Moscow Metro Stations

One of the big surprises for me has been the beauty of the Metro stations in Moscow.  From an engineering standpoint the system is amazing enough - 7 million people on an average weekday and no more than 3 minutes between trains - but most stations are beautifully designed with sculptures, mosaics and chandeliers as well.  So this afternoon we spent our 26 roubles (around 90c Australian) and rode around on the Metro checking out the various stations.  

A huge statue in the entrance to our local metro station, Partizanskaya.  The thing I find really cool about the Russian statues is that they show everyone holding the weapons and defending the country - even the women.  When you think about it, Australian/American/British pictures, statues and art pretty much always shows the men with the weapons and the women holding food or children.  It's nice to see women getting an equal footing here.


Supposedly the stations were created to be "The People's Palaces" - the idea being to beautify the places that the everyday people travelled with art (glorifying the state of course).  I guess it's a bit of a strange state because they were built during Communism, so it wasn't exactly a choice of the people to build them, and a lot of people died during the construction.  But they're very beautiful nevertheless.

Being the UX nerd that I am, I have to comment on this line progress display from inside the metro carriage - the stations that have already passed have a red light and the station that you are currently travelling to shows the red light flashing.  Very good way of visualising where you are and what's coming up, and the transfer stations.  (A problem, however, is that they only include the Cyrillic alphabet, which makes it hard for people who don't read that to translate to the guidebook's Anglo alphabet version.)