Viva Vivo City

I have seen the future of retail in Sin­ga­pore and it is big. And looks like any other mall in the U.S. or Aus­tralia. Or Malaysia. Or Tai­wan. Or Thai­land. Or every other coun­try in the world I’ve been to.

But no, just because it’s big doesn’t mean Vivo City is soul­less. It’s got a Gap. And my col­league tells me there’s a man-made beach on the roof, where you can pre­tend you’re not sev­eral storeys off the ground kick­ing sand into the kid’s face next to you. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t get to the top floor. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have found the fea­ture with­out a GPS.

If you drive, there’s the cav­ernous car park to nego­ti­ate. No, wait. There’s the dri­ve­way to the car park where you wait an eter­nity before you see the elec­tronic sign­board telling you that there’s one car lot left, then none, then one, then two, then none again.

About a week later, you get out of your car and make your way to a lift lobby, labeled ‘Q’. This gives you an indi­ca­tion of how big the place is going to be, because you can’t see where lob­bies A to P are.

Tech­no­rati Tags: gap, Sin­ga­pore, vivo city

Don’t bother try­ing to fig­ure out where Lobby Q is in rela­tion to every­thing else, because they’re not in the busi­ness of mak­ing that easy to fig­ure out. The staff at the infor­ma­tion counter were very help­ful though, telling me where the near­est OCBC and UOB ATMs were (not in Vivo City), and that Lobby Q was near the bridge link­ing Vivo City with Har­bourfront Cen­tre.

Later on, after the movie we were watch­ing ended, Naomi and I found our­selves fol­low­ing the other cin­ema patrons through a labyrinthine series of un-windowed cor­ri­dors and stairs, and out onto the street out­side the build­ing. To get back into the shop­ping area, we had to take an esca­la­tor to the base­ment before we took another up to the first level.

All this while, I kept think­ing if the were, God for­bid, a fire, or worse, there’d be may­hem and chaos, because in a build­ing as com­pli­cated in lay­out as this, may­hem and chaos are always lurk­ing some­where wait­ing for a fire or worse.

But mor­bid thoughts aside, there was this den­tists’ clinic near Lobby Q that irked me just because it was called ‘Den­tal On The Bay’. There was a vacant shop space next to it of sim­i­lar size, which I think would be suit­able for a psychiatrist’s prac­tice called ‘Men­tal On The Bay’.

But I sup­pose you can’t stop peo­ple from using names and suf­fixes just cuz it’s fash­ion­able now. I mean, in the 80s and 90s, there was a slew of shop­ping malls with names end­ing with ‘Point’, because ‘Cen­tre­point’ was really the place to be then. Chi­na­town Point, Cause­way Point, Com­pass Point, Jurong Point, Orchard Point (next to Cen­tre­point) and North Point are cases in point.

Oops, I have just realised from extended research that the above-written malls (except Chi­na­town Point) are named so because they belong to the same par­ent com­pany, Frasers Cen­tre­point Malls, but I’ll never let hard facts get in the way of a good point. Never!

OK, so, as I was saying…

Vivo City’s really great cos there’s the first and only Gap store in Singapore.

And here’s my favourite Gap webpage:

Less is more

iTunes is play­ing an ille­gal copy of On a Mon­day from the album “Into the Pur­ple Val­ley” by Ry Cooder of which I have the orig­i­nal CD.