. It cost them $350,000 and has put them, in Renate's words "in debt to the hilt", though it gives their children a taste of the sun-and-surf lifestyle.

Andrew still sits on a monthly committee meeting for the Kangaroos but has recently given up playing football with a Prahran club. Instead, Saturdays are spent watching Max at Auskick and taking him to the occasional AFL game. "Life in Melbourne is good," Andrew says. "We're happy."

-- Claire Halliday

© 2005 The Age

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