Journal: News & Comment

Winding and twirling

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Every summer from the year I turned eight until I turned thirteen, my parents and I went to San Diego for a month, staying at a condo owned by one of my mom's friends. I've also returned there several times since, so that city is the one I feel most comfortable in after Vancouver.

One place in San Diego I like is the downtown mall Horton Plaza. Tom Coates hates it because of its confusing layout and chaotic colour schemes, but those are the same reasons I like it. Here in Vancouver we have a few (not many) malls that, while vastly different, follow a similar and somewhat hateful "confuse the customer" architecture, but somehow they don't work, because they are also entirely indoors and have the dark terra-cotta tiles of mid-'70s mall design. While at Horton Plaza I always felt pleasantly lost, at the local malls I just wanted to get out.

One neat thing about Horton Plaza is that the parking lot levels are not numbered, but identified by fruits—"I'm on the Lemon level," you remember. The mall is also where I first saw Aliens in 1986, and where I accidentally spilled gravy on my wife's new shirt during our honeymoon in 1995. Ah, the memories.

 |