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.