BANGKOK, THAILAND
Generically extravagant shopping centers have been a fixture of the Asian megacity for decades, metastisizing upwards from corrugated steel rooftops and tangled black powerlines to spawn smaller consumer-tumors in the streets around them. Forget about the HDI – in Asia, the best development index is how big of a mall you can build.

Japan, for example, is essentially one contiguous retail complex. Underneath downtown Osaka are mile-long subway stations filled with fancy clothing stores, restaurants and electronic outlets, and in Tokyo you don’t even have to be downtown to find that.

Vietnam, on the other hand, has only a few absurd shopping centers that are all concentrated in downtown Saigon. Diamond Plaza is Vietnam’s attempt at The Asian Mall, a big glass tower that also sports office space and serviced apartments for rich white people. The arcade on top is what makes it a real winner – Saigon is a stressful place, and every once in a while bowling a game or two and shooting a hundred zombies is exactly what you need to chill yourself out. I’m only really mentioning it because I just found the website, which is hilarious in just about every way a department store website can be (I love the music).

Bangkok’s Asian Mall (well, the biggest) is MBK, an eight floor monstrosity in the middle of the closest thing the city has to a downtown. A lot of it actually maintains the chaotic feel of an Asian market, minus that smell, but it’s still serviced by a swanky elevated rail system and connected to Siam Square (“The Shinjuku of Bangkok” is a little bit of an exaggeration) by an air-conditioned bridge. MBK’s the place to go if you need a cheap cell phone or tacky piece of furniture, but it’s really not any different from a mall you’d find in the US.

MBK’s shiny exterior is definitely a face Bangkok puts on for the world before it tries to convince us that it’s not just a huge mess, but I’d hesitate to say that it’s not the “real” Bangkok. Bangkok is about excess and flamboyance, something you see everywhere from the street food to Khaosan Road (“A short road that has the longest dream in the world”) to Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong, the city’s infamous sex districts. Those older tourists that refuse to leave downtown may never experience all the tainted glory that Bangkok has to offer, but they’re certainly not missing the point. MBK is nothing if not excessive.