I won't question the allegation that SM City Pampanga is the longest shopping mall in the Philippines. I've walked among the many wings of the complex and I can sincerely say that it dwarfs many of the shopping malls I've been in – all around the globe. In fact, I spent two hours there just a couple of days ago.

Our Purpose for Being There

When you live on a strict monthly budget, you don't just get up and go every time you feel like it. It's not cost effective. We always wait until we have several things to do – things that will take us the better part of a day to accomplish.

Our car needed service. Since it only had 7,600 kilometers on the odometer, it really only needed the oil and filters changed. When we dropped it off at the dealer's service department in San Fernando, Pampanga, the service representative was flabbergasted by how little mileage (or is that "kilometerage"?) our 2006 Toyota Corolla Altis had on it. Of course, I then had to go through the spiel of how I don't have a job to go to every day, etc.

We also needed plumbing and electrical parts for things in our house that have failed on us in the past few months. We could probably find all of these things in Olongapo, but since we knew the car dealer had a shuttle service to and from the SM mall, we figured we'd combine our efforts on this trip to Pampanga which, by the way, only takes an hour (one-way) since the completion of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway.

We picked up toilet seats, toilet tank innards, light fixture electrical ballasts and other things I can't quite remember offhand. Regardless, it was money spent wisely. The eating part of the trip wasn't money spent wisely, however, but I was fat, dumb and happy by the time the shuttle came to pick us up.

The Size of the Mall

SM City Pampanga may be the longest mall in the country, but it definitely isn't the biggest. That particular attribute goes to the SM City North EDSA shopping mall, which is the largest in the country and the third largest in the world. It used to be the SM Mall of Asia, but that mall is now in second place.

I'm not going to spend any time trying to find the exact size of the SM City Pampanga mall, but I will tell you this: There is no way any human being can walk every corridor of the mall within an hour, even if that person doesn't stop to look at anything or gaze to the sides. I'm talking about walking at a steady gate, with the eyes straight ahead. I'm not kidding, it's that long and that's why we made sure we scheduled the shuttle runs at two hours apart.

Since my wife is a shopaholic, I can also tell you that tearing her away from some of the shops, in order for us to get what we needed while we still had time, was almost as hard as pulling teeth. Somehow, we managed to exit the building without running out of money before doing so.

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