An expedition to the Far East.

A change is as good as a holiday.

I am a bit ashamed to confess I live a fairly huge portion of my life in a 12 km radius.  In fact, 80 % of my beaten track is even smaller, maybe 5 km.

Our local shops 1km from home are my favourite place to purchase, giving me coffee, bread, dry cleaning, meat, postage and emergency fruit, veg and groceries.  On my ideal day, this is as far as I will travel.

Several times a week I go a tiny bit further to what seems to be the most expensive Coles in the known universe.

My bag.  I'm proud of it. 

But when I really need birthday presents, saxophone reeds and cheap, crap clothing, I go to our local Mall.  Most people just call it 'The Mall".  Most people (myself included) also dislike going there, perhaps because once you get there it's possible to spend endless hours wandering up and down, trapped by the choices available.

So, for something a little bit different, for an outing with our good friend S and her two delightful littlies (both under 4), Issy and I made the journey to the eastern suburbs and went to Westfield Bondi Junction.

Our rough mission was originally to purchase a few pairs of frilly white ankle socks for Issy and several of her dance classmates to wear as part of their costume during their concert performance on Saturday.  But by the time we made it over all those bridges and through all the tunnels, two other Mums had already found them elsewhere.  I'm hopeless, yes?

 Anyways, we found a park and ventured into the centre without a particular goal in mind, other than coffee.

Here's what I noticed:

There were a lot of prams.  Mostly Bugaboo.  Some Stokke.  I did not see a McLaren.

The place wasn't crawling with famous millionaire celebrities.  Just people shopping.  A tiny bit disappointing.

The posh shops on the 3rd floor had virtually no-one in them, but the clothes, shoes and accessories were amazing.  We only looked in the windows, we didn't dare go inside with three kids.  There was a Jimmy Choo shop.  Issy and her little friend J loved the sparkly ones.  You are never too young to love shoes.

There was a Zara. Which I doubt our local Mall will ever have.  I'd never been to Zara. I've only been told about it by fashion savvy, UK familiar friends.  S, a fashion savvy, UK familiar kind of girl, convinced me I needed a pair of yellow jeans.  Time will tell if I do, or if I just got carried away.

We did enter the shops on the 4th floor in the 'kids precinct'.  Unfortunately the products within became contentious because I refused to buy all of them for my daughter who became quite fractious as a result.

They do sushi differently in the eastern suburbs.  Issy doesn't like eastern suburbs sushi.

Don't the frilly socks just complete the ensemble perfectly?

While we enjoyed our time out East, and it was fun to spend the day with S and her two bubsies,  I will stick to the Mall in the future.  When it all comes down to it, a shopping centre is a shopping centre no matter how fancy and my local 1km away shops will always be my favourites.