Your long-awaited metro guide

I've been promising a post about the Moscow metro, so today I went out and made an idiot of myself all over Moscow for you. Those of you who know all about this, please forgive me this rave and feel free to skip any of the following: the metro system here is AMAZING. Where to begin? First, the least discounted ticket you can buy, for 1 ride, is only 22 rubles, less than $1. When you buy lots of trips, each one costs about 50 cents. Second, the trains run every three minutes. And when they say the trains run every three minutes, it means they run every three minutes -- or sooner. That's right, for your benefit I timed them today. The stations are kept very clean, people give up their seats for the elderly, and everything is well marked (ahem, Boston). But really, the thing to love about the metro is that it's beautiful.


Let's begin at home. On the Zamoskvoretskaya line, our stop is Vodny Stadion, which you've already seen. Compared to, say, any Howard- Dan Ryan/95th stop, it's brilliant.

As is the next one south, Voykovskaya. But compared to all the other stations here, neither is anything to write home about.












Sokol is also a little blah.










Aeroport is the first really beautiful station along the way.









After it comes Dinamo, which I have done wrong by with this picture. Because Dynamo Stadium, home of FC Dynamo, is nearby, the other walls have little reliefs of soccer players. Between the two tracks is a high corridor that looks similar to those in some of the pictures below.


Next comes Belorusskaya, which is like the Belmont (or Park?) for our line -- you can transfer to the ring train here. Unlike those stations, the path to the transfer is just as amazing as the station itself.

Station:









Transfer:









Mayakovskaya is even more beautiful. I would say it's the best station between us and the center of the city.




























You think that you wouldn't get used to this kind of grandeur, but... you do. Tverskaya is only ho-hum.


It's all squat and functional, and I demand grandeur.


Actually, Tverskaya is very nice, and it has the transfer to Pushkinskaya, which we'll see later when I go to the purple line.








But continuing on the green line -- Teatral'naya is my favorite. It's splendid and beautiful and impressive, but mostly I love that you can walk over the tracks. Right over them. Like, you could drop things onto the train as you make your transfer. These two pictures show the path to get to the red line.

















After the transfer to the red line, the first station is Oxotny Riad. Nice, right?



I skipped Lubyanka, the next station, because it looks almost the same.

And because I was sitting across from the Russian Jason Siegal. What? I was curious.





Chistye Prudy has a beautiful park right outside (more on that later). The station is okay, too.















So after that short side trip to Chistye Prudy, I returned to the metro and switched over to the purple line, or what is properly called Tagansko-Krasnopresnenkaya.


Pushkinskaya does have a nice station, but somehow I managed to get a picture without ANY of the highlights, namely the bronze pieces (I don't know how to describe these, they're giant sheets on the wall) with quotations from Pushkin and cute little pictures of quills and country estates. And THEN, when you go to transfer to
Tverskaya, there's a giant statue of him in the hall.





Here is Kuznetskii Most (take that, Foster):






And then Kitai-Gorod,
with its fantastic columns.







My favorite art, though, comes from Taganskaya and Proletarskaya:


















Can't see this one well enough?
There you go.












Tsvetnaya was a pleasant surprise. First in the main hallway there's these lovely little windows.



But then at the exit:



Wow.


So enjoy your rides today on the CTA/MBTA/whatever Washington's is called/in your Honda/Toyota. I'll be on THIS:











One final note about the metro system. Some stations are much farther underground than we're used to. The escalators, however, are not broken into several shorter ones. No, no. You just ride one very long, very steep escalator. So steep, in fact, that I get dizzy looking up or down them. But for you:



(Ok, I cheated and shot it without actually looking. But they're really long, and did I mention steep? Like climbing a mountain. But without exerting any effort because Russians don't like to walk up -- or down -- the escalators. Escalators move so you don't have to.)