Reviews Corner

SM Marikina is one of the places our family frequents. Aside from its being accessible from where we live, it’s the newest in the block. I have heard quite a number of opinions from commuters. Low accessibility for them. But it should also be noted that the owners have built infrastructures to address this issue. Still, the long walk from where people will alight off the public transpo to the mall itself can be quite a distance.

I still hear people say that it is better to go to Sta. Lucia, Robinson’s Metro East and for people who live in Marikina to just hang around the Riverbanks Mall instead. It really has its downside for commuters around the vicinity. Which personally, may just be one of the reasons why I favor this place. I have yet to see for myself it being crowded as most malls are, especially during paydays.

We love going to SM Marikina although I still could never quite understand how on earth that a third world country as the Philippines could actually afford to have so many malls, particularly in Manila. SM Marikina is just one of them. But allow me to enumerate a few things that have attracted me to this mall.

It has probably the most decent and non-restricting parking space that I have ever seen in a mall parking space, hands down. I don’t know if it is just me, but I always get this funny feeling whenever I park anywhere from the Edsa Shangri-la Mall to Glorietta, even that of Rockwell’s Powerplant Mall. It’s almost always hard to breathe in other malls that if you wouldn’t look like an idiot, you’d race to the entrance as fast as your feet could carry you. Not to mention those pipes hanging that you could almost hear the air flow or what have you in there. It feels so dangerous in malls like that whose owners have obviously tried to maximize the mall space and made sure that the vertical clearance is its narrowest possible. I love that Henry Sy considered the motorists who would frequent his brand new mall baby. Although, I still wouldn’t fail to hear my mother wonder aloud why mall owners charge parking fees to customers here in the Philippines. She would repeatedly note that this is not so in the States. For parking fees, they charge PhP 25 for the covered area and PhP15 for the open parking place.

Although SM Marikina isn’t that huge inside, the layout of the place is really good. Look at all those breathing space in its Cyberzone area. This is where we would usually go to – the techie couple that the hubby and I are.