The metro is the bane and gem of dear old St Peter. It is quite terribly different from the London  metro; though a metro is a metro and the differences are perhaps subtle.

The big bulky blue trains as huge and communist as the buildings around Park Pogedi and Mockovskaya, those massive stone testaments to soviet power. If it could be, it would be made of those same large bricks but instead it is  matt blue wash metal. A very unjoyful blue. It is not so 'metro-sexual' as to shine and flash red signs like some of the London trains.

It is a wide geometrical wound dug into the earth, a surgery perpetrated deep deep down into her intestines.

Little tokens with an 'M' sign  just like magic coins. I wonder, if that was London, wouldn't people make fake ones  as they do for the supermarket trolleys? So here there is the tinkle of coins, and in London only gliding paper. The card system exists too though it doesn't have such an evocative name,;only 'Proyezdnoy Bilyet'(train ticket), and no oysters,  no thoughts of Alice in Wonderland or Venuses emerging from the sea.

Standing. On the way up, it is absolutely acceptable to stand sprawled on both sides of the escalator, Very, very rarely some-one tries to climb the stairs.  No efficient businessmen nudging tourists irritably aside with their briefcase. However, every-one makes a mad uncouth rush for the escalators when they leave the metro, then they stop suddenly once having managed to stand a  place or two higher on the moving stairs than the rest of the rabble. Russians go on the escalators, two by two. It gives the effect of a big fur-coated, high-heeled game of British Bulldog, the metro and the stairs being the two safe zones. Just like in that game people move out of bounds, scaling the opposite stairs to get to safety quicker.