It took you HOW long?! and a movie list

Last weekend Colleen, Stu and I journeyed to the end of the world...aka Strogino, on the west side of Moscow.

Life up in the northeast, Mytishi, is fun and all, but every so often you feel like you have to break free from the 'burbs and see some other parts of the region. (Great. Now I have "I Want to Break Free" stuck in my head. It could be worse, I guess. It could be the stupid rainbow song I have to sing to my Kids Box 1 class twice a week. Red, and yellow, and pink and green, orange, and purple and blue...I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow with youuuu...how do you SING a rainbow??? Life's biggest question for me right now!)

Anyways...last Saturday our friend Kendra from Atlanta, Georgia (therefore she is my hero because she's a Southern belle and Scarlett O'Hara is one of my top three favourite fictional characters*) had her birthday party, and we really wanted to go. Kendra lives about a 20 minute walk from Strogino metro station. Ok, we reasoned. We'll leave our flat at 6:30.

WE GOT TO HER PLACE AT NINE. 2 and a half hours later!! It was soul-sucking. First we had to walk to the train station. Then we took the train to Komsomolskaya metro station. Then the metro allllllll the way over to the blue line where Strogino is. Then the walk to her flat. On the way we were assaulted by a drunk man, almost slipped to our icy deaths a few times, paid for extremely gross toilets, and napped on the metro. What a fun commute.

Because I had to catch the last bus from Medvekovo metro station to Mytishi, I got to stay at Kendra's party for ONE HOUR before I had to turn around and make the trip back. So in total I spent 5 hours traveling to get to a party where I could only stay for one hour. Somehow, that doesn't make any sense. But I guess that's Moscow for you.

Kendra with one of her birthday presents - Russian Monopoly!

Melissa and Vic (one of the few pics I managed to
take in the hour I had there)

On a completely unrelated note, here is a list of the movies I REALLY want to see (but will probably end up waiting until I'm back in Canada so I can rent them with friends and fam):

- The King's Speech (ahhhhh I WANT TO SEE THIS SOOOO BADLY! George VI and Elizabeth = LOVE!)

- Sense and Sensibility (I may have watched the trailer for this movie five times in a row one night, dreamily envisioning myself as Marianne Dashwood with my own charmingly bumbling Hugh Grant/Willoughby)

- Morning Glory (Harrison Ford. You guys know my love for him.)

- Slumdog Millionaire (just finished the book, and it was one of those reads that you cannot put down. I really hope the movie lives up to the book and its own hype!)

- The Social Network (it sounds thought-provoking and interesting. Plus I like the catchphrase for the film: "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.")

- Easy A (I'm a sucker for Amanda Bynes' movies. She's so cute!)

- Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (this won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film sometime in the 1970s, and I have heard from many Russians how amazing it is. But I think I'd enjoy it more if I watched it with English subtitles!)

I'm sure there are other ones but I'll stop now - are there any you'd recommend?

*Top three fave fictional characters: Scarlett O'Hara, Jo March in Little Women - except for her lapse of insanity when she passed over Laurie for that old German guy (how could she? Broke my ten year old heart!) - and Konstantin Levin from Anna Karenina.