My first traffic jam!

It was Saturday afternoon, and I had just made it through customs, grabbed my bag, and out the door. Through the throng of taxi drivers, there it was, a sign: “Laura Preston.” “Sasha” (as I later discovered, that was his name) waved it back and forth, nonchalantly until he saw my eyes meet his. As if by magic, he suddenly became animated, grabbed my bag, and off we went. Through the “das” and “nyets,” I was able to get my first tour of Moscow.

And my first traffic jam. I know they say the city is large, but I never thought it would be a web of confusing roads, packed with cars of all sizes and styles, zigzagging and driving on parts of the road I didn’t even know were driveable. As we listened to Russian pop music Sasha groaned as we waited in stopped traffic for half an hour. An hour later and we were still driving towards the city center, as Sasha pointed and most likely swore about the hundreds of stopped cars on the other side of the freeway; his route home. As he smoked what was probably his 8th cigarette, I pointed to some sky scrapers and asked, “Moscova?” Nyet, further ahead.

As long as it took to get to my flat, somewhere on the opposite side of town, I decided I would never feel the urge to drive through this town, as we turned and continued onto to large road after large road. Who knows where we were????

Later on I discovered that there is a solution to this congestion problem, which is ultimately doomed to happen with 10 million people in one place: the metro. They aren’t lying when they say it is one of the most lavish and beautiful undergrounds in Europe. Believe me, the best part of the metro is waiting for the train as you stare at the tiled ceilings, or marbled halls adorned by crystal chandeliers. Too bad the longest wait time is 3 minutes. The metro seems to go wherever I need to go, and faster than anything else. The trick is to read the signs and know the stops. Time to practice my Cyrillic reading!