Metro Moscow

If you ever go to Moscow I advise you to stay underground. Don’t bother going to the Kremlin, Lenin’s tomb (he’s dead you know) or the Red Square for that matter, which by the way is not red (red in Russian thou also means beautiful, so it’s a choice of interpretation I guess). Only tourist sight over ground worth seeing is the wonderful cathedral of St. Basel. It looks like a castle with sugar coated pop stickle-onions on every tower, and you feel like licking it or taking a bite out of it rather than taking its picture. It’s now been renamed as Kiki’s church, since I’ve been talking about it a bit too often I suppose ever since we got to St. Petersburg.

The true attraction thou is the Moscow metro, being the busiest metro in the world. No matter the time of day it’s packed with ppl going on and off, whether it’s a Sunday evening, Saturday morning or rush hour during the week; the flow of ppl is constant. The mantra being: don’t lose your travelling companion! The metro is a web of different lines taking you all over Moscow thru stations that aren’t always logic in which way they go, and the stations being only in Cyrillic doesn’t really help especially when you have a map that’s phonetic. Needless to say, this brought some confusion with it and the light blue line is from now on the color of evil (according to a Swede) since a few managed to get lost somewhere between the dark and light blue line. They were either on the wrong train in the right direction, or on the right train in the wrong direction. It’s been the source to many great laughs ever since.

The Red Sqaure

Kremlin

Red Square at night

St Basel at night

Red Square at night

Starbucks :)

Breathtaking St Basel

The enormous amount of ppl also bid you a few challenges. When travelling in a group of 15 ppl, getting them all on the same metro seems impossible at times, thou important since the names of the stations are quite hard to make out if you’re not fluent in Cyrillic. The first day in Moscow a Canadian jumped on the train because he thought we were all getting on, which we were, but when the doors on the metro close they close even thou you’re stuck somewhere in the middle. We managed to signal him that we were going five stops, hoping that he could count, which apparently he could. Not everyone could count thou it turned out. When we were heading to the Trans-Siberian train we all had to get on the metro with our huge backpacks (remember, the metro’s ALWAYS packed), which wasn’t extremely popular amongst the Russians. We were suppose to get off at the fourth stop on the blue line (not the light blue, but the dark blue) to switch to the brown line that would lead us to the train station. We got to the station the brown line had taken us to and started walking, before we realize that we were two ppl short. The rest of the group walked to the train station, while I and a Belgian stayed behind to keep a look-out for the two missing. We were standing on top of a long staircase looking into the massive crowd streaming towards us every time a train arrived, which was more or less every minute. They looked like black smoke moving in close ready to overrun us, and as soon as we could get a glimpse of the floor another train gulped up more ppl. Finally the missing girls arrived, having gotten off one stop too early. Counting is hard when you’re squeezed into a metro cart with unimaginably many ppl.

We also met some of the nicest ppl in all of Russia (so far) on many of our metro rides. We’re travelling with an English woman who’s 78 years old. This is quite a dame and she’s everyone’s’ granny.  As soon as we would enter the carts, someone – usually an elderly man – would jump up and offer her his seat. They’re very chatty as well and they kept talking to us all the way, even thou they couldn’t understand us and vice verca. We also experience a couple of the guys getting off at the same station as us, just to make sure she got off ok. She’s given away a lot of thankful hugs and gotten a lot of admiring kisses in return.

Apart from being the place where all the action is, the metro is in itself an experience. It’s filled with art and culturally hidden messages. Every detail is taken into consideration when being built, with chandeliers, bright colors, statues, golden couples and mosaic pictures as beautiful as can be, not to mention being the cleanest metro I’ve ever seen. We went on a metro safari (as it ended up being called) bouncing from one station to another, being amazed and astounded over and over again. It was like moving from one wow-moment to another. It’s what you can call low-budget sightseeing with a very rewarding experience.

Don’t underestimate the metro!

A sample of pictures from the metros