The EM District malls...

A quick disclaimer: any astute readers may notice that some of my blog entries are slightly out of order. As much as possible I am trying to keep them in the order of our days but I am falling behind a little and sometimes, I just want to cover a different day. We have another rest day coming up, so I will try and catch up then.

Bangkok, Day 7.

Aaah, today we decide to cover the EM Quarter and the EM Sphere shopping malls. It's about a 30 minute walk from the apartment to the EM Quarter and EM Sphere shopping malls - they are on opposite sides of the Sukhumvit road from each other and close to Benchasiri Park and the Phrom Phong BTS station, so we reckon this should be quite a nice wee day as not too far and pretty much all inside with good air conditioning...so we'll be back at the apartment early afternoon....right?

EM Quarter

Even though we have not been outside for very long, the air conditioning is very welcoming as we enter the EM Quarter shopping mall. This mall was opened in 2015 and along with the Emporium and the EM Sphere, they all make up the EM District, comprising of 2,500,000 square feet of mixed use retail space.

The building features a 30-ft open air garden on the fifth floor, six stories of dining terraces sitting atop a helical floor slab, an eight theater cinema complex including an IMAX theater as well as a pedestrian street and five-story waterfall, as well as two stories of underground parking. The mall is divided into three sections, named the Helix Quartier, the Waterfall Quartier and the Glass Quartier.

Now, at this point, I am going to confess something. Before coming to Thailand, I said to R that I don't know how anyone can eat a 'dinner' type meal of say rice and chicken and sauce in the morning, as that is just a bit weird for me. Dear readers, I am now eating and very much looking forward to those very same rice dishes at 10.30 am! I guess there is something in the old adage of "if you can't beat them, then join them". So, shortly after entering the mall, we somehow manage to sniff out the food court area, and before we know it, our brunch orders have been delivered. We're finding that a number of the malls have either their own 'food card' which you load some money onto, and then you can just use the card to pay at any of the food places in the food court. Some malls will even accept payment via the Rabbit card. In this case, R decided to add some more money to his card, and we'd just pay for our meals from this. Now this was not actually the brightest of ideas since we both ended up ordering different foods from different vendors, so it takes longer than if we had both just used our own Rabbit cards - lesson learnt!

Anyway I had a "Treasure Rice" and R had a BBQ pork and Chinese sausage with rice dish. Mine was much better than R's, which was a little bland he said.

After filling up with some proper sustenance, that was us ready to explore the mall. Oh, and what a mall it is. It's absolutely massive (see the directory), but more than that it was just a stunning and gorgeous place to be. I'll put a few photos and videos here but it really was outstanding, especially the views from the upper floor and surprisingly it was not very busy either.

We especially loved all the plant and tree greenery, the waterfalls and the views of Bangkok from the top level of the building. There was an external connecting walkway to a restaurant or hotel in the upper floor but it had a large circular piece of glass that neither one of us felt brave enough to walk over as you could see a long way down...

The mall is decked out with lots of Christmas decorations, making it very sparkly and magical looking. The photos and video don't do it justice, and you won't really get an idea of the scale but it's huge!

The other thing that is quite funny is that R is not good with heights, so he's been complaining a bit that the escalators are nearly as bad as the cable cars I dragged him onto in Canada - he's such a drama queen at times!

Of course, there is something to be said when you are wandering all these amazing malls but not buying anything as you don't have any space in your luggage because you are travelling light! That said, we do have a favourite new store: Muji, which is a Japanese brand that has lots of cool things.

Emporium Mall

After spending a lot longer than we expected in the EM mall, we dived out into the open heat for a short time to make our way to the EM Sphere, but accidentally went to the Emporium one first instead. This was like a big John Lewis or Debenhams, in my opinion. There were a lot of house and electrical-type items, but it aimed more for people living here rather than your average tourist. We didn't spend much time here as we thought the EM Sphere would be better, so we headed over there.

EM Sphere

The EM Sphere building was pretty cool in terms of the shops and food courts (it also has Ikea on the 3rd floor), but it was not a patch on the EM Quarter. However, that did not stop us from spending another couple of hours wandering all over it!

Thus, after a fairly long day of shopping malls, we decided there was nothing else for it but to stop off at the Japanese supermarket and bakery for our dinner and dessert that evening. My step count was almost 23,500 (which is well above my daily target) as we arrived back at the apartment at about 16.00hrs to argue over who was getting the shower first. So much for a 'quiet' day!

26 Nov 2024

Bangkok, Thailand