Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind

I’m realizing that not a lot goes on during the course of a week outside of work – the office accounts for a majority of the day. In that respect, life here is much like working life in any big city. But the whole point of this experience for me is that getting into a “rut” in Moscow has intellectual stimulations in its own right. Just getting to work in the morning, for example, can be a real eye-opener.

The street I live on, Merzlyakovsky Pereulok, leads down to Novy Arbat and the metro station. By the time I leave in the morning, it’s already clogged with cars; both the street and the sidewalks. In Moscow there’s no controlling legal or moral authority that dictates how to park. If a driver sees enough room, he simply pulls into the spot – in any direction. If it’s not enough room to parallel park, it’s perfectly acceptable to pull in head first onto the sidewalk. The result is that the car blocks both automobile and pedestrian traffic.

It gets a lot worse the closer to the metro, too. On the main streets, there’s no real on-street parking; the only alternative is to pull up on the sidewalk – which is exactly what happens. So drivers pull up on the sidewalk and then drive down the pedestrian path looking for a place to park the car. In short, there’s nowhere that you won’t encounter a car either driving or parking.

And I haven’t even crossed the street yet.

Pedestrians are highly disadvantaged when it comes to crossing the street. Most intersections have an underground walkway to avoid surface traffic. But sometimes it’s just not the most direct path. Pedestrians clump together at intersections until, emboldened by their numbers and as if signaled by a ringleader, they all dart out into traffic together. Moscow drivers, usually totally oblivious to the presence of others, are intimidated by the numerical advantage, and slow down. Slow down, but don’t stop – they continue edging their way through the crowd.

So it’s been a bit of a gauntlet already, and now I’ve only just reached the metro.

The Moscow metro is a well known miracle of city planning and engineering. Every accolade is well deserved. It’s vast, it’s beautiful, it’s clean, it’s efficient – and it handles more people than the metro systems in NYC and London combined on any given day.

You’d probably guess that. There are constant streams of people, all somehow ending up on trains. Cars are large and long, but whole trains are packed within an inch of their capacity. The entire system seems to run close to the intensity level of the downtown 6 train on the Lexington Avenue line.

It is close contact, and it is urban combat. One doesn’t get on or off the train – one jockeys for position and then is swept into the appropriate direction when the doors open.

It takes some getting used to, this anonymous yet highly personal one-on-one violence. One morning, for example, I felt what I thought was a blunt object striking me in the back. I looked over my shoulder at the young woman behind me – pretty and well-dressed on her way to work. A second jolt; I turned around in time to see the third one coming. She was repeatedly using her forearm to bash me in the small of the back – a forearm “shiver” in pro-wrestling terms.

“What’s with you?” I said in my best Kaliningrad sailor-speak.

What came out of this lovely woman’s mouth was a torrent of abuse and invective so violent that I immediately considered myself fortunate to only be getting a few forearm “shivers” from someone so angry. The long and short of it? Her definition of personal space did not match mine – I was not following the people ahead of me closely enough for her taste.

So in a sea of literally hundreds of people queuing for the escalator, I was the proximate cause of her being late for work. And she gave me hell for it.

It was a valuable lesson, though. Now I don’t look over my shoulder at the person pushing me; I’m way too busy shoving the person in front.

Back, then, to my premise that living in Moscow is a lot like life in any big city. Thank God - I find it hard to get homesick for New York in a place as chaotic and confrontational as this!