My time spent in Bangkok came close to hitting my peak sensory limit, and of all these the shopping experience here might have topped the list. My location in Bangkok was at Siam Square, the heart of the shopping district. The intersection adjacent to my hostel and the street running parrallel to it contained no less than five shopping plazas. Each plaza marked a mall that was bursting with shops, the smallest filling three floors while the largest, MBK, supported a massive eight floors.
MBK shopping mall was right across the street from my hostel and even though I have been there almost a dozen times, I still manage to get lost in this massive complex. The mall has everything under the sun, but it is the chaotic mazelike structure of the shops that disorients me. I would weave my way in between shops, checking out the goods, and when I would look around I didn’t know one end from the other and sometimes didn’t even know which floor I was on.
There are eight floors, and each floor is divided into zones. There are shops as you would expect in a normal shopping mall in America, but there are sections on each floor that is a hodgpodge of stores thrown together. It isn’t the difference in the type of store; the mall is structured so that like goods are grouped together. It is the way these kiosks are set up that creates such mazelike madness. After countless times getting lost and stumbling on new stores with each visit, I decided to bring my iPhone along and take some pictures of the majestic madness that is the MBK shopping mall.
On the ground floor in what is termed the “mini-plaza”, shops are stacked one on top of the other.
An electronic geek’s paradise, the fourth floor has every gadget you can imagine, and the speciality is phones. I need phones. Lots of phones.
Did I also mention that the mall is inundated with at least 50 kiosks containing pirated DVDs and software? I had heard about the prevalence of pirated movies and software, but it is still somewhat of a shock to see kiosks selling these goods inside the mall.
You can pick up a directory pamphlet at certain locations in the mall, and it helped to relocate myself a few times. The directory lists a ground floor followed by seven more floors. I list here the ground floor as being the first floor, and the top floor as the eighth floor. That being said, the mall culminates on the eighth floor with 8 theaters, 28 bowling lanes, karaoke, and lots of food joints. I love some of the innovative ways movie previews are shown here. There is a section that has movie posters and footprint silhouettes on the floor. If you step on the footprints, the movie poster changes to a trailer of the movie and lists showtimes.
Another innovative technique is embedding small LCD TVs in movie stands. The movie trailer plays continuosly on the screen and the large stand shows the opening date and actors.
- A massive arcade center exists on the top floor. Soccer is, obviously, a hugely popular video game here.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of the other shopping plazas around besides MBK. The Siam Paragon is much more upscale and more of a typical very high end shopping mall in the states. It contains a massive food court on the ground floor that has some amazing Thai restaurants.
Central World Plaza’s main feature is its central hub of escalators and elevators, with the shops wrapping around them in a DNA-like strand. While not as glamorous as Siam Paragon, Central World Plaza still holds it’s own and has a very nice movie theater complex on the top floor.
You could literally spend weeks in this one area, Siam Square, shopping ’till you dropped, and you still might not see everything. Massive. Chaotic. Maddening. Majestic. Memorable. The MBK and it’s adjacent malls encompass all these terms.