I set foot at Thomson Plaza for the first time since 1992. It was gloomy with tired and forgettable shops. A good eighteen years later, the place was still filled with tired shops though the mall had been refurbished with a new facade in the form of metal-cladding and an ubiquitous Starbucks joint at an outdoor seating area. Like the past, the place was full of activity, mostly people in their fifties and sixties eating and wandering around. Were these the condemned of a consumerist hell, wandering and questing in a lifetime for the holy grail of the cool product?

There was a Shizuoka Yajimaya bookstore there in the early eighties.

On another note, I opened an account with a Dutch bank today. The staff were kinda incompetent. I was puzzled at the number of mistakes made.