A Day at The Mall

Even though I got here last Saturday, this feels like the first weekend I'm here. Some of the other guys from work has either flown back home, gone to another city in the US, or arranged to meet up with friends. That left just half of us here at the hotel, with nothing to do basically.

The company will pay for a gym membership, and since we'll be here for a while, we can get a membership card to the local YMCA gym. Given that the "gym" here on the hotel is so tiny, it is a great offer, and I managed to I a card yesterday. I had arranged to go to the gym with one of the Calgary guys, but his bed won the battle of getting up, so he never made it. Anyway, the gym is really nice and fairly large, with a good number of machines, an indoor running track, a large pool, sauna, steam room and probably a lot more. Unfortunately my card wasn't activated, but I got a one-day trail membership and was allowed inside. Having come that far, I was told I should have brought my own lock if I wanted to use the locker room. Of cause I didn't have one, but luckily I could leave my stuff behind the reception counter. After a nice workout, I chose to go back to the hotel and shower, as I wouldn't have a chance to lock my stuff away while showering. The steam room has to wait until Monday.

Besides going to the gym, we've decided to go to a mall a bit north from downtown Dallas. One of the HR girls from work suggested that we go the the North Park Center, and said that it was a place one could easily spend the whole day. I must admit that we were skeptical. We tried to gather as many people as we could, but it ended up just being three of us, the last one being my new boss. Armed with directions we went to the nearest DART light rail station, but managed to miss the first train while we were getting our tickets. Little did we know that it took 20 min before the next train arrived, so we waited patiently at the station.

With about 25-30 min by train and a few minutes on a shuttle bus, we got to the mall. It surely is huge and just finding something for lunch took us a while. There's apparently a hockey type gathering there this weekend, with people selling trading cards, pucks and loads of other hockey stuff. There were a few cups on display, and you could get a picture opportunity with the Stanley Cup, if you were prepared to wait in line for a while. I still don't really know what the Stanley Cup is a trophy for, but it was very popular so I guess I'll look it up at some point. I did get a picture of it, along with a few more from the mall, which I'll upload in a bit.

After having spent an hour and a half walking around the mall (I think I went round the place twice...) we were thoroughly bored. There were loads of clothing shops and shoe stores, but that was about it. There were a few other types of stores like an Apple store and a Dell store (I didn't know Dell has that) but there were no bookstores or music stores or something like that. Since neither of us were looking for clothing, there wasn't really anything for us there, so after having been there about two and a half hours, we decided to go back. Somehow we managed to just miss the shuttle bus back the the light rail station, so once again we waited 20 min.

I was a kind of hoping that there would be a place to buy some movies, so that I could have something else to watch besides HBO, so I decided to get off at station called Mockingbird, where we went for happy hour on Thursday. I was pretty sure I'd seen some shops there, and hoped to find what I was looking for. But no, it was just about five or six shops which provided the exact same things as the shops in the mall had. There were just a lot fewer shops there, so after having spent about 10 min walking around the place, I headed back to the hotel.

When I got the the station near the hotel, there was still a bit of daylight left, so I had a quick walk round the area, in a direction I hadn't been in yet. Amazingly I came across grass, which is something that is really hard to find here in Dallas :) It's either concrete or mud/bare earth all around. The piece of grass I found happened to be the place where Kennedy was shot, so that was two surprises in one go - not bad for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Now I just need something to do for the rest of the day. Uploading a few pictures won't take long, so I guess I could try and find out what that Stanley Cup is all about :)

Btw: I promised a picture from the 22nd storey. It's also going to be in the latest back of uploaded picture in my Picasa web album