130309 Garden 5

in my second weekend trip, sy brought me to the biggest shopping mall in korea - that failed.

there's 5 buildings each over 10 levels high, but 2 of the buildings have almost 90% of the stores closed.  this is a really good case study of a government initiative that failed badly. think more than 1 trillion of losses was incurred. you can read a little more here.

the only good thing was that rayforce was filmed here, but even cosplay photography was banned so the group that came here for shoot was chased off just right after they don their gear. sure sucks.

the architecture is pretty modern, and you can see some cutting edge designs as soon as you ride the elevator up.

and my dear starts snapping away at the buildings. hahahha. so i snapped him. *_*

here's the main buildings, divided into techno, fashion, living and young. last one is some branded dept. can't remember the name, but it was somewhere between fashion and young. while techno and living was apparently closing, the fashion dept is doing pretty well.



it all looks bustling and pretty outside... but when you get in...

eh not you didn't see wrongly, the shops just get lesser and lesser and with each level, emptier and emptier. and look who's doing the cash register. the customers are so little that nobody cares who's guarding the area.

i kind of went crazy on the shoes because they were going for 10k - 15k a pair. boots at $15-$20/a pair!! (but later on i realised that almost everywhere it's this price, so it's not really a sale. oh well)

and then there are also shops with REALLY pretty shoes. BUT NO ATTENDANTS! the owners just abandoned the shoes there!!! :((( i wanna take them home!!!

and then there's shoes going for 5k - 9.9k won. not that nice though.

 

and here's a surviving shoe shop that's selling shoes over 80k. no sales here despite the bad business.

i bought like 4 pairs of shoes before i finally gave up and we went to have a late lunch. we were supposed to have brunch but i was too caught up in my shopping. teehee. we ate at ashley, a buffet-styled place. there were actually quite a few restaurants in the fashion/young building, on the 8-10 levels.

 

oh ya, their toilet has pretty cool taps. lol. you tilt the plate thing to make the water fall out. hohohoo.

since there's nothing much to do, we went to catch a movie - wizard of oz. the theatre has seats that's called Veat Box and Sweet Box. Veat Box is actually seats that vibrate or move according to the effects of the movie, and Sweet box is well, seats at the very back of the theatre meant for couples. i swear it was super comfortable. but at twice the normal price. sy fell asleep throughout the whole show. not that i could blame him, oz was a pretty boring show. it doesn't help that the first 30mins was in black and white. zzzz. went home after that.