How to survive the Moscow metro

I have decided that if I can survive the Moscow metro, I can survive anything. Being thrown into the endless sea of people all pushing and squeezing past as we tried to navigate our way with ridiculously large luggage during the hight of rush hour was a serious achievement.

The crazy metro system of Moscow is famed and for good reason, the stations themselves are works of art, decked out in everything from floor to ceiling marble to stained glass and mosaic murals. It feels like an entire other city buried deep under ground and to get to many of the tracks you have to ride one of the endless, wooden escalators which can take several minutes and go up to 100 meters below the ground. Once at the platform, trains speed past every 30 seconds (and yet we still saw people sprinting to make each one, as if that extra half a minute was the time between life and death) and the train doors shut sporadically and with no warning, which resulted in one instance where I managed to squeeze on, before the doors promptly closed in Sam's face, producing a moment of pure panic, and I'm sure a priceless shocked face on my behalf, before the realisation that we would simply meet at the next station set in.

Other hazards to watch out for includes buying tickets. We had no idea how the system worked which resulted in frustrated ticket officers yelling the same phrases at us getting louder and adding angrier hand gestures each time, which seemed who be a common Russian way of trying to explain things.

To avoid this bewilderingly scary experience, know that all journeys are the same price regardless of direction or distance. Once you finally make your way through the snaking queue to the ticket both, you simply need to indicate how many rides you want. Don't expect anyone to speak English, holding up the appropriate amount of fingers is enough followed by a 'spasiba' so you don't seem completely rude and incompetent.

It also pays to know the name of your desired and current stops in Cyrillic as almost none of the maps or station lines are in the English and the letters look so completely different it's pretty much impossible to guess, counting the number of stops was our main survival technique. At least pretend you know what you're doing and try to move with confidence as in the push of the 7 million people who take the metro every day, it's easy to get stuck in the middle of an impenetrable crowd going the opposite direction.

Of course outside of peak hour is not quite as crazy but I would still definitely rate the Moscow metro experience as more hilarious than traumatic, at least with a little hindsight!