I wrote a while back that Moscow's subway system is one of the top five things to see when you are visiting Russia's capital city on your adoption journey. But mass transit can be an odd experience for us car-crazy Americans. So I thought I'd take a minute today to look at how to ride the Moscow Metro and the city's trams.

First, some background. While the London Underground has far more kilometers of track (408 to Moscow's 279), the Moscow subway system carries more than 8 million passengers a day on workdays--two and a half times London's ridership. That's also twice as many as ride New York City's subways and buses on a work day. So rule one is to not attempt to ride the Moscow Metro at rush hour,

Rule two is, if you are going to a specific destination (as opposed to just meandering), to carry a piece of paper with the name of your stop printed in Cyrillic, as well as the names of the start points and end points of the lines that you will be traveling on. Then you can play a match game with the subway signs at each station until you get to the right place to get off. Why so many names when Moscow's subway lines are also identified by a number and a color (and thus far easier to understand than New York's alphanumeric soup)? Well, knowing a line's start and end points helps you to know if you are getting on a train that is going in the direction you want to go.

Rule three is to get a fare card. When I first rode the Moscow subway some 20 years ago, you had to get a single ticket equal to the price of your journey. But if you didn't quite understand where you were going, or got off at the wrong stop, you had to pay a fine to the lady at the exit. I wondered then how much of the Metro's operating budget came from fines paid by foreign travelers. A 10-day fare card doesn't cost that much in Western terms (I didn't note exactly how much in my adoption diary), and it will cover all your needs.

One final note, Moscow also has a tram system that operates above ground. While surface traffic often slows it to a crawl, there is one line I found to be very handy--the one that operates along the inner ring road, the so-called Garden Ring. It is identified by what looks like a number 6 on the signage. My little guy loves cars, trucks, trains and construction vehicles and we spent one afternoon watching them all from a tram circling Moscow.