I know the road from Petersburg to Zelenogorsk by heart, like the lines on the back of my hand. During my childhood I gazed at this part of life from the window of a suburban electric train, now I watch it from a car window. However, I must say, the same stupid and vagrant thoughts come to my mind: here are some houses… I wonder what kind of people live in them? How do they live?

Anyway, inhabitants on the section between Lakhta and Olgino are a priori people who are far from poor. Here even one half of a wooden house, as I read in the buy/sell announcements, costs 90 thousand CU. What megabucks! For 90 thousand CU in any other direction one can get a cottage with a shower and real toilets. Not to mention that for the same amount one can purchase a house in Montenegro, Bulgaria, or Spain… We won't even speak about a dacha under Sevastopol for fear of getting upset. With this money you can get three dachas there. Or, for example, for as many as thirty years enjoy two-month vacations at seaside resorts! To fork out 90 thousand CU for one half of wooden house without any conveniences, on a tiny piece of land, one's head must be filled with dense, thick fog. The fog brought by the spell of some evil Fata Morgana.

Indeed, what good is there in the settlements of Lakhta and Olgino? Absolutely none! A plain marshy territory with boring and sparse vegetation, a shallow stony gulf where no sanitary doctor will ever recommend bathing. The chronic like gastritis and slow schizophrenic construction of the dam didn't improve, to put it mildly and tenderly, the condition of the water in our puddle.

Small and rather bad shops. Mysterious cafes and taverns spreading the weak odor of burnt meat, and the strong smell of criminal acts in the style of unforgettable Petersburg criminal serials. The only comforting place is the kindheartedly pleasant light-blue colored church, which, however, works only on weekends and holidays.

These places have no inherent content, no civilian life. Here one can walk only along paths-streets leading from the highway to the railroad. It in no way resembles the absolute ideal of our Petersburg dreams, an English village. Those who have bought a piece of mirage here for themselves, sit behind their two-meter high fences and, trying not to look at the creeping to the throat city, which has moved right up to Lakhta, diligently fry the notorious shashlik, the necessary attribute of paradise on earth. To gorge oneself behind one’s own fence is really to be on cloud nine. But on this prestigious territory even for 90 thousand CU one cannot reach it. Because, as we remember, this money is enough to buy only one half of the house!

So what has gold-plated this sad and boring area? What power threw the prices up into the empyreal height? What is the name of this Fata Morgana?

Her name is… Olgino motel. The building which in the 80s was crowned with a romantic halo of spivy dealings and currency prostitution. It was then that Lakhta-Olgino became a golden prestigious place where proud and beautiful socialism met with the world of pure hard cash. Olgino prostitutes long ago became Swedish grandmas but an aftertaste of something expensive and wonderful remained in the people. And instead of a shampoo, a hope or a house we still buy a mirage taken from our heads!

Let's go further. My hat! They demolished the “Wave”, the very “Wave” which was situated in Repino by the beach. This complex of buildings made of red bricks was famous from the 90s. The youth of new-Russian capitalism, the first cooperative shops, the first cafes! But the world of pure hard cash knows no sentiments. Now there is a fence with a friendly inscription saying: “Construction of elite settlement “Sunlight Rabbit”. Or “Happy Duckling”, I don't remember anymore.

It is easy to imagine what this “duckling-rabbit” will look like. There is a bunch of such “rabbits” built in Repino along the lower highway. It looks like the following: several dozens houses are pushed together behind a fence, on an area of about thirty-forty hundred square meters, their style being beyond words, and unique for our area. I have no idea where these despicable architects studied. The houses look like a few crooked and wry, boastful and oafish freaks. The distance between these two-three-story freaks is about 10 meters! What a communal apartment for one million dollars. I don't know a single person living in such a settlement – even if we got to know each other we wouldn't be able to exchange even a couple of words. We are absolutely alien to each other.

Repino is yet another prestigious mirage. The one with expensive and bad shops you won't find anywhere else in Russia. Because in the depth of the country, shops are bad but cheap, whereas here they are bad and expensive. Meant for happy ducklings who are not supposed to pay less than one hundred bucks for a drug bottle. The place that lacks any kind of proper, inherent, common life of the settlement. Even the only value, the beach, doesn't receive sweeping and cleaning as it should. And the forests considered a reserved area are in a disgusting, horrible condition. They undergo silent illegal cutting, many trees fall down, and there is nobody to care for the forests. I have never seen a single forester here! The “mirage-prestige” thus simply hangs in the air. The formation of prices in this area belongs entirely to the favorite genre of all teenagers, the fantasy…

One would think the simplest solution is to give life a calm and sober look, having geared common sense on the first speed. No, it doesn't work. The principal architectural style of our society at the moment is mirages behind the fences.

That is, to pick someplace one million CU, build a fence and sit behind it, and spit at all people.

But we, the children of light, pioneer-heroes, people of the future, we walk by fences and chaff and sing joyful songs. We are the owners of the whole world, not just a miserable mirage on six feet of land.