Moscow's Metro

This is a map of the Moscow Metro, the worlds 2nd most heavily used rapid transit system. On a given weekday it will move over 7 million people. To put the map into a little bit more context, Moscow is home to 10,382,754 inhabitants who live within 417.4 sq mi. The Metro system is almost entirely underground, and the different lines exist at different elevations crisscrossing each other on different planes underneath the city. Escalators carry the city's population deep into stations that are beautifully decorated, often with soviet era sculpture and mosaics in tile and stone.

The first day we arrived in Moscow, Craig took Shannon, Aurora and to Red Square. The system was overwhelming. Hundreds of people all speaking Russian, crisscrossing tunnels, stairs and escalators leading in every direction, and no sense of where we were going much less any reference for N,S,E,W. The largest contributor to the confusion was the Cyrillic alphabet. Foreign signs and symbols left us unable to pronounce much less decipher where we were going or more importantly where we had come from.

Day 2 on the metro. After a total sense of helplessness had sunk in I determined that figuring out how to navigate this system was essential to seeing the many galleries, museums, sights, and totally mundane parts of Moscow which made this city, the former capital of the Soviet Union, home to the largest number of billionaires in the world, and Russia’s country's political, economic, religious, financial, educational and transportation center.

The key to unlocking this labyrinth of colors and symbols, turned out to be a map containing both the Cyrillic and Romanized spellings of all of the stations. My first chance navigating the system require an hour of preplanning, consulting the guidebook, and familiarizing myself with the pronunciation of my destination and origin. That first trip, as well as each trip I've taken since then has each had it's moments of uncertainty but the Moscow metro has allowed us to see for the first time great art by: Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Dega, Bounarrd, Monet, and many Russian artists. Shannon, Aurora, and I have seen, the Kremlin, Russian Markets, cathedrals, and museums, and a small part of the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings of Moscow.