{"id":121,"date":"2008-06-11T09:36:52","date_gmt":"2008-06-11T09:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/?p=121"},"modified":"2008-09-16T11:55:21","modified_gmt":"2008-09-16T11:55:21","slug":"the-metro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/?p=121","title":{"rendered":"The&nbsp;Metro"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Metro\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/48129015@N00\/2678942573\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right;\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/3213\/2678942573_193acc9b70.jpg\" alt=\"Metro\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Saturday morning was spent (briefly) exploring the Moscow metro. Hopefully the pictures will do it justice, but it&#8217;s another of those tributes to what awesome things you can build if you don&#8217;t mind sacrificing really large numbers of people in the process. Aside from the blood flowing down the tunnels, the station spaces are amazing &#8211; from the escalator tunnels, the ticket halls, the over-bridges through to the station tunnels themselves, everything is enormous and high and beautifully arches. There&#8217;s little litter, almost no advertising, high quality buskers (so far, a string quartet, a bass guitar + trumpet combo and an beautiful solo violinist), and everywhere there&#8217;s a sense of restrained opulence &#8211; lots of bronze and brass, but no gold.<\/p>\n<p>\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The service is extremely frequent, and the larger heights mean the atmosphere is less stuffy than the London system. Though I&#8217;m fully aware there are Scandic saunas less stuffy than the Northern line in summer.<\/p>\n<p>\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Metro\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/48129015@N00\/2678943523\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" style=\"float: left;\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/2249\/2678943523_ae655e0752.jpg\" alt=\"Metro\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Naturally, it&#8217;s not all great &#8211; there&#8217;s lots of staff, being less than helpful or doing very little; each escalator tunnel has a grey-haired witch at the bottom in a metal cabin,\u00c2\u00a0 eyeing the passengers or simple reading the paper. Perhaps the worst thing is not the Cyrillic letters (which are getting easier) but the poor iconograpghy \/ visual design. It&#8217;s impossible to work out which station or line you&#8217;re on as you arrive at a station, the name being obscured and in low-contrast colours. Interchanges are almost never co-sited, so every line change is akin to the Monument-Bank situation (not all, to be fair). At least the interchange tunnels are equally massive &#8211; larger than a LU station tunnel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00c2\u00a0 Saturday morning was spent (briefly) exploring the Moscow metro. Hopefully the pictures will do it justice, but it&#8217;s another of those tributes to what awesome things you can build if you don&#8217;t mind sacrificing really large numbers of people in the process. Aside from the blood flowing down the tunnels, the station spaces are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,50],"tags":[116,114,111,112,115],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-travel","tag-metro","tag-moscow","tag-russia","tag-trans-siberian","tag-underground"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182,"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goneabitbursar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}