visiting our great neighbor to the north

The Mr. and I decided to go to Canada yesterday.  The border guard was a little skeptical that we were traveling into Canada in order to go to a movie, but it was the truth.  Langley has a kick-ass theater called the Colossus.  Justin had never beheld its glory, and it was time for the movie-loving pilgrim to finally see Mecca.

At first, Justin was not so impressed with Canada.



But as we stopped for coffee at The Wired Monk, he started to perk up a bit.  For Justin, there are very few situations that are not improved by the addition of coffee.

Unfortunately, the coffee was crap.  I had high hopes when they put chocolate whipped cream on my iced mocha, but it was the lonely high point of an otherwise awful cup of coffee.  Burnt shots!

We left and headed over to the Colossus.  Our day improved substantially.  I couldn't fit the entire building in one frame, but hopefully this pic gives you a decent idea:



The Colossus boasts 19 screens (one of them IMAX), a Baskin Robbins, TCBY, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and a Starbucks (of course) among a few other restaurants.  Seating in the theaters is stadium style -- so you're fully sitting above the row in front of you.  Pretty posh.

We saw Transformers -- part two of our deal that if we saw Harry Potter V, I'd go to see Transformers.  Truthfully, I ended up loving Transformers.  Highly recommend it.

We felt our deeply Canadian experience wouldn't be complete without a visit to IKEA over in Coquitlam.  On our way, there was a traffic jam and we got into a bit of an altercation with some girls in the car next to us.  I looked over, and both of them were hanging their heads on the window sill, staring intently into our car.  I thought the best response was to grab my camera and take pictures of them.  They responded in kind.  Justin was going to lick the window just to take things up a notch, but he couldn't lick said window and drive safely at the same time.



I was impressed by two things in this moment: 1, Justin and I have the same level of maturity as tween girls; and 2, these smart-ass 12-year-olds have WAY cooler cell phones than we do.  Sigh.  They win this round.

IKEA was fun, we'll head back up there once we move next month.  Two more sights on our tour of Canada raised and then quickly lowered our opinion of our great neighbor to the North.



(Apparently we also have the same maturity level as 12-year-old boys.)



It pains me to show you the second picture, it really does.  Just like the let-down at the Wired Monk, Justin's hopes were raised (Yay, Canada does have Mountain Dew!) and shot down.  Hard.  (Caffeine free Mountain Dew?  ...I hate this country.)

After explaining to a border guard once more that we had indeed come to Canada simply to go see Transformers at the Colossus, we made it safely back into the good old US of A.

Good to be home.