Small Shelly Fauna

Hungry for sportive lemurs, thirsty for Naya…NAYA!

So perhaps a word about the Metro is warranted. The Metro is Moscow’s subway system, and I have to admit that it puts any other to shame. It’s huge, of course, with 9 main lines connected by an ourobouros-esque circle line and three accessory lines connecting some of the terminal regions. I’m staying in one of the more boonish regions of the city, but even so, the trains are completely packed when I leave in the morning and return in the afternoon. I’ve read that 6 million people use the Metro every day, and I certainly believe it: I can’t even begin to describe how much time I’ve spent slowly shuffling along in crowds of hundreds trying to get to the ridiculously steep escalators (my ears popped going down one once, for serious). Shoving and elbowing is de rigeur, and once you’re inside the train, you have to get used to discovering increasing levels of constriction which the human body can survive as more people try to board incredibly overcrowded trains at subsequent stations (my experiences taking the morning subway in to Manhattan pale by comparison). The good thing is, in the event that a train is so stuffed that not even the most rabid assault will allow entry, the next one will be along soon. Metro trains run every minute, on the minute. And since it takes a good 30 seconds to discharge and take on passengers at each stop, there’s really only a 30 second window between trains. So, yeah, 6 million people a day isn’t that much of a stretch, considering. To keep things on schedule, there’s none of this “the doors are closing please stand clear of the doors” crap you get in the U.S. If those doors close, they stay closed, and if you get stuck inside, you either crawl your way in or get the hell out if you value your life. So, my commute takes me on three of the lines on the Metro: the Sokolnicheskaya, Koltsevaya, and Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya. I get on at the Sportivnaya station (so named because it’s near the big sports stadium, where I think they play hockey or something. They take hockey pretty seriously round here, the riot police and army were out in force for a game the other day), then transfer to the circle line, then take that to the next line to the east, then take that south to the museum. Off-peak, this lengthy, two-transfer commute goes extremely quickly, like half an hour or so. Of course, the crowds tend to expand that a bit. But still, say what you will about the Russians, they sure keep the trains running on time.