Crowded Shopping malls, Cinemas, and a Store Devoted to Guns and Fishing? Welcome to Florida!

Posted by Christopher

So we are back in Ft. Lauderdale.  So far, we have had two kinds of weather here.  They are: way too hot or way too rainy to do anything outdoors. That’s why we said, “what should we do?” Let’s go to a nice air conditioned mall”.

Welcome to sunny Florida.

On the way there, we went to a massive store called the Bass Pro Shop. One Wal-mart sized half was covered in every fishing gear you could imagine, and the other with guns. There was a small boating section but nothing to talk about really.

After that, we decided to check out the rest of the massive store. We went to the guns part, mainly because we don’t get a chance to see that many guns very often. They had a massive gun wall loaded with snipers and pistols, (which was actually pretty scary) but I hoped none of them were loaded. What we mainly did was play this shooting arcade thing, where you got a rifle that fired lasers, and if the laser hit one of the targets, then it would make a little sound and the object would fall over or something. It was pretty cool and we all had a turn, except for mom.

When in Rome ... 

After that we decided that we would go to the mall. It was called Aventura Mall and they had just gotten a new Microsoft Store which Dad wanted to see. The first dilemma we came to was the parking lot. Something that we had REALLY not expected was that the parking lot was full. There was literally NO place to park. So we drove around the parking lot for a while, with a lot of other cars, but could not find one. Eventually I spotted two guys walking away from the mall on a lane parallel to us. I thought about it for a second then realized that if we could get there in time they would be leaving. So I yelled over to Dad to drive over there fast, and he began to speed up a bit turning a corner tightly. We got there before any other cars, with a bit more gas than was allowed, and we pulled in to the parking space.

I guess we weren't the only ones who thought a walk around the mall might be a good idea.

We went in to a mall that was pretty crowded, although not as busy as we would have thought based on the parking lot. So we walked around a bit, first deciding to go to the apple store. Mom’s Iphone wasn’t charging properly and Katie and I wanted to use the Ipads. So we went in to the spotless white room, and Katie, Alexander and I went straight to the Ipads. Katie and I played a game called Toca Cars, which was pretty fun, and Alexander played the original Sonic game. Mom came back to us in fifteen minutes and said that they couldn’t fix her phone so she would either need to buy a new one or live with weird charging. We of course chose the latter.


Next we went to the Microsoft Store which was really cool. At first I thought “what would Microsoft do to top having thirty Ipads with games on them? I found out. The first thing I did was I went straight to the first computer I saw, and tried out the keyboard. ( I have sort of a thing, where I need to find the nicest keyboard in the store, if they sell keyboards) About three minutes into me trying it, Alexander came over and said “come over to the cool part of the store man!” I was having fun with my keyboard testing, but I decided I’d come with him. Alexander led me to the back where there was 12 Xbox’s setup all participating in a store tournament with everybody else, and each of them had their own computer monitor, with side walls so you couldn’t see what other people were doing. It was pretty awesome. I got on one pretty quickly and began playing in the contest. I had been playing for five minutes and was almost winning, when mom came and told we it was time to go! It was really hard, but I let someone else play and I walked away, even though my turn wasn’t nearly over.

Back in the land of video games.

We had just left the Microsoft Store, when we decided that we would try and see a movie. Dad had seen good reviews for X-men Days of Future Past so we decided we’d see that. When we checked, they said that a movie was starting right that minute, so we grabbed our tickets and made a dash for the theatre. We needed to watch 15 minutes of ads anyways, but we were quick.

I thought the movie was quite good. It was certainly an action movie, but It had a really good story and was very fluent. For X-men fans, this is definitely a movie I would recommend.

24 theatres in one building.  And one good movie.

After that, we quickly grabbed Japanese food at the food fair, which was really good, then we went back home. 

I thought it was really fun to be back in a big mall.  It was really clean, which appeals to my OCD side, and it was air conditioned, so it was cool.  I liked running around to all the stores and doing all the demos.  My favourite store was the Microsoft store, by far, because of all the tech and gadgets and video games.

It was a bit intimidating at the start to have all the people there.  It was definitely the biggest, most modern building we have been in for a long time.  I guess some stores don’t even bother to have branches in other countries where people can’t afford their products.  It is a bit weird getting back to all this modern stuff, but it is still pretty fun.  I sure feel lucky to be able to do it.

Mmmm, Japanese food for dinner.