Falling Down and Other Fun Stuff

I suspected as much.

I went to Google Translate this morning to see if the Russian language has an equivalent to the English word "yield." Google Translate gave me "выход," which even a dummy like myself recognizes from the Moscow Metro.

It means "Exit."

If Google Translate is to be believed, Russians don't "yield," they just "exit."

This group has nothing on the Moscow Metro crowd
during rush hour.

I'll sign on with that one.

There is one operative principle here in Moscow: "Me first! Get out of my way!" Every time I walk out on to the street and see the bumper-to-bumper honking madness out there, I'm glad that I have finally attained my life's goal of living in a city where I don't have to own a car.

When I first came to Moscow in 1993, I brought a car with me. It was a 1985 Dodge Aries that I had bought in Africa from another American. I didn't want to bring it with me; I'd planned to sell it before leaving Abidjan, where I had been working, and come to Moscow auto-free. But a deal to sell the car in Abidjan fell through, and I had no choice but to have it shipped to Russia. I worked for the U.S. State Department at the time, so this was no problem: the U.S. government paid for the shipping.

But there was no way I was going to drive that thing in Moscow. Forget it. My mother didn't raise no suicides. The damn car sat in the garage at the U.S. embassy for a few months until I finally was able to sell it. For the time that I lived here back then, it was the Metro or taxicabs for me. No driving. Not in Moscow.

But even in the Metro you're not entirely safe.

I should have remembered this. But there is so much I have forgotten in the years since I was last here. Many of the few words of Russian that I used to know have escaped me. I did, however, retain a memory of being on the Moscow Metro during rush hour and finding it so crowded that I could practically lift my feet off the floor and just let the crowd carry me through the station.

So it was that much stupider, what I allowed to happen to me last Monday.

A colleague, (with whom I'm bunking at the moment) and I were on our way back from teaching a kindergarten English class. Neither of us drives, so naturally we were on the Metro. We had to get from the Blue Line to the Purple Line, which meant making a change of trains midway. (One of the first Russian words you learn as a Moscow Metro patron is the word for "transfer." In English it sounds like "perry-hoad.")

It was about 5:00 p.m., the worst time to be on the Metro. Moscow has roughly 12 million residents, and at 5 p.m on any given day, 11 million of them are on the Metro.

I'll take the cattle stampede, thank you. They're more polite.

So my roommate and I were doing the "perry-hoad" bit, trying to make our way from one train platform to the next. I had my backpack on. It was hot in there. A million bodies generate a lot of heat. And most of them were all around us.

I turned my head to say something to my roommate. Mistake. Some Russian guy who was in a BIG hurry went shoving past me on my left. I didn't see him coming because I was looking the other way, and I literally tripped over this jerk. Tripped over him. My feet went bye-bye and I went down, backpack and all. Next thing I knew I was lying on the station floor.

Feeling stupid for allowing this to happen to myself, (after all, I am not a completely inexperienced Moscow Metro rider) I just lay there for a moment, looking up at the stampede, my chin on my hand. My thought was, "I think I'll just lie here until the first snowfall comes and covers me up."

In fact, I had slightly twisted my ankle. My roommate offered to help me up. A policeman noticed me not getting up right away and came over to see if something was wrong. No, nothing was seriously wrong: it was just me feeling stupid for letting myself get knocked down like that. I got up after a few moments, dusted myself off and limped on.

"You should have remembered that," my roommate said.

"I know, I know."

As for the Russian jerk I tripped over, he didn't even look back. He was in too big a hurry.

At that hour of the day in Moscow, everybody is.