The Metro Code

MOSCOW – At the Sweet Moscow Hostel, one amenity that seems to come with check-in is a comfortable familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet. A Swedish couple staying on a queen mattress on the floor in the next floor said they figured out how to use Cyrillic in two days. A Brit on winter university holidays says he could do the basics in one. The hostel manager, also a Swede, who arrive three months ago from managing a property in Thailand, can read whole chunks of text. Perhaps someone will check in tomorrow will memorize it in the taxi from the airport or from a podcast they will listen to in REM sleep the first night in the six bedroom dorm.

Taking Cyrillic and turning it into normal letters is essentially a Cryptogram, those switching puzzles that some pale eight-year-old boys love to solve instead playing of contact sports, or at least they used to before World of Warcraft. The Cyrillic letter "р" – written the same as the Roman/English letter "p" – is actually the same as the letter "r." Their "c" is the same as our "s," our "n" the same their "h," and so on.

Using substitution, the mysterious and impossible Russian looking "ресторан," becomes something near and dear to every American: a R-E-S-T- O-R-A-N. In Russian, it doesn't even have the crazy French verb "au." Here it's simply "o," just the way it sounds.

It sounds so easy, but alas, I still don't have it down.

If only Cyrillic was just about taking the letters and mixing them up, some strange equation to memorize in 26 parts (If P = R then R = T and C = P). The reality – that it's much more complicated – arrives in three stages: б, я and Г. Here's a more detailed look at each individual stage:

Stage б: Apparently there are some characters in Cyrillic there aren't the same as English. But that one kinda looks the as a "b" so it's not too bad.
Stage я: Eh, not only is this character backward, which is pretty freaky, someone at the hostel told me that it's a vowel. Whoa.
Stage Г: Holy fuck! What is the hell is that? Put down the Russian dictionary and spend $7 on the International Herald Tribune at nearest Western supply store. Read about Paris Hilton over a Big Mac at nearest McDonald's.

Yes, Cyrillic has crazy bonus letters that don't correspond to a single English letter or sound. There's my personal least-favorite: Ж.

My restaurant example makes it sound like a simple substitution process, but a single letter can represent any number of sounds, depending on the letters grouped around. With my non-existent Russian, I have no way of knowing whether an "O" is an O or a U, for instance.

Oh, and even if I was able translate these words into Roman letters, they would still be in Russian, with its complicated grammar, unfamiliar verb forms and random diacritical marks in the middle of words. The only reason I want to convert is so that I can attempt to pronounce them to people on the street, or see if the word is a cognate. There's a fair number of English words in use, so there's always a chance that I can convert and figure it out. As a bonus, Russian, thanks to the Francophile Catherine the Great, uses tons of French. "Restaurant" isn't originally English, you know.

As a political scientist, I might be interested in the word "самиздат," if it appeared somewhere on the streets of Moscow. If by some miracle I could convert it to letters, I would get "samizdat," which doesn't help much. Wikipedia says this refers to "the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries," but again, how would I know that just by taking the Cyrillic letters and making them into Roman ones?

But I don't have time to find glasnost-era relics (or more appropriately I should say Гла́сность-era relics). I'm too busy trying to use the subway. Moscow isn't the most tourist friendly city in the world, especially if you're traveling on a budget that doesn't allow for a private helicopter rental. The metro system is labyrinthine, with more than a dozen lines snaking around the city in pixelated lines. Destinations are labeled only in Russian-Cyrillic.

The biggest problem for the Cyrillic-challenged on the metro is deciding which direction to go. After descending 15 or 20 stories underground (these stations were designed to serve as fallout shelters), I, the rider am faced with parallel tracks a couple of hundred meters apart. They are quite wide, as Russian metro stations are Baroque masterpieces, the most beautiful example of Soviet public art.

The distance makes even the tiniest, most insignificant outpost appear to rival New York's Grand Central Station, but also complicates choosing your destination, as the list of stops is listed only on the wall past where the train stops. The current station is shown as a large white circle, and then all the remaining stations are listed in order.

In order to make a decision, first I must pull out the name of my destination, which inevitably is one incredibly long word, something like, "Замоскворе́цкая." I have to look at this word slyly, as more than a glance will be a tip-off to police in the station that I'm a tourist and they should start concocting some sort off "offense" and issue me a "fine," and then I have to determine if that station is on this side of the track.

Замоскворе́цкая. There's that one that looks the backwards three, and then an "a" and then I forgot. Another glance, and a check to the left and right for police. So there's an "m" and about halfway through there's an apostrophe. I go back to the list of stations - there's so many of them. Moscow is huge, and some lines have over 40 stops, and over half of them appear to start with the backwards three.

Whoosh! A train arrives. Moscow is the opposite of every other metro system in the world in that trains come far too often. They arrive every 90 seconds at most stations, which between passengers embarking and disembarking, doesn't leave much time for scanning the wall for station names. So most of the time, I'm racing against the arrival of an oncoming train. If I don't see the station name, or what I think is the name, I start dashing (not running, that might attract the police) to the other side to catch the train.

All this trouble just because I'm not functional in Ж and those other strange letters. Since everybody at the hostel claims to be so good at using these stupid things, tomorrow I should bring someone along on the metro, as my personal decoder.