Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Day 209 - Visiting the World’s 5th Largest Mall


It was funny not sleeping on a train last night as none of the familiar sounds and shakes were present yet we both had great sleeps and so were up relatively early. The mall was on our agenda today and we’d set aside the entire day for this as the mall is 5th largest in the world. The place has over 800 shops and so easily dwarfs the likes of the UK’s Trafford Centre with its mere 280 or so.

We made the half hour walk in the heat of the Edmonton sun until we reached one of the west side entrances to the mall. In we went and quickly made note of our location in the likely event that we’d get lost. We had heard a story of someone who’d lost their car here and it was a week before they found it again – we weren’t taking any chances and soon got our hands on a map of the place. Imagine our shock as we opened up the guide and the first page we hit was two separate maps for the mall’s theme park and waterpark! The place is basically a long strip of shops covering two floors and with little offshoots of shops sprouting out from the main stem of the mall. We decided to cover it all and so set off conquering the ground floor.

We were both stunned when, within 45 minutes, we’d reached the far end of the mall. During this time we’d even wandered into the entrance of the theme park, just to have a look, and stopped for a few moments by the ship and ice-rink. We had even managed to stop off and cure Corrie’s persisting cravings for Blizzard ice-creams at a Dairy Queen. We then set about doing the upper floor and this too was a much shorter journey than we’d originally expected, even with a stop off to take in the waterpark through the huge glass windows overlooking it. We ended up extending our time here by perusing a selection of shops, constantly fighting the urges to impulse buy!





We judged that this pace didn’t seem much bigger than the like of the big shopping centres back home in terms of walking from end to end. It’s obviously the likes of: the theme park, waterpark, shooting range, huge cinema etc that rapidly gobbles up space to make this place huge. Well there’s only so much time you can spend at a shopping centre without actually buying anything and so we eventually decided to make a move and walk back to the hotel.

More chilling out back at the hotel; catching up on more of the Olympics and trying to make note of a few more points of interest for our upcoming road trip.

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