Metro

Metro is soooooo handy for transportation, there is so much traffic jams and you never know how long it takes to drive somewhere. It takes only about 15–20 minutes for me to go to work/downtown with the metro, plus some time for walking. This can take (about 7 km) more than one hour with the taxi. If you miss on train, there will be another one coming very soon. It's unusual to have to wait more than two minutes for the next train. There is also a screen showing how long time it has been since the last train. Metro is also very cheap to use: single ticket costs 19 Rbl and 70 journeys 600 Rbl (about 25 euros). My first times in Moscow metro were however full of surprises, I was so lost all the time! In London for example you can change at one station to many lines but here you can have four different names for "one station" if there is four lines. So confusing, it took a while to understand that. On my first day it took like 4o minutes instead of 15 from the hotel to work. I am still not sure how did I ended up there, I was changing lines like five times... Luckily there was many friendly locals around! It is also very useful to be able to read cyrillic letters & signs. I am so slow when reading them but anyway, that helps! Great! Actually it is not always that hard, some words can sound familiar if you just read them in a right way: apteka (apteekki in Finnish, pharmacy), avtoservis (car service), gastronom (super market), kassa-avtomat (kassa in Finnsih too, ticket automat), fotografija ("photographic studio") and so on... Some metro stations are also very beautiful, historical & pieces of art itself.