Petals on a wet, black bough

Until yesterday, I had never used the St. Petersburg metro. It goes throughout the city, but there are only stations once every couple of kilometers, and the nearest one to me is about a mile away. It's worth using, though; the SPB metro is something else.

For one thing, it's deep. Access to the stations is by escalator, and it actually takes a couple of minutes to ride all the way down; if there are many other people on the escalator, you actually can't see the bottom.

For another thing, some communist somewhere along the line decided that SPB (and, I guess, to a lesser extent Moscow--we'll see) train stations should be monuments to the people. So where NYC subway stations tend to be small, plain, and dirty, SPB metro stations are long, clean, open spaces. You would never write a book like Neverwhere about the SPB metro. And the stations really are monuments, each one unique. One has marble facing; another is covered in red mosaic (the Revolution Square station--go figure); another has what might be a neoclassical interior. It's pretty crazy; I think we're actually trying to put together a tour of the metro stations.

Oh, and the trains are clean, too. Chris pointed out to me that there are always sunflower seeds in the NYC subway cars, but in half a dozen different trains and stations now I've seen no evidence that there's any kind of trash on the SPB metro. Apparently, Russians take their public transit pretty seriously: everyone moves at a reasonable pace and in a more or less orderly fashion, and everyone stands to the right of the down escalators so that people who want to can walk the distance.

Walking down the escalators is more difficult than you might expect, by the way. They're fairly steep, but mostly it's just that they go on forever--it's a little bit vertiginous, and I can't help but think that it would be very bad to miss a step. Going up can be a little dizzying, too--if, as I do, you like to tilt your head to watch the people on the down escalator, it's easy to lose track of what exactly is vertical.

As a last note, apparently Russians like to read: I probably saw as many or more people reading in the metro as I did playing with or talking on their cell phones, and cell phones are as common here as in America. And all ages do it, too.

That's all.