Bombs

Well I’m sure the first thing on everyones mind is what it was like to be in Moscow when these explosions hit the metro, especially on the same line. Lucky for you, I just happen to be a guy with first hand experience. The way Russia handles disasters is in some ways better than in America, some ways worse, just like most of the things I’ve seen here.
The morning started off with me watching something on the news about the Metro. Of course I didn’t understand much of it. I just heard Lieublanka closed, 36 people something something something. I thought “Well that sucks, I have to go through there, maybe I’ll just go around it and keep the red line on the other side.” I left a little later than usual, and when I got to the brown line to zig-zag my way through the center of town, I get a call from Iulia who is going crazy and talking a mile a minute. All I hear is don’t go to Prospect Mir blablablabla then I say I’m on my way there and get NONONONONO. A few seconds later, Ira calls but the network is busy, so she sends a text to get out of the metro ASAP. I figure out bombs are going off around town and make my way through the most dense crowd of people I’ve ever seen.
I get outside and notice traffic is horrible. I call Vera and ask what to do, because my language ability limits my options as far as make-shift travel arrangements go. She starts freaking because I was apparently the first one to tell her that this was happening, and she tells me to go home. Which would have been cool if the red line was working and the subway wasn’t the most dangerous place in the world at that moment. I decided to instead make my way to a nearby coffee shop, buy some internet time, and let everyone know that I wasn’t exploded.
The aftermath was a mixed bag of good things and bad, from my perspective. Initially, there were a ton of cops near and in the metro. This isn’t really a bad thing I guess, but there were no dogs, no metal detectors, no anything. Just a bunch of ~18 year old kids wearing fuzzy hats carrying whompin’ sticks. There were also some private (un-official goverment owned) forces around with SMGs and some armored vehicles, but they were either sitting around looking scary, eating street food, or motionless inside the ~APC things. By 3pm the Metro was totally clean and back in working order. They had video of the terrorists on camera and apparently catalogued the whole scene and completely cleaned everything. How much of that is legit, I don’t know, but it was definitely clean and working in no time flat.
Today was Moscow’s day of mourning. Most TV was off, and just displayed “Moscow Mourns.” If you’ve gathered anything about flowers in this culture, even numbers are bad. I saw probably about 20% of people in the metro today carrying pairs of flowers, bud down. They were all bringing them to the stations affected and had set up what I would consider the 9-11 style memoir shrines. By the end of the day, it was a mountain of flowers surrounding candles, photos, and news articles.
In the end, it’s interesting to see that in a foreign country, they are no different than us. It’s definitely something to think about whenever people go on a rant or media spreads propaganda. As soon as the bombs hit, everyones cell phones were going crazy with people checking in on them, making sure they were at home, etc. In the aftermath, many totally random citizens were buying flowers and leaving them at the stations. It’s a powerful experience that will definitely stay in my mind forever.