A BIG Mall

Yesterday we visited one of the bigger malls that's a little further from our house, called Panora.  (They have a great website which is in Turkish, but you could still look around and see the floor plan and store listings.)  This mall really IS big!  Seven levels and hundreds of stores. Mind-boggling!  Now before I even talk about the mall, I have to tell about a cultural lesson I had.  Justin suggested we go to check out this mall on Saturday, and I said I didn't want to on a weekend because it would be so crowded.  I mean, in this weather, what else does everybody have to do besides go to the mall?!  But Justin persuaded me that it'll be fun even if it's crowded, so we loaded into a taxi and got there just after it opened at 10am.  We walked in and it was like a ghost town.  Completely empty.  I was baffled!  However, what I have learned is that Turkish culture runs on a much later schedule than I'm used to in the U.S.  They go to bed much later than we do, and they get up much later too.  So at 10am, most families are still sleeping!  Pretty much anyplace we go before noon, there is a very small crowd.  Numbers begin to pick up after lunch, and by evening everyplace is packed.  That's convenient for us to get our errands run before the crowds come out, since Elias still gets up at 7am - he doesn't seem worried about fitting in with Turkish culture!  So I learned my lesson about that, and I won't argue with Justin wanting to go anywhere in the morning, even on a Saturday!

So we walked in and the first thing we noticed, besides the vast size of the place, is the glass elevator!

Our mall has some great escalators, but no elevator.  So that's fun!  There were a LOT of recognizable stores in this mall - you can see on the top level in this picture the Nike store on the left side of the elevator and the Adidas store on the right.

This was taken from the top floor, which is called Level 2.  Below you can see Level 1 and Level 0 (Ground Floor).  Then the underground levels are called -1, -2, and -3!

One thing that was neat about the way this mall was set up is that some of the stores were organized by category.  They had a section marked "Sports Street" where all the athletic stores were in one place.  They also had a "Kids Street," so it was easy to find the kids clothes and toys!  There were two huge toy stores that were not in that section, though, but we found them too!

Most of the toys in all these stores were way overpriced, but we did find a Winnie-the-Pooh pinwheel for only $1 - Elias carried that all around the rest of the mall!

Our FAVORITE thing about this mall, though, is there was a HUGE saltwater fish tank that was beautiful and fun to look at!  We stood there for a long time just admiring the fish!

So this was a really fun activity for us to do - we'll go back again!

Then at the end of our visit, we discovered in the bottom level a store called Kipa (again, website in Turkish), which I had heard from a friend was really awesome.  And wow, it was!!!!  It was a huge supermarket that had a huge selection, but what we were most excited about was the low prices!  WAY cheaper than we've seen anywhere else.  A friend told us there's another one even closer to our house, so we'll probably go there often!

For more photos of Panora than I've put here, check out the photo albums on their website!

*Note: The legend I hear is that there are still bigger malls than this one, so I'll report when we explore them!