If you think the 205 gets hairy . . .

A friend just asked me about my trip to Moscow (Russia, not Idaho) this spring, and I found myself going on about traveling on the Metro, and then I started thinking about the way they drive there, and then I realized this is a great blog story. So . . .

I wanted to go visit my friend Alexey in Moscow. He suggested I come the first week of May, as May 9 is Victory Day, a celebration of victory over the Germans in WWII and a remembrance of the Soviets who died, and this would mean a three-day weekend and a big national holiday. Incidentally, May 7 was Medvedev’s presidential inauguration, but Alexey wasn’t too excited about that, partly because he knew the change of guard was purely ceremonial and Putin would continue to run the country, and partly because Red Square and the inauguration were closed to the public for that day.

So anyway. Driving in Moscow, for me, was out of the question. The road system is not that complicated, but traveling the highways is a wild ride, indeed. Imagine four or five lanes in each direction, packed with cars all going at breakneck speed. Every time a space opens up in one lane, three or four drivers go for it. The concept of lanes, in fact, is fairly fluid. Pretty much however many cars can fit, that’s how many lanes there are.

Alexey told me that zipping back and forth from lane to lane, constantly jockeying for a better position, is called “playing chess,” and the driver who does it is a “chess player.” Alexey denied being such a person, but of course he was constantly on the lateral move. If his car could hop, it would be more like a game of checkers. If, that is, checkers was played with multiple players all hell-bent on jamming their pieces into the same square by whatever means necessary. He had my life in his hands and there was nothing I could do about it, so I just had to trust him. Whenever the threat of imminent destruction got to be too much for me, I would close my eyes and go to my happy place.

On my last night in Moscow we went out for a nice dinner with wine and then took a cab home, as Alexey considers drinking and driving not worth the risk of being pulled over by the militzia for a random paperwork check. (He also explained how to bribe your way out of a bad traffic stop: When the police officer tells you to come down to the station with him, you say you would like to save both of you the time and trouble, and isn’t there any way you could just pay your ticket now? Then he says weeeeeeeeell, he wouldn’t normally do such a thing, but for you, okay . . .) Hailing a cab consisted of standing at the roadside with his hand out, waiting for some random car to stop. Our random car might have been a gypsy cab, it might have been some local citizen in need of a few rubles – there was no way to know. At any rate, he not only got us home in one piece, he showed Alexey a short cut he never knew about. Score!

Pictures from englishrussia.com

Next: Navigating the Moscow Metro