In case you missed it from my previous blog posts, I spent a day of my trip in Hà Nội, Việt Nam exploring the Vincom Mega Mall Royal City, an underground shopping and entertainment complex.
I’ve been having a tough time dealing with the high heat and intense humidity in Hanoi, which is a starkly different than what I’m used to back home in Las Vegas. The heat itself is mostly fine, but when coupled with the humidity, I feel like my body isn’t able to properly cool itself down and it ultimately translates into physical exhaustion. Because of this, I’ve been trying to seek out indoor tourist activities, and the Mega Mall seemed like a great place to see a lot of stuff all at once in a single area.
Over the past few days, I’ve shared my thoughts about and photographs from the Baby Elephant Animal Park, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art, and HLC Starry Sky Art Museum, all found in units inside the Mega Mall. Obviously, the Mega Mall has much more than that, but nothing else seemed to warrant its own dedicated blog post. I still wanted to share what I saw elsewhere in the mall though, so I figured a reasonable way to do that would be to do a round-up post of all my miscellaneous Mega Mall photographs.
I actually enjoyed my time walking around the Mega Mall quite a bit. The sheer number of different things inside the mall, in addition to the very wide breadth of what was available to look at, was actually quite surprising. I was aware that Vietnam is not quite at the level of economic development as the United States, but you would never know that from looking at the Mega Mall. The inside was very nice and technologically advanced, and it was air conditioned (which is apparently not always a common thing in Vietnamese buildings).
Another thing I found unexpected was the number of flags. In the United States, you’ll see some places have a large United States flag or two by the entrance or hanging on the wall. In the Mega Mall, there were literally a total of thousands of miniature flags—both the national flag of Vietnam and the flag of the Communist Party of Vietnam—hanging in pretty much every other store. I thought the United States was pretty patriotic, but I guess Vietnam has got us beaten there.
Another thing I liked about the Mega Mall at Royal City was the fact that it basically created a little campus with the high-rise apartment buildings. With the Mega Mall having an absolutely gargantuan WinMart, being a resident of Royal City seemed like it would be pretty convenient. The courtyard area seemed to also double as an event venue, considering that I saw some light construction going on that appeared to be associated with an upcoming convention of some sort.
Here are some photographs I captured around Royal City, starting with the apartment buildings outdoors, then of some visually interesting spots inside the complex:
