Subway

Snow came late this winter but there's been a lot of it, transforming the city and giving it a festive air. People seem more cheerful.

My friend Steve and I were stuck in a claustrophobia-inducing jam of humanity at the subway station on our way to the opera the other night.

The subway system is fast and efficient in most ways, but not in channeling passengers from arrival platforms to departure platforms at transfer stations.

Trains arrive every two minutes. Hundreds of people get off and then squeeze through a narrow tunnel with the same number trying to get through from the other direction. It gets worse with the arrival of every new train. You feel as if you're in a soccer mob or that Who concert in Cincinnati where 23 fans were trampled.

But everyone pushed through an inch at a time, patiently, even jovially. A man in front of me held up his cell phone camera to take a few "Hail Marys." "Dobre!" I said (good!). He grinned at me. The man behind me said something with a smile, too bad I couldn't understand a word of it. Then someone broke into the chorus of "Volga Boatmen" (which you'll know if you ever took piano lessons "yo, ho, heave, ho") and there was general laughter. Laughter under (literal) oppression! For me, it was a new view of the people of Kyiv.