Mall Walkabout

On Saturday I spent the afternoon walking around Vaughan Mills mall because I wanted to buy a new pair of tall boots.  I purchased the boots, and then on Sunday afternoon I spent the afternoon walking around Yorkdale mall because it was -10 C and therefore too cold to go walking anywhere outdoors.  I joined the ranks of the mall-walkers, the likes of which JPT is always cursing.  Frankly, I believe that 90% or more of the mall population at Yorkdale throughout the entire year is there just for the walking.  It's mostly parents with little kids who need to get them out of the house and yet protect them from cold/heat/snow/rain/UV radiation.

Vaughan Mills mall was surprisingly quiet on Saturday.  It's usually packed every weekend.  I guess people have finally run out of shopping steam after early Christmas shopping, regular Christmas shopping, last-minute-Christmas shopping, and the Boxing Day/Week/Month sales.  Either that or they ran out of money.

The mall was running a Circus Day program.  At the food court, after partaking of a plate of limp and tasteless Teriyaki noodles, Ken and I were treated to a performance by a young lady in a spangled body-suit who climbed up a pair of bright blue silk sheets and then proceeded to twirl around upside down and do the splits 40 feet up in the air.  There was a guy on extra-tall stilts wandering the halls, alternately juggling and playing a red ukelele.  (It would have been pretty darn impressive if he could do both at the same time!)  His extra-long stilting pants had white sweat-salt stains around the buttocks.  Surely those things can fit into a standard washing machine.  We also saw a young fellow doing balloon scuptures.  He made a surprisingly convincing balloon Elmo.

My goal was to find a pair of knee-high black snowboots.  Because I get around on foot most of the time, I keep several pairs of boots to deal with the different levels of winter.  There are my insulated hiking boots, which do the trick in late fall and early spring when there's a sprinkling of snow on the ground.  When slush starts to accumulate on the road I move up to the calf-height, rubber-bottomed boots:

The highest boot level is occupied by boots to be worn during or after a blizzard, when pushing through knee-high snowbanks will probably be required.  The last pair I had was cheap, and they got a bad case of stinky-foot-stink.  Unacceptable!  I replaced them with these:

According to the propaganda they allow one's feet to "breathe", thus preventing stinky-boot problems.  They weren't on sale, which is slightly irritating, because EVERYTHING else in the mall was marked down at 70% off, but hey, you have to pay for quality.

All I have to say about Yorkdale, today's mallwalk destination, is: it was a mess.  The 70% sales were on there too, and every store was filled with bargain-hunters, picking over piles of stuff and leaving total chaos in their wake.  Shoe stores were a jumble.  Clothing stores were worse.  They would have had to double their staff to keep up with the destruction.  And for some reason Sears was a disgusting mess even though absolutely no one was actually shopping in there.  It was as if a stampeding army had been through earlier, tossing sweaters like salad, dropping marked-down scarves and gloves on the floor, and no one had made the slightest effort to tidy up.

I didn't buy anything at Yorkdale except a bottle of water and a lip balm from the Body Shop because their coconut lip balm is simply the best.  For tidiness, entertainment, and overall satisfaction, Vaughan Mills wins the Better Mall prize this weekend.