Salads, Carparks and Doggy doos = ACE!

OMG. 

Dudes, I discovered an awesome, new shopping centre today! It is in a suburb called Rouse Hill which is up North West Sydney, (42km North West of CBD according to Wikipedia)

I know this sounds pretty random but hear me out, eh. As vain and ditzy as it sounds, I'm a real fan of shopping centres. I love them. I like to go to as many as I can and see which are better. By better, I mean I like to know which ones have better carparks, better designs and wayfinding systems, better shops, and of course, the food court is always worth checking out too! Ha. 

Anyway, today's road trip up to Sydney began with a 6am start and a 2 hour drive up to the Hillsong Service. That was pretty cool. After that, by recommendation of a family friend, we found ourselves in Rouse Hill's shopping centre, which is apparently only just opened late last year so everything is still.. all shiny and NEW! (heck yes)

So first bang wow whammy to make this centre a stand out amongst others was the carpark. They have this special system there where you drive in and there's red lights over all of the parking spots which are occupied and green lights over the vacant ones making it a cinch to get a spot! That's not all. As you drive around, there's signs at each turn telling you how many empty spots are in that aisle so if there isn't any, you know not to bother. Do you kinda get me?

Oh and when I parked in, there is a sensor above my spot which senses my car and the light turns Red to indicate my spot is now occupied! Wow, it was really, really cool. I took a photo on my new phone thing (cause it has a camera now and all-big woop) but I can't figure out how to bluetooth it onto here, so no photo for you. I'm sorry :(

So the fantastic carpark paved the way to a really colourful and, interestingly designed shopping centre. It was one level only, and set out as 4 separate blocks in a square shape. You walk through the block and go to the other block by crossing a closed street which was also full of shops. So, if you guys have good enough imaginations with my crappy description - it is really kinda strange but cool. There were also road signs everywhere and lots of crazy colour coded areas.

The other weird thing about the place was that the actual four buildings were more like half buildings - an open mall, that is to say, that parts of the mall had a roof and others didn't. It was like, if you were shopping in there and it rained, you would need an umbrella and then you wouldn't when you walked to, I dunno say, Target which did have a roof. Yeah! 

So the whole mall was lit up by natural sunlight and it was like walking around a themepark because there was all these playgrounds, and little sideshow game things and the weirdest looking bench chair things (eg. some were benches which then morphed into tables, some were like upside down mushrooms). Everything was just odd. 

I also took a photo of this thing on the side of the "mall road thing" which was a doggy doo station, where if your dog poos, they provide all the facilities you need to clean it up but again, sorry :(

Hmm, what else?... oh yes! The food court! Well it has all the fastfood typicals eg. "Mcinedible, KFC, Subway (but not $3.95 subs - bah), as well as your typical fake asian food, kebab shops, crepes, sushi, sandwich bar, and this place which I had heard of called, Sumo Salad!!! Here I can show a photo which I scabbed off their site.

So, OK. It's obviously a salad bar. Big deal , right? Yeah, that's what I thought too but as I'm trying to eat healthy, I thought I'd get a salad because my gosh they looked tasty. I took their menu brochure thing and every single salad looked, like, damn these are the best salads I have ever seen! So what you do is, you order what you want, and they make it on the spot and it takes a few minutes but you watch them get the ingredients, cook things like chicken, beef etc. if you are having that, and present it to you in them boxes like Noodle Box does, with the Box and the metal handles! And I have never tasted anything so good. So It was amazing. A bit pricey, but, considering it was a dollar more than Oporto charges for a salad and it was about 5 times bigger and nearly impossible to finish, and a hundred kazillion times better in quality, it is worth it. 

It's also really filling! I eat a lot like crazy but I had that salad at 2 and now it is 11:30 and I havn't had anything since except a Chai Latte, and I'm still FULL!....nuts! (speaking of nuts, my salad had almonds in it)

Right, so anyway. Good place to go, this Rouse Hill, it's so new, the actual suburb (houses and residential such such) is being built now around the shopping centre and they have so far built a library too. Yew! Oh I also finally bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from Borders (yay Borders) there for 10 bucks and now the collection is complete.