Open spaces for family fun

My daughter Isobel has a favorite place in TriNoma Mall: she likes sliding down the pole at the playground. She eagerly climbs up the spider-web ladder in order to reach over to the platform, then hangs on to the pole like a fire-fighter before swiveling down. After a few anxious moments the first time — being pushed and prodded by other kids who were waiting in line, measuring the distance to the ground — she took a leap of faith, hopped on, and swung her way down. She then repeated this exercise about 30 times. I try to tell myself this youthful enthusiasm won’t lead to a future career involving poles.

It doesn’t take a huge budget to entertain a kid in Ayala Malls. Sometimes, it just takes finding the right activity for your child. Fortunately, Ayala Malls has long specialized in providing every possible environment to meet every kid’s — and every family’s — entertainment needs.

Other activities we like doing together at TriNoma and Glorietta: poking around in National Bookstore, me in search of the latest fiction, my wife looking for juicy biographies or fashion books, and Isobel ensconced in a pile of Eloise, Berenstain Bears and Curious George books. You can happily lose yourself for hours in a bookstore, and it’s nice to do this together as a family. The bookstore is one of the few places I never regret spending a lot on our purchases.

For movies (on those occasions when I can be coaxed to watch the latest CGI cartoon) we like Market! Market!’s accessibility, and really love Greenbelt’s state-of-the-art cinemas.

Market! Market! also features one of the largest public playgrounds in the area, a place that’s always teeming with kids and family activity. And sometimes Isobel and I like to spend a few hours in TimeZone — the clatter of video games and karaoke rooms and the screeching of virtual F1 racecars is our mini Vegas, without the danger of losing the family nest egg on games of chance. Hey, we’re just in it for the prize tickets which Isobel and I usually cash in at the end of the day on wind-up cars, Gummi bears and strawberry-scented school erasers. See? Finding fun in the mall is a breeze.

To be honest, I find myself heading to malls more to fulfill specific tasks than to seek a day of entertainment. But I’m definitely in the minority on this. My wife Therese likes hooking Isobel up with new outfits from Levi’s, OshKosh B’Gosh or David and Goliath (all found at Ayala Malls); I’m okay with ticking off my errands and meeting up later at some designated merienda point: Figaro at Bonifacio High Street, or Five Cows ice cream restaurant at TriNoma.

And few are the times when we can pass through a mall without treating Isobel to a couple of rides — whether it’s the Merry Go Round in TriNoma or the motorized animal rides at Market! Market! I tell myself she’s picking up valuable future driving skills for the Wacky Racers speedway that is Manila’s streets.

There is one little habit we hope to curb, which is our daughter’s insistence on adding one more toy to her ever-growing cache each time we have an outing. We’ve decided that, just because our daughter picks up a toy in a mall or toy store, it doesn’t mean we have to buy it. That’s what lolas are for, after all.

Better still, we’ve managed to find more creative and educational toys at places like Hobbes and Maxiworks. Pricier, it’s true, but how better to visually display the solar system than with glow-in-the-dark constellation kits? Or to teach kids about dinosaurs through D.I.Y. models? And she loves the Kids Labs science kits, which teach everything from optical illusions to basic biology experiments.

They say malls are the Philippines’ indoor infrastructure, replacing the need for public parks by offering a safe, climate-controlled environment where families can bond and fulfill their shopping needs. This may be true, and Ayala Malls are certainly at the forefront of this social trend. But Ayala Malls also has one of the biggest public park areas at Bonifacio High Street — a 400-meter stretch of green lawnscape (and 40 meters wide) where people are encouraged to walk a dog, throw a Frisbee, or just flop down on the grass and take in the human parade. When we first visited this public area at its opening, I was skeptical about whether people would flock to this outdoor spot — after all, Manilans are raised in air-conditioned malls; being outside seems as welcome to them as sunlight is to vampires. But it appears this kind of public area is actually what people have been silently craving all these years: most nights, the area is full of people hanging out, sitting and eating at the area’s many concrete rest spots, or flocking in out of the brightly-lit new boutiques (The Gap, anyone?). At lunchtime or in the morning, you’ll see local residents letting their dogs off the leash, allowing their pets much-needed exercise on the spacious lawns. We also happened to do a photo shoot with Isobel and other children at High Street’s grassy spread one day, and the kids couldn’t get enough of it: they ran, danced, played and rolled in the grass — something you very rarely see in Metro Manila.

This, incidentally, is how public parks should be, and are, in many urban cities throughout the world.

Who knows? This kind of brave thinking on the part of Ayala Malls might just catch on with other developers.