It was time for lunch, an early one since I still needed to see some more places in Cebu City before I leave for a different island. I first needed to buy my ferry ticket to the next island. Fortunately, SM City in Cebu has a very convenient travel center where visitors can purchase ferry tickets. I took a cab to SM City and headed straight for the travel center.
Strangely enough, the travel center is not in a very convenient location in the mall, in fact, I had to go around the carpark just to be able to get to it. There didn’t seem to be any way to go to the travel center from the mall itself. You’d think that the mall would make it easier for visitors to get to the travel center itself from the mall but no.
The travel center itself was very simple, there were a few people at the counter waiting to assist travellers. They know the schedules quite well and seem to have good connections with the ferry services. Quite convenient for travellers who do not know anything about this place, like me. I noticed that there is a place for visitors to store their luggage. The security guard does a token check of the bags and lets people through. Within a short while, I got my tickets so I was ready for lunch and then more exploration of Cebu City.
Heading back to the mall, I was doing a little exploring. SM City Cebu is the world’s 11th largest shopping mall. Actually, SM malls have a tendency to grow, much like how the original SM City in Quezon City grew to be the second largest in the world. Anyway, the new extension of the mall seems to be a classier version of the SM malls. It does tend to be not very SM-like since most of their malls try to pack in as much as they can. However, moving through the huge mall you can see where the new changes to the old. I hope they find the resources to harmonize the look of the mall especially the interiors.
The SM City Cebu has all the shops you would expect in an SM mall. SM already has a fixed set of anchor tenants which are primarily owned by the SM group so their malls will definitely be filled with tenants. The rest are filled by the other smaller companies. Outside, the Mall reveals much of it’s SM heritage with the boxy design so typical of SM malls. I always didn’t like how unimaginative they are when they design their malls. I guess they design more for practicality and not aesthetics. Incidentally, SM City Cebu has a lot more adjacent lots for expansion, I would not be surprised to see this mall climb up the ranks of the largest malls in the world.
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your photo of the satellite image is old…it does not show the new building of THE NORTHWING
Thanks for noticing Jun, yes the satellite image is old. As you may know the maps on my posts just make use of Google Maps which are not really updated as often as you might expect. It really depends how often they take satellite photos the area and how often Google decides to update their database. For something free such as Google Maps, there isn’t any pressure for them to get the latest and the greatest maps as soon as possible. If you look up the SM Mall of Asia in Google Maps, you would see that it is not even built! Thanks for visiting!