Riding the Rails

So, I'm going to try to write a little bit about everyday kinds of things. Today I thought I would talk a little bit about how I get to work - the metro. If you're already bored, stop reading now.

St. Petersburg has one of the deepest subway systems in the world, and as far as average station depth, I think it's actually the deepest. The deepest station is over 100 meters deep, which is pretty far down, especially if you compare it to most New York stations, which are barely underground. It means riding the escalators in and out of the stations is one of the longer parts of the trip each day.

I walk from my house to the Nevskiy Prospekt metro station (where the blue and green lines cross), ride one stop to Sennaya Ploshad (where blue, purple, and yellow cross), and then ride the yellow line to Ligovskiy Prospekt. I know that doesn't seem far enough to warrant taking the subway, but the stations are a lot farther apart than they look on the map. The church is farther out on the yellow line, at the stop Novocherkasskaya.


To ride the subway here, if you don't have a card, you buy tokens, which cost 22 rubles, about 70 cents.


Differences between riding the subway in St. Petersburg and New York

St. Petersburg - clean, well-designed, quiet, people stand to the side when you try to get off the train, you never have to wait more than two minutes for a train

New York - disgustingly filthy, sometimes the ceilings are falling in, noisy (but sometimes that's actually really fun - when it's musicians and not just the horrible noises the trains make on the tracks), people try to be in the way as much as possible, sometimes you have to wait what feels like a lifetime for a train

New York would win in plenty of other contests. One of the other interesting differences is that in New York there are always people begging in the subway. Sometimes they play music, sometimes they make a speech, sometimes they silently walk around with a hand out, but beggars are common on New York city subways. I have not seen a single person begging on St. Petersburg subways. I thought I was about to see one a week or so ago when a woman got on and began making a speech. But no. She was selling covers for your passport. Of course. That's what most people do on subways. Since then I have seen two more people doing the same thing and they have pretty great success. One day from one stop to a next (maybe two minutes) a lady sold passport covers to three people sitting right around me. She wasn't even able to get to the other half of the car before I got off. So far no one else has done any soliciting on the subway, just the ladies selling passport covers.

Here are pictures I took this morning on my way to work.

Entering the Nevskiy Prospekt station.

This is how I know I've never waited more than two minutes for a train. On each platform there is a digital clock showing the time and how long it has been since the last train left. Because the trains are so frequent, people are rarely running to try to get on a train before the doors close. They know there will be another one in a minute or so. Good thing too, because some of the train doors close pretty mercilessly. I'm pretty sure it would hurt to get caught in those doors.

My train pulling into the station (the trains are blue, though you can't really tell in this picture).

The Ligovskiy Prospekt station, where I get off every day.

I'm feeling very excited because I made a list of all the things I know I want to do before I leave, especially things outside the city that are going to take some planning. After work today I went to a company that does river trips and booked a ticket to go to Valaam. I was looking into other ways of getting there, but it seemed pretty complicated, and this way I will even have food provided for me. If you're interested in what Valaam is, http://valaam.ru/en/, there's more information. The short story is that it's a monastery on an island in the northern part of Lake Ladoga, which is the largest lake in Europe (a little smaller than Lake Ontario). It looks like a really beautiful place, and once I'm there I'll be free to hike around the island, which has chapels and hermitages all over through the woods. This is one of the things I've known I wanted to do since before I came, so I'm excited to make it happen.

As I walked home from doing that I came across this church. It was closed, unfortunately, but I thought it was pretty. It's kind of the twin of the one across the street from my building, except yellow instead of red.

I hope you all enjoyed your St. Petersburg subway lecture. Now you can picture what I'm doing every morning, while you're all still in bed, or perhaps just getting ready for bed.