Uptown -- downtown -- Park Avenue

[austin_dern]

I tend to overdo it when I plan things, so today I just got on any old bus and saw where it ended up. This being Singapore, that means I ended up at a bus interchange near an MRT station, a Housing Development Board complex of flats, and a mall, but that's all right; I hadn't been there before. The Hougang station (near the far end of the North-East MRT line), interchange, mall and flats were quite nice, rather homey, and had a lovely sidewalk path wrapping green space.

Sengkang, farther north, was a less personal place, although the station was mixed in with the Compassville Mall. I know everybody else on the Internet hates malls, but I like them and the crowds they draw, particularly when they have an eccentric design or set of stores. These stores weren't fantastic, but the mall did have an ``Age of Exploration'' theme, with 17th century maps represented in the tile floors and mastheads sprouting out the fourth and fifth storeys in the central area and such. The MRT station also links to an automated Light Rail Transit system, generally unremarkable although the LRT cars are these skinny, tall things that look sort of like Star Trek movie cargo shuttles.

Punggol, the far end of the North-East Line, achieves perfect East Rutherford, New Jersey. They have hopes the area will be developed soon -- just looking around I found seven stations for its LRT system under construction -- but for the moment it's marshy fields with factories in the distance. The station resembles the starship Reliant rising from the grass. As a storm was rolling in I got some great and atmospheric pictures.

Trivia: Cartoonist Walt Kelly was born in Philadelphia in 1913. Source: The Best Of Pogo: collected from The Okefenokee Star, Edited by Mrs Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch, Jr.

Currently Reading: The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World, Harlan Ellison.

Comments

The mall.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

It's funny that you mention liking malls. I personally do enjoy them, and not even for the "let's go make fun of the empty people" aspect of them; that's actually sort of a put-on thing, and now that I'm somewhat more vulnerable personally to being laughed at, I'm realizing why I miss going. Even if I don't go into many of them, I like the fact that there are dozens upon dozens of interesting places to look at, and that stimulates my creativity with a minimum of walking about.

Sure, I could poke around online and find the weirdest stuff in the world, it's all Right There, but it's not quite real because it's not there in person. Online, there's no playing Gradius tunes on that cheesy Radio Shack keyboard and watching the salesdrones flinch, or sitting in a food court and absorbing the sensation of being still in a swarm of activity, or rifling through a rack of shirts you know won't really fit but might have a neat design and just maybe.... As artifical and most wannabe cynical parrots claim the mall is, it's actually quite a bit more real in certain ways that appeal to me in ways I don't even comprehend.

As I said, though, lately when I go it becomes a less joyful thing, and more of a surgical strike; I get what I want or go where I need to, and then I'm whisked out by my mate, and the whole time I'm a naurotic mess. This will pass in time, however, and then I can again secretly enjoy.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I like malls well enough, although they tend not to have the most interesting stores in them. I go to my local mall pretty frequently because it has the only year-round Dairy Queen in town, and I love Dairy Queen.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm all good with malls. They have all the *stuff* I want. But I like stripmall shops as well, and downtown stores. It's all about store selection and convenience.

Now the effects of places like Wal-Mart on local businesses and effects of malls on downtown shopping, those can be problematic, annoying, and I expect that's the source of what most people don't like. That displacement. But the mall itself is a good solution for multiple shopping opportunities in one visit.

And, although in recent years this has declined, malls are one of the prime places to find arcades- genuine 10+ machine arcades that are likely to have games beyond the "One racer, one shooter, one pinball, one fighter, and a skil-crane" setup of many movie theatres, Bowling Alleys and such. Plus, where else can you find those jalapeno-enhanced pretzels? -1-9

--Chiaroscuro

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

I like malls. Except when they have badly-run pet shops. Nicely-run pet shops (it's relative, of course; properly-run pet shops don't exist, because they lose money) are a nice diversion, and I rarely pass up the opportunity. But the other stores tend to be fun too. I think I'd love one with maps and nautical stuff.

They were more fun when I had money to spend in them, though. I miss the good ol' days of Crossgates and Colonie Center. Not so much Latham Circle, though, which tended towards depressing; it was like visiting a fresh corpse that hadn't realized it died yet.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'm lucky in that none of the malls anywhere that I've lived had pet shops in them. But on the couple of occasions when I've been to a mall that had a pet shop in it, they were the worst pet shops I've ever seen. At a mall in South Bend, Indiana, when I was visiting my boyfriend there, I saw (among other nasties) goldfish in a horrible state, with big gaping wounds in their sides and their tails and fins completely covered with fin rot (a white fungus). I was shocked and I asked the manager if he was aware that the goldfish were sick. He made a show of dipping a finger in the water and then tasting it (!), then announcing, "yes, the water's medicated." This didn't explain the fact that the fish were still for sale -- which was obvious from the fact that "SALE - HALF OFF" was written on the side of the tank! That was my first experience with a mall pet shop and it's not one I have forgotten.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've only seen two actual pet stores in malls in Singapore, one at Bukit Panjant LRT station -- a cramped space specializing in hamsters, mice, and fish -- and one at Tampines, with a pretty nice array of dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, and various scaleys and fish. The most amazing thing about that was they were selling rabbits imported from the Netherlands at S$750.00 each (around US $450 or so). I can't imagine how. Guinea pig boars ran S$240.00; sows S$260.00. The store was also lined with posters about ``reading your pet's feelings,'' most of which boil down to ``don't ever under any circumstances touch a rabbit, hamster, or guinea pig,'' which runs against my experience with them.

I do miss the Crossgates and the Colonie Center malls ... neither is quite great on its own, but between the two is a good afternoon browsing and wandering. The Orchard Road Shopping District has plenty of oddities to wander around, and you can spend a day going through the AppleCentre, the only Borders in Asia, a couple hobby shops, a few US-style comic book shops, some VCD/DVD shops, a few more bookstores, electronics galore, and wrap the day up with dinner at The Snoopy Place. No models of the Destroyer Escort Slater, though.

Meanwhile I'm glad to know I'm not actually the only person who likes hanging out someplace in which people are generally happy and in which you can be as social or as isolated as you feel, and change with almost no inertia.