"This is Medvedkovo, the end of the line. The train does not go any farther. Please vacate the train." That is an approximate translation of approximately what the recording says at the end of every metro line. There may be another line about not forgetting to take your personal belongings with you, but I can't remember for sure. This is what the result of the recording looks like:
The orange line of the Moscow metro is similar to the gray line in that the builders seemed to run out of decent names for the stations as they got to the end (see my earlier post about the Altuf'evo station for an elaboration on this, in the unlikely event you're interested). Downtown, the orange line has stations named after Turgenev and the Tretyakov Gallery, but as you get out toward the end stations got stuck with names like Sviblovo and Babushkinskaya
On the platform at Medvedkovo:
Child, tree, pigeons, and hideous apartment blocks:
The local sledding hill:
Catching air - check out the kid in the center, I was a little slow with the zoom on this one:
A militiaman (cop) watches over the open-air Medvedkovo market (with his back turned to me, of course - I am not going to risk a fine or a beat-down to make these photos more authentic - you wanna pay me, you get the beat-down-inducing shots. Let me know):
Cops like this one love the markets because there are lots of improperly documented migrants from other parts of Russia and from former Soviet republics who have cash because they are selling things at the market and therefore are able to pay bribes. Or perhaps the militia just happens to serve as this market's protection racket, or krysha (roof), as that would be called in Russian. They do, after all, provide something called "extradepartmental security" (vnevedomstvennaia okhrana) to private citizens, for a fee.
If you squint and look into the distance in the photo above (or just click on it to expand the size), you can almost make out the Evroset' mobile phone store and Jackpot (ok, Dzhekpot) slot-machine hall, which, just like the cops, stand watch over the market and wait for people's cash to come their way.
The station entrance/exit is quite Soviet - Artemiy Lebedev actually has better photos than mine capturing that aspect of the exterior.
3 comments:
hello!
i've run into your blogger by occasion - and it seemed really interesting to me!))
though what i can't get is why don't you like the name Medvodkovo? surely, i'm biased because i've lived in Medvedkovo for the whole of my 17 years........)) but still! i think it's ok because it's what this district has been traditionally known as. the same about Altufievo - it's the name of a manor that used to be there in the 19th century. as for Babushkinskaya - maybe you know that before the 1960s (or earlier), i s'pose, this area didn't belong to the city of Moscow itself. it was a town Babuskin - called after a famous pilot. is it worse than Turgenevskaya?))
Galya aka TheSpinningOne
crimsonsky@yandex.ru
Galya,
Fair enough. I guess I shouldn't make fun of metro station names just because they sound funny to me. And I should have taken the time to read up on the history (thank you for informing me on that) before commenting on the station names at all. Thanks very much for checking out the blog and for your informative comment - keep coming back and keep commenting when you have something to add.
Lyndon
I got your email. Thanks for continuing to visit the site. My email address is ".md" because I got it 5 summers ago when I was studying in Moldova. Go figure.
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