According to the plaque at its main entrance, Dar es Salaam’s Mlimani City Mall turned 3 years old last Saturday (Nov.14). Happy Belated Birthday, Mlimani City – this one is for you!

For those of you who have never heard of Mlimani City, allow me to tell you simply that it is the mall in Dar es Salaam. Although Dar es Salaam has many other shopping centers, none other can truly be elevated to the status of a mall. Housed all on one floor, Mlimani City Mall is smaller than many other malls found in neighboring countries, such as The Village Market in Kenya or Garden City in Uganda, but still, this mall packs a punch!

Allow me to give you an idea of what can be found at Mlimani City. First, I’ll start with banks. Although it’s not the most noticeable thing about Mlimani City, the mall has not one, not two, but 6 banks on its premises: CRDB, Exim Bank, KCB, NBC, NMB, and Twiga Bancorp. If you bank in Tanzania, then there is a great likelihood that your bank (or at least one of your banks) has a branch at Mlimani City.

Beyond banks (which I listed first probably because a number of them straddle the main entrance to the mall), Mlimani City is built around three South African retail chain megastores – Shoprite, Game, and Mr Price. (The Shoprite at Mlimani City is laid out almost exactly like the one at Lugogo Shopping Mall in Kampala and had me tripping constantly about what city I was in when I first moved to Dar).

As can be expected, Mlimani City also has smaller stores. Among these are many electronics stores (BMTL,  Fone Shack, Hitachi, Phone One Limited, and Samsung), eateries (Chicken Hut Restaurant, Coffee Bar, Delightful Bakes Cafe & Restaurant, Fairy Delights Ltd., The Juice Parlour, Marrybrown, Samaki-Samaki, and Silver Spoon Fast Food), and telecom company agents (Tigo, Vodacom, and Zain).

Oh, and of course, let’s not forget clothing stores. Mlimani City has its share of these too. Among them are 4u2, AK’s, Giordano, Holliewood Fashions, Identity, Modern Day Boutique, Mummy’s, Tausi Fashions, and Truworths – all which sell apparel not only for ladies and gents but also for infants.

One of my favorite reasons to visit Mlimani City Mall is to buy cosmetics and toiletries. For this, I always head first to Shear Illusions. If I don’t find what I am looking for there, then I  make sure to visit J.D. Pharmacy and Lolita Parfyumerie too, both of which also stock a broad range of similar products.

If home and interiors are what you’re interested in, then Mlimani City has something for you too. For this, check out stores such as Frame World, Gerry Super Furniture, Home Shopping Centre, Interior Solutions, and Mr Price.

And yet, Mlimani City offers even more than I’ve mentioned so far. While you are visiting this mall, you can also process and print your photos at Photo Point, buy shoes at Footprint, or buy jewelry at Yakub Jewellers. If travel is what’s on your mind, then you can buy luggage at Samsonite, change money at Coast Bureau de Change One, or book a trip with Alesy Travel & Tours Ltd.

Photo Credit: Yalaminy

For book lovers like me, a stop at Scholastic book store is a must! If your clothes need laundering, then Alpha Dry Cleaners will be able to handle that for you. If you are in the mood to buy African artifacts, then search no further than African Art. And if at the end of it all something you purchased at the mall is very valuable to you, then maybe you might want to stop over at Real Insurance and check up on insurance policies.

At the end of the day, when you’re finally done with all the errands that brought you to Mlimani City Mall, take the opportunity to relax and unwind with a movie at Century Cinemax, Tanzania’s biggest cinema complex.

What can I say? I told you Mlimani City packs a real punch. So once more, from me to you, Mlimani City, Happy Belated 3^rd Birthday!

Until the next time,
Biche

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That same evening, I returned home to an excited housemate who had spent the afternoon in the new store buying household goods for an apartment that she would soon be moving to. As soon as I got home, she couldn’t wait to show me what she had purchased and within minutes, I found myself seated on her bed as she pulled her new belongings out of bags that she had stuffed under her bed for safe keeping.

Out of these bags, she pulled gorgeous cushions made out of rich fabrics in the most delicious colors. She showed me hip, playful wine glasses that were just perfect for the young 20-something professional woman that she was. She pulled out candles, dried flowers, and all manner of beautiful knickknacks that would turn her new apartment into a beautiful and tasteful home. With the added incentive of actually seeing what Mr Price had to offer, I made yet another mental note to visit the store ASAP!

A short while later, while running errands in Westlands, I decided to make a small detour and finally check out the new Mr Price Home store. My, oh my! Was I in for a treat! In this large store, I was first greeted by beautiful bedding, complete with perfectly-made beds to let you see just how great this bedding would look in your own home. (This is when I first spotted the mattress pads that I wrote about in this post.) While perusing the store that day, I saw gorgeous rugs and glasses of all variety. I saw beautiful ready-made curtains, dried flowers, toilet mats, towels, and laundry baskets.  Basically, I saw everything that you could possible ever think of needing in your home. (Well, that’s not quite true. I didn’t see any hard furniture such as beds or couches or tables but still the range of household items that I saw at Mr Price Home was pretty exhaustive.) As I walked around taking everything in, I nostalgically began to think back to when I first started living on my own in Nairobi and how much I’d have loved for such a store to be open at the time.

When I began to live on my own in Nairobi (back in 2003), I had an apartment that I was totally in love with. I was in my mid-twenties, well set up both professionally and financially, and I simply couldn’t wait to furnish my home in  the way I’d always dreamed. Sadly, reality set in: finding household furnishing in Nairobi that was  functional, chic, and affordable proved more difficult than I’d expected. Walking through Mr Price Home that first day, I began to imagine how much easier, and more fun it would have been to furnish my home with all the stylish functional items that I could see at Mr Price.

Anyhow…bygones. Fast forward to today, two years later. Since that first visit to Mr Price Home, I have since become more familiar with the Mr Price brand and the various Mr Price stores in East Africa. During a visit to Nairobi last year, I visited the Mr Price clothing store located at The Junction Shopping Complex; in Dar es Salaam, I am a frequent visitor of the Mr Price/Mr Price Home combination store in Mlimani City. (I also hear that there’s a new Mr Price Store at The Oasis Complex in Kampala, which opened earlier this year.)

Mr Price in Kampala - Photo Credit: Nicholas Kajoba/UgandaOnline.net

But now, I’d like to ask you: As an East African (or East African resident), how has the advent of Mr Price stores to the region changed your life? Have you ever visited any of these stores? Have you ever purchased anything there? Would you recommend that others shop at Mr Price stores? How do you find the products that Mr Price stores sell? What do you think of these products in terms of price, quality, beauty, utility and/or value?

I look forward to hearing what you have to say. In the meanwhile,  in an effort to attempt to provide you with an answer to the question I posed in this post’s title, here is a link to  the official Mr Price website (I hate to break it to you, but you’ll have to find the answer to the question for yourself. ) Also, if you are interested in finding out more about the presence of Mr Price stores in East Africa, then check out this article from allAfrica.com – it shed a lot of light on the issue for me.

Otherwise, that’s all from me today.

Until the next time,
Biche

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For me, let me just come right out and say it: I love being able to shop all day and all night as the need arises. Being a very nocturnal person, you can often find me at Nakumatt Ngong Road doing seemingly weird things at seemingly weird hours. Yes, I think there is no better time to check out shoes or shop for laptop bags than when you are done with absolutely everything else you need to do for the day but aren’t feeling sleepy yet (understand: around midnight).  I definitely feel that this round-the-clock availability has helped me be a lot more productive than I would be if all I could do late at night was hang out or flip through television channels (I don’t really like to watch TV).

When Nakumatt Ngong Road and Ukay first extended their hours, of course this was big news so I took advantage of these longer hours as often as possible, just because I could. After a while though, it became normal and I really didn’t think about it that much anymore. Sometime mid this year, when I stopped by Fone Xpress at Nakumatt Ngong Road to help a friend, who was travelling out of the country, buy a phone after midnight, a couple of hours before he had to fly out of town, it hit me all over again: Nakumatt having several 24-hour stores around the country (which encourages other stores housed in the same shopping complexes to also be open round-the-clock) was bound to make a real difference in our lives as East Africans (I hear the Nakumatt in Kigali is also 24-hour and that some of the branches to be open in Tanzania and Uganda will also offer this service)! We may take it for granted, but I don’t think our societies can remain same old, same old.

The question is: a year down the line, how has your life been affected by the 24-hour supermarket phenomenon? Has it changed at all? If so, has the change been positive or negative? Did Nakumatt do a good thing by giving us the possibility of being able to shop 24 hours a day?

When I was younger, while studying at a North American University, I remember coming home for the summer and, with my friends, commenting about a business that we found closed in the middle of the day. Our first reaction was to bash the business and the African work ethic in general, but further reflection on the situation led to me to conclude that not having businesses open all the time was a price I was willing to pay, as a customer, to live in a world that moved at a more leisurely pace (a pace that I think allows for people’s emotional and spiritual wellbeing) as well as one that has so many opportunities for warm, rich social interactions. As much as I love that I can keep doing, doing, and doing until late into the night nowadays, I wonder if, in the long run, this won’t eat away at our society’s social fabric because now, instead of sitting together and sharing moments in our common human experience, we might be working late to provide these late-night services or feel obliged to take advantage of them since, after all, aren’t we slowly (but surely) becoming a society obsessed with maximizing productivity?

Trust me, I am not in any way saying that such thoughts detract from the pleasure I experience being able to shop whenever I want to, but I just couldn’t help consider possible future consequences of this seeming Godsend.

Whatever the case, I’d really like to hear what you have to say. How has the phenomenon of 24-hour supermarkets affected your life? Do you think this phenomenon is a move in the right direction for our society? Or rather, do you think it’s a move in the wrong direction?

I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

Biche

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When I first saw Yaya Centre‘s new slogan a couple of years ago, I thought: How pompous! No, there really is reason to go elsewhere. That was back when the revamping of the Yaya Centre had just begun, and Yaya’s greatest claim to fame, at the time, was that it had been one of Nairobi‘s first shopping malls. A couple of years later, I see where Yaya Centre was coming from with its slogan – Y go anywhere else?.  I guess the management at Yaya Centre already knew what Yaya was about to become though it took us, its customers, a little longer to find out.

It’s easy not to notice how much has changed at Yaya if you go there regularly and never take the time to take it all in. I recently had to stop and think about it all after a visit I made to Yaya in search of a Christian book that I desperately wanted to read. As usual, I was in a bit of a rush and had squeezed this errand between a number of other items on my to-do list. I drove to Yaya, found parking easily enough, then quickly rushed to the Christian bookstore, on the ground floor, that I had been to many times before. I did all this absentmindedly, focusing entirely on the task at hand while paying very little attention to my surroundings. That is…until I noticed…the Christian Bookstore I was rushing too had been replaced by a Nairobi Java House!

Wow! I was really surprised. Granted, I hadn’t been to Yaya in a while, but when had all this change taken place? I took a little more time to walk around Yaya, paying close attention to all that had changed (did I say I was in a rush? ). Although some of the changes at Yaya seemed to me to be simply superficial changes – stores that already existed at Yaya had just taken up new locations in the shopping mall – a lot truly had changed at the shopping complex. Even the oldie-but-goodie stores had become newer and improved versions of their former selves. Yaya Centre was truly become bigger and better!

Are you a regular visitor of Yaya Centre? If so, what keeps taking you back to Yaya? For me, it’s a long list of things that just keeps getting longer every time I visit the shopping mall. To give you an idea of the range of things that one can do at Yaya, let me share with you, floor by floor, what keeps taking me back to Yaya Centre.

On the ground floor, I buy airtime; I go to the hardware store; I check out new phones; I deal with my Kenya Airways reservations. I bank; I buy medication and toiletries; I buy really good baguettes; I shop at the supermarket; and occasionally, I buy gourmet meat cuts when I am entertaining. When I am pressed for time, I meet friends at one of the coffee house on the ground floor. I buy all my fresh produce almost exclusively at Yaya.

On Yaya’s first floor, I gaze longingly at beautiful gold jewelry, which I buy on very rare occasions. I take my clothes for dry cleaning; I take passport photos and make photocopies; I take care of my stationary needs (and buy emergency gifts). I buy clothing of all kind – wardrobe staples and dress-up items. Sometimes, I look around just for the pleasure of the eye without really buying much.  On this floor, I take care of some makeup and cosmetic needs not only for me, but for my Mom who often sends me to buy a particular brand of facial products which she has a hard time finding anywhere else in East Africa.

Yaya’s second floor, for me, is a lot less about running errands and a lot more about socializing and relaxing. I often catch a meal at one of Yaya’s many second floor eateries. When I need to get online but don’t intend to do so for too long, I surf the net on Yaya’s second floor. When looking for a book to read, I make sure to stop by one of my favorite bookstores, which is also located on this floor. When in need of fitness related items, that too I take care of here.

These are some of the things that keep taking me back to Yaya again and again. I haven’t mentioned any floor above the second floor because I rarely have business there (those floors mostly house offices) though I have on occasion visited doctors’ offices and the Yaya Centre management office for the purpose described in this post, on those upper floors.

What keeps taking you to Yaya over and over again? How well do you feel Yaya Centre is living up to its slogan of “Y go anywhere else?”? As usual, I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Wishing you well,
Biche

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