Having spent quite literally the entire day at West Edmonton Mall, I can truly say Two things. Firstly, I am absolutely exhausted simply from all the walking I've had to do just trying to find my way around the complex, and secondly that I really am finding it very hard to justify the existence of the place. Now don't get me wrong here - today has probably been the most fun I've had in a while and by the end of it I felt as though I'd spent the day at a theme park rather than a shopping mall, but I somehow can't get my head around how the person with all the money invested in the enterprise can think that the largest shopping mall in the world is best suited to a relatively small city which is covered in snow for much of the year. Surely you would want to site such a place near a major holiday destination or next to Disneyworld where it would get millions of people through the door every day - wouldn't you?

Anyway, as I've just hinted, West Edmonton Mall was even larger and more incredible than I had pictured - even though plenty of people have told you that it's the largest shopping centre in the world, you still somehow can't quite get your head around what that means. In the UK, people say that Lakeside or Bluewater in Essex are very large shopping centres, and talk about them in hushed voices as though a trip to Bluewater is a fun day out for the whole family. The thing is, West Edmonton Mall really is a fun day out for all the family - the fact that it's actually a shopping centre seems to be a secondary concern to having as many attractions as possible to keep people there once they arrive. In the UK, we try to entice people into shops by installing a cash machine on the premises - in Edmonton, they do the same thing by adding an Ice Rink or an Olympic Swimming pool onto the side, both of which are actually things to be found in West Edmonton Mall. From the outside, the building does a pretty good job of lulling you into a false sense of security - when you pull into the car park, you look at the large brick monstrosity in front of you with its nondescript swing-door entrance and think "Well, that doesn't look like anything special." Then you approach the entrance and notice that a sign over the top identifies it as entrance number fifty, and you start to realise that you're only looking at one side of a building which clearly stretches off in all directions out of sight. Stepping inside is like walking into the TARDIS - corridors stretch off in every direction, on several levels, every tiny space crammed with every shop and restaurant under the sun. But it's the things which aren't shops that make West Edmonton Mall what it is.

I mentioned a few moments ago that there is an Olympic swimming pool and an Ice Rink in the mall, and I suppose from that you've probably assumed that I'm talking about some discrete building to one side where people shuffle through a doorway into a reception, pay to use the facilities and then make their way through to a separate sports complex - but you'd be wrong. That's what would happen anywhere else in the world, but here in Canada they obviously think that hiding all the facilities away in separate buildings would prevent casual visitors from realising what a fun place they've put together - so most of the entertainment and sports facilities within West Edmonton Mall are right there in your face. In a shopping centre anywhere else in the world, the atria at the corners of the building are occupied by seating areas, restaurants or floor plans showing you which way to walk to the shop of your choice, and the passageways between the shops themselves are lined with carts selling sweets or ice cream or those pillows full of polystyrene beads which seem to be all the rage at the moment. Here, the atria are so large that they can contain an entire Ice Rink complete with seating for spectators or a complete amusement arcade complex, and the passageways are filled with full size reproduction Spanish galleons or rollercoasters or miniature golf courses. Walking along one corridor, I came across an arena filled with water and surrounded by tiered seating - here, the mall puts on sea lion displays throughout the day exactly as they do in Sea World down in Florida, and the surrounding pools are home to the sea lions who perform the show. Each section of the mall is themed, so you can wander around Bourbon Street with it's New Orleans feel, or stroll through Europa Boulevard where all the shops and decor are reminiscent of Europe and fountains fill the spaces between shopping opportunities. And what about paying a visit to Chinatown, where all the shops have a Chinese feel, selling Chinese foods and decorated with bridges and oriental gardens? At one point, in a moment of madness, I think somebody once thought about actually putting an area into the mall where you could simply go shopping, but then they thought better of it. I wonder how many people go to West Edmonton Mall to get their weeks shopping, end up playing golf, going swimming and riding the rollercoaster all day and return home with empty pockets and no shopping to show for it? Come to think of it, if somebody decided to attach a housing complex to the side of the building for people to live in, and build a station to connect them with the trains running east-west across Canada, nobody would ever have to go outside in Edmonton at all.

West Edmonton Mall covers over 570,000 square metres of land - and for those of you without a head for maths (or math as they insist on calling it over here because they obviously believe that there is only one type of "math" rather than several types of "maths"), that's 6.1 million square feet. This makes it five times larger than the new Wembley Stadium. To put it another way, the largest shopping centre in the whole of Europe is currently the Metro Centre in Gateshead, near Newcastle in England. The Metro Centre only covers 1.8 million square feet. This makes West Edmonton Mall somewhere which really doesn't want to get caught up in a recession of any kind - can you imagine how many seconds it would take for shops and businesses here to start going under if people stopped coming through the door in their thousands and spending large amounts of cash every day? Can you even start to picture how much money this place must cost to keep running? The mind boggles.

I broke my day up by spending a considerable amount of time propping my steaming feet up in one of the mall's two food courts, places which probably took up more floor space than an entire British shopping centre and were more than happy to offer me any type of food I could imagine - whether I wanted some sort of elaborate Chinese meal with twelve courses or a box of cinnamon donuts. It took me nearly ten minutes to walk from one side of the food court to the other, so it was really just as well that the food was exceptional. I also wanted a book to read on the train when I start heading down the east coast of the USA in a weeks time, so I decided to visit one of the many bookstores on offer within West Edmonton Mall. Suffice to say that there wasn't a hope in hell of finding what I was looking for - I would've needed an extra couple of days just to look around the ground floor of the bookshop, which seemed more reminiscent of the British Library, and in the end I came out with Bill Gates book on how he sees the future of technology. At the time, it was only about three years since Bill Gates had famously gone on record as saying that he didn't see any future for the internet, and that it was his sincere belief that people wanted something far more structured and regulated and would prefer to use the Microsoft Network instead - so I thought his idea of the future might be good for a few laughs. In a few years time, perhaps we'll be looking back on his predictions and falling about with laughter in the same way we do when we watch old episodes of "Tomorrows World" from the seventies in which scientists told us sincerely that we would all be living on the moon, driving flying cars and giving orders to our robotic maids by the year 2000. In a breathtaking display of just how incredibly up himself Bill Gates truly is, he actually includes with his book a free CD containing a virtual walking tour of his house on an island in Seattle, just so we can see how rich he is. I mean, seriously, who gives a virtual tour of their house away with their book.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.