The metro is a PETA nightmare. As it gets colder, the fur coats are coming out--some look like they're made from multiple entire animals, and are older than a system of government or two. I usually can't identify the animal, but a couple weeks ago I saw a scarf that was a chain of three little foxes, each biting the tail of the next.

I'm getting to people-watch more now--at least that's my positive spin on having to take public transportation everywhere since moving out to the boonies (I left the city center for Строгино, an old resort section of the city that overlooks the Moskva River, by Шукинская metro). I take the metro in on the nights when I teach, and a tram to the oil and gas magazine.

The other people on the tram are overwhelmingly elderly, and mostly women (the life expectancy of Russian men is 56). I pretty much never get a seat, either because it's crowded or because I feel bad watching some octagenarian hold on for dear life around the curves. I honestly wonder where they're going all day.

Russia is aging (I'm not sure how true that is of Moscow, which has about 10% of the country's population but is extravagantly unrepresentative of Russia as a whole). There's a public service ad in the metro that says "Наша страна нужно ваш рекорд--Россия [I forget] 3 человек каждый минут," "Our country needs your record, Russia loses 3 people every minute," and has a picture of a beaming woman holding three identical Photoshopped babies. I'm not sure if the agewise topheaviness I see is a result of the population decline, or if it's because the Russian elderly are more integrated into daily life and less confined to nursing homes and Florida-equivalent as Americans are.