I’ve been doing a lot of things lately. Getting out of the house is becoming more common for me. And as I look forward to presentations at the PHP meetup at the end of April and PodCamp Ohio at the end of June, I’ve been attending little gatherings here and there as time allows. There are a couple trips in particular that require more elucidation than what effort I want to put into this seating, but I did want to write about something simple that strikes me every time I venture into the city for an event or meeting or whatever.
As I’ve observed in the past, you always take something with you when you visit somewhere like a major city, even if you’re mostly retracing your steps. I’ve gotten in the habit of taking the R5 from Malvern to Market East on the instructions of folks whose company I enjoy but much less frequently these days than I like. On that route, I manage to walk through a good chunk of the Gallery, a kind of “train station meets three story mall”. It is in this place that I’ve encountered one of my favorite Philly oddities.
It’s just a matter of so many odd things being in one place at one time that strikes me, not that any one of these things in particular is odd. First off, I think that mall-on-station is probably a great idea commercially, but is still a tad strange. But then you add the fish and meat market. I think this is the only shopping center I’ve ever been in with a regular old Radio Shack, a bookstore, a CVS, a Game Stop, a standard food court, and… A fish market. Ok, maybe that’s not weird, maybe it’s just me. But then…
Then you have the Market/Frankfurt line, which runs right through there. Ok. There’s a Septa station on one side, and the subway station on the other. Not too weird. The subway entrance/exit is right next to the fish market, which is somewhat convenient, I guess, if you’re into a fast fish trip. Maybe Philly denizens would think it odd that I have to drive 10 minutes to a stand-alone building that contains fresh fish when it’s just an easy trip to the mall for one-stop shopping of video games and fish. But that’s really not the part that fires the neurons. Including everything up through this, I’m unaffected.
What gets me is that as you’re walking through this section of the building, you’re engulfed in the smell of fish. Clearly this place has been here for a while. And I’d expect any fish market to have a certain fishy odor. But what tips the scale on the “what the heck?” factor is that there is a perfume kiosk in the hallway right outside the fish market entrance. How..? Wha..?
This is just incomprehensible to me. I find this very strange. In the pileup of things that seem odd to me, this is the cap. I should be a patron of this kiosk some day, just to see what it’s all about. Clearly there must be something to it that I’m missing. On every other day, I pass through the fishy odor down into the bowels of Philly subway.
