Transportation

So, obviously, I didn’t bring my car with me. And, I would have been, well, terrified to be driving around a big Russian city in the middle of Russian winter. Let me enlighten you with a story from my previous trip, though I’m sure you’ve already seen enough Russian dash cam vids to fully understand my initial sense of fear about traveling to and fro in the city. So, story time. We were going to go to the winter festival (a really cool event they have every year in the town center, across from the amazingly beautiful town hall building, that has ice sculptures everywhere, ice skating, slides and bridges made of ice, tons of stuff. I’m going to go in more detail about it later, though, since it’s not really a part of this story), and we had just gotten into the car, 15 month old baby, myself, husband, and father, mother and sister in law (yea, it was packed and unpleasant–all dressed up in layers and jackets and me, six moths prego at the time), when I realized that I had forgotten the camera. I told my husband, and, a few Russian words later, my father in law had popped a U turn and was driving on the opposite side of the road looking for an opening to get into the lane he needed to get back home for the camera. It was one of those I’m-facing-a-truck-right-now-going-who-knows-how-many-KM-per-hour movie moments. Scary, it was. This time around, we didn’t really have any heart attack moments, though my kids loved yelling Быстро! Быстро! (Fast! Fast!) when we were in the car with my father in law because he would often oblige.

So, as you may have noticed, my father in law has a car. He works as some kind of personal driver for a rich dentist, or something like that, so he has a very flexible schedule and gets to use the car as his own whenever he’s not working. From what I understand, it is relatively uncommon to own a car, but also mostly unnecessary because public transport is (in my opinion) really good there. My mother and sister in law both walk to work or use public transportation to go places. The daycare that we got the kids into was very close and we could have walked there, but during the winter months where being outside too long was dangerous, especially for young children, my father in law would take us to drop off and pick up the kids from school. Once the weather warmed up, we walked there and it was very pleasant–maybe about 15-20 minutes each way.

Pics of walking to daycare:

Decorations someone hung on a bush outside our building; frozen shapes with food coloring.

I would often stop on the way home to take the kids to one of the many parks we passed on our walk (another great thing, every apartment building had its own park for the kids to play on). A playground near the kids’ school:

So, that was half of it. I also had to make my way to school every (week)day. My university was about an hour away from our apartment, so there was no way I could walk there. I took the bus everyday, and it was actually a lot more convenient than I thought it would be, judging from the way my husband had talked about it. He spoke of sometimes having to wait a half an hour for a bus in -35 degree weather and about them being very unreliable and sometimes unheated. You can imagine, therefore, that I was a bit worried about how well I’d do going back and forth over such a large distance depending only on such apparently unpredictable public transport. But my biggest fear, really, was that I’d get lost. The thing is that if it ever happened that I got lost, I would be in big trouble because I wasn’t at the level where I could ask people for directions, and even if I called my father in law on the little crappy phone I had (first I’d have to figure out how to do that, since the menu on the phone was in Russian), I’d still be unable to tell him where I was to come and get me. But overall, my fears were unfounded. The buses were actually really reliable; even if I missed a bus by a few seconds and watched it leave without me, I’d still only have to wait about 10-15 minutes until the next one came. There was only one time where I was seriously getting cold while waiting for the bus, and that was because I was waiting for a specific one. Of course, there were many different buses that would come by, and there were two specific routes that I could take to my university, numbers 27 and 28. The only problem was that the buses on number 28 were older and often had broken heating systems (it was also usually pretty moldy smelling–sometimes I would feel like I’d be sick breathing in the mold smell for so long; I tollay felt for the poor conductor and driver on there all day). When it was really really cold and I went on number 28 my feet would sometimes get so cold I felt like my toes would freeze, so I tried to avoid that one when it was more than 15-20 degrees below. Once I was waiting for a number 27 and a few 28s had already gone by, but it was 35 below so I knew better than to get on, but I was really really cold because I only had one very thin pair of leggings on under my jeans. My thighs were freezing and I was rubbing them, but wanted to keep my hands in my pockets, and I was worried. I was only at the stop for about 15-20 minutes but it wasn’t very pleasant. I never had another day like that, and it actually wasn’t all that bad in retrospect, but it was one of my first days where it was that cold and all I could hear was my husband telling me about the cold and having to wait so long.

The getting lost fear wasn’t entirely unfounded, either. The buses were really really crowded in the winter (and, to be honest, in the summer too) because it was so cold (and, later, hot). So sometimes it would be difficult to get out of your seat (if you were lucky enough to get one) and to the door in time to get off the bus before it left the stop. Also, because at first I didn’t really know the route, and because the windows would freeze over so completely that only the people who had window seats and were able to make a tiny hole in the frost with the warmth from their fingers or breath were able to see out, I was really worried I would miss my stop. It never actually happened because they had an intercom which called out the stops, and I knew what my stops were called, but still it was a bit nerve wracking at first. Once I got a hang of the order of the stops and was able to see out the windows and recognize landmarks along the way, I didn’t haven any difficulty.

One interesting thing about taking the bus is that there is a conductor who you buy tickets from after getting on the bus. In the US (at least in my experience) you get on at a single door in the front, pay at a little kiosk thing, then sit. But there, to make it faster, there were multiple doors on the side of the bus, and once it started moving the conductor came around to sell tickets to all the people who just got on. Every once in a while a controller would come on the bus and ask to see everyone’s tickets. I was worried once because the conductor missed me when she was selling tickets (I was way in the back of a packed bus) and, though I could have ridden for free, I was loathe to have the controller come and ask me where my ticket was, and so motioned for the conductor the next stop. Sure enough, the controller came by and asked for our tickets just a little bit later. It obviously wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but I’m a nervous perfectionist about things like that.

I actually really liked the city because everything was really close; we had a grocery store right under us on the first floor of an adjoining building, a pharmacy next door to that, and there were daycares every block or so to really allow working parents an easy time finding one nearby. I’m not a city girl myself, so that seemed really great to me, and the buses were just one part of what I think is a really great transport system. So, there were buses (автобусы), vans (фургоны), trolleys (троллейбусы-buses that were attached to power lines above as a source of power), trams (трамваи-a type of bus/train that runs on rails but the driver can stop and go at will and stops at red lights and is pretty similar to a bus), and a subway (метро).

The metro in my city is really tiny, though, only 6 stops total. I didn’t end up using it on this trip because it didn’t really go anywhere I needed and I was too busy to take it just because, but I did go on my first time in Russia a long time ago. I most often took the bus, obviously, both for school and to go to one of the malls. I took a tram to go to my favorite mall, too. Overall, once I got used to everything, it was really simple and easy to get around.