Last Saturday, Last Stop

Moscow, Russia - With the rising price of real estate, Moscow is experiencing suburban sprawl. People are moving farther and farther away from the center, where the forest of apartment blocks is growing wider and denser.
The Moscow metro reaches out to all of these corners of the city. If you look at a metro map, it looks like some sort of creepy crawly creature, with a ring line circling the center, and and ten different radial lines reaching out in all directions.

With the exception of taking a trip to Izmailovo market or Novodevichy monastery, most visitors to Moscow have little reason to venture outside the ring line. Indeed, most foreigners living in Moscow reside and work in the center; the best clubs and restaurants are in the center; the best shopping is in the center; why would anybody leave the center (except maybe to go to Ikea)?
But a group of stalwart adventurers has started doing just that (leaving the center, not going to Ikea). On the last Saturday of every month, the members of the Last Stoppers Club pick a line and ride the metro as far as they possibly can. Each month they go to a different stop. And the Moscow metro is expanding at such a rate that there are new "last stops" being added all the time, so the club has yet to repeat itself. Read all about it at http://www.laststoppersclub.com/.
Who knows what the Last Stoppers will find when they exit the metro station and come above ground? But whatever they find, they intend to do as the locals do... and when I say "locals" I don't mean Muscovites, I mean suburbanites. The worst case scenario is standing around drinking beer from the kiosk. (Surprisingly, I don't think the Last Stoppers Club has ever come to that.)
Last night I joined this daring group to see what goes down at Strogino, a brand new metro stop at the end of the dark blue line #3. At 8pm, we met at Kievskaya, which is the station at the intersection of the ring-line and the blue line. We were a fine-looking group of Russians, Americans, Norwegians, Brits and maybe some others - about twenty in total. At least half the crew were first-time last-stoppers, while others have been regular participants for months. And we were the only passengers on the train when it pulled into Strogino, 40 minutes and 40km later.
Strogino station is beautiful, sparkling with chrome and marble. At the street level, two spaceship-style glass structures - one on each side of the highway - house the entrance to the metro and the escalators leading underground. But once outside, we were surrounded by Soviet-style apartment blocks. It was an unlikely destination for a night out on the town, but there right next to the metro station was a big restaurant and sports bar called Penalty. Just to clarify, this was not øòðàô (shtraf), which would be Russian for "penalty". It was Ïåíàëòè which nothing except the transliteration of the English word.
All 20 of us filed into the pub, where we were promptly denied service because our group was too big. Before you say anything bad about the Russian service sector, I will clarify that we were invited to sit out on the terrace, but it was not an enticing prospect in the rain. So we decided to move on.
The next stop was the beer kiosk - not as a destination in and of itself, but just to buy some beers for the road. (There is no open-container law in Russia, so you can drink a beer walking down the street, and many people do.)
And then our group of 20 continued walking along the highway, past the apartment blocks and construction sites, in search of somewhere to hang out and have fun like the locals do.
It was only a few minutes before a sort of mirage appeared across a busy intersection... could that be a strip mall? It was! It was a strip mall out in the Moscow suburbs. And there, wedged in between a shoe store and a slot machine hall, was another restaurant/pub, this one called Beer-Line. Again, not Ïèâíàÿ Î÷åðåäü (pivnaya ochered) which would be "beer line" in Russian, but Áèð-Ëàéí, which is nothing more than the transliteration from English.
Beer Line had no problem finding a table for 20, nor did they balk at our steady stream of demands for pizza and drinks. Each end of the table was supplied a "tower" of beer - that's a seven-liter container from which we could fill our own mugs - and it was miraculously replaced each time it was emptied. The pizza was tasty, the conversation was scintillating; and so we passed a very pleasant evening at Strogino. I had to admit that I was surprised that life in the Moscow suburbs would be so civilized.
After that our group had a parting of ways. There were the die-hards who wanted to go back to Penalty for afterhours. They could not get enough of Strogino. The rest of us, however, retreated to the city center for the remainder of the night. The burbs are fine but let's not overdo it.