Friday 20 March 2015

Big Shopping

I found these whilst tidying up in my photo files and they make me smile, so I thought to share them.
In the last couple of years, there has been a lot of  commercial development in the nearest town to our place in Spain; one great success is a huge shopping mall. It has underground and ground level car parking. Now, us English folk park well and where we can. Coming from such a small and crowded island, parking is at a premium and I think on the whole, we are delighted by the sight of an empty car park. Of course, in the blazing southern Spanish sunshine, locals will naturally park underground. You can play 'Spot the Brit' in the ground level park where sun glasses are required to stop your eyeballs burning in the sunshine bouncing off concrete and hire car windows. We are drawn to any empty parking spaces with glee. And an empty one ground level car park is misleading:  the first time visitor thinks the place must be quiet. Not a deliberate attempt to fool the Northern European neighbours, I'm sure!
Underground parking is always a maze isn't it. Quite apart from the fact that you've to negotiate the first fifty feet in sheer panic because the sudden shade has apparently made you road blind, there's the difficulty of WHERE to park. Often this is made easier by the car park planners...colour coded areas, number and letter codes for row and area and level. Well, at La Zenia, you get it all. And it's free. The pink area is D and E; the walls and paths are striped with pink, each bay is numbered and the pink colour corresponds to that part of the mall that has the food shops and cafes in the majority. And just in case you missed that...there's a dirty great 'statue' depicting food and drink.
The blue area is for leisure...and the dirty great 'statue' is a tennis racket and tin of balls. These parking spaces are underneath a huge sports store as well. Some thought has gone into this.
My favourite 'statue' is the huge ginormous handbag. But I don't have a picture of it because despite all the codes and numbers, we couldn't get our bearings below ground, and were too tired to go back into the mall and come down to the car park along the handbag route. So if we plan to go shopping in La Zenia Mall and I say to you 'meet you in half an hour at the tennis racket'...you'll know exactly what I mean.  

11 comments:

J said...

I didn't realise you were near La Zenia, we used to go to Torrevieja for our holidays thirty odd years ago and used to go to hotel La Zenia to swim, we went on a coach trip from Mazarron to the shopping centre, not my idea of a day out as it was packed, prefered the market down the road.
Jan x

Sue said...

You just know things like that would be vandalised here.

Hope you have a lovely weekend. Sue

Helen said...

I suppose it says something about me and my shopping habits that the title of your post made me immediately think you'd bought something huge in the craft line!! Love the giant tennis racket!

Sue - said...

Gosh it must have really changed since I last stayed in Cabo Roig. They were certainly doing a lot of building then as it changed dramatically in a year. Don't think I'd recognise it now!

April said...

What great pictures. :-) I hope you're putting those in a scrapbook.
April

April said...

What great pictures. :-) I hope you're putting those in a scrapbook.
April

Bleubeard and Elizabeth said...

Mr. Dunnit looks ready to sit in the food court. I thought it was a great photo of him, though. Wow, I've been malls like that in Los Angeles, Seattle, WA, and Kansas City, MO. The color coding changes on every level, as do the letters. Laughed at the dirty food court sign photo. Only YOU can bring humor to a parking area!!

misteejay said...

Great photos Julia and you really do need to get them scrapped.
Have you noticed that parking is starting to become more hap-hazard here in the UK. We now have a lot of Eastern Europeans living in our area and it is amazing to see them just stop the car and go and do whatever...even if they have blocked a main road just to go and have a chat with someone they have seen. There have been some very heated moments between these folk and bus drivers.
Toni xx

Kyla said...

Love it. In NZ there are a LOT of these large statue things depicting what is close by....it was obvious we were not local as I stopped the car at each and every one to take a photo!! The best was a 20ft beer bottle on the main road pointing the way to the local craft brewery (run by a woman no less!).

kyla

Princess Judy Palmer said...

I'm with you Brits--there is an empty spot let's take it! I'm not like "those people" who have to circle around for hours looking for a close spot (especially at the gym, what's up with that?). We also value shaded parking at a premium here... you know it requires oven mitts to drive in the summer here. Fun photos!

Neet said...

What a great idea - would love to see this place.
Hugs, Neet xx