A First View of the Metro

We had a great flight. The plane to Amsterdam was half empty, so I got about 6 hours sleep. Kristen didn't get any, so she fell asleep a couple of hours after we got here. That's probably why she's still sleeping, and I'm up at 3 AM writing this. Our flights were both on time, and we got out of the Moscow airport in record time. But we had to wait there for my sil because the traffic was so bad that it took over two and a half hours for her to get to the airport instead of the less than an hour drive that it should be. On the way back the traffic was so bad that we got out of the taxi and took the metro. That was a fun experience.

The Metro here is really interesting, by far the nicest metro I've been on. The Metro system was begun in the early 1930s, 5 years after Stalin came to power. Stalin had many of the palaces and churches demolished, and brought the salvaged materials to the Metro so that everyone would be able to enjoy them, not just the elite or the religious. It's done in what is called the socialist realist style, a style with the goals of furthering the cause of socialism and particularly communism. Picture touring a palace and add trains on each side coming and going every minute, and you get a good idea of the early metro system. Even the entrances to the Metro are unique and elaborate. I saw a brief glimpse of the earliest metros but hope to get back for a more extensive view when I'm not dragging around a ton of luggage. Further out we saw the stations that were built after they ran out of palaces and churches to pillage. It was still very nice but no where near as fancy. The columns generally seemed to be made of marble, but everything else was cement. I don't recall seeing tons of ads and certainly no graffiti or bills stuck on the pillages or any garbage littering the ground. The people take great pride in the Metro and wouldn't think of defacing it. Apparently they wouldn't think twice about reprimanding someone who did deface it. I asked my sil what would have happened if I dumped my garbage on the ground, and I was told that someone would have grabbed me by the arm and yelled at me until I picked it up. I'm glad I didn't experiment to see. Inside the Metro an entire underground city. There are shops lining the whole thing, like an enormous underground mall. There was a wide variety of stores including pies with all sorts of fillings. Jessi recommended cherry, so that was what we all had. I'm glad we don't have these at home, or I would be considerably heavier. They were really good. Another thing which surprised me was how deep the metro is. The escalator to go down into the metro seemed like it went on forever. This is because it was created as an underground shelter as well as a metro. The stations in the center section are even deeper and then there are the tunnels that are rumored to have been created by the Communist in case of an invasion. The metro works with a card with a magnetic strip in it. When the card is place on the reader, a green light shows and it's safe to go through. Otherwise 2 spring loaded pieces of metal come out. Apparently during soviet times they were set to break the hips of the person breaking through. Now, I am told they only hurt. We saw several teenage boys running through the barriers and jumping over the springs. Occasionally a babushka caught the kid and yelled at him. Most of them got away with it.


We finally got back to the apartment at about 9 PM and had dinner about an hour later. After dinner I had a chance to talk to my brother for a couple of hours. It's so nice to be with my family again! Tonight we go to St Petersburg on the overnight sleeper. Then we'll be in St. Petersburg for the next 3 days.