Jamuna Future Park 4.59

Jamuna Future Park has the potential of becoming a great hangout place in the "future" (no pun intended), but right now it is only a huge, cemented structure that houses very little other than food shops and a movie theater. Basically there are three aspects of JFP right now, and I will touch upon all of them.

1. Food 6/10

The food court is huge, and a large number of the country's renowned food shops have their branches in here. Swarma House, Burger'N Boost, A&W, Pizza Hut, KFC, Cream and Fudge etc. all are here, along with a plethora of known and unknown choices.

However, the service and quality of some of the lesser known shops are not that great, and thus it is recommended to stick to the branded shops. During our first visit, we ordered steak from a random shop, which took a long time to arrive, and was cooked weirdly. They used standard curry beef masala instead of any steak flavors or seasoning. We also ordered fried rice combo from another shop, but that, too, wasn't anything great.

The food court has a unique payment system where you have to buy coupons and payments are made to the shops against the amount loaded in the coupons. Thus, shops cannot manipulate prices. This is a good gesture, but the shop owners struggled with the technology and took a lot of time in executing the billing.

In the outskirts of the food court, there's a decent looking coffee shop named Tabaq which is gaining fast popularity. However, I myself did not go there.

2. Indoor and Outdoor Amusement Park 8/10

These are the highlights of JFP right now. In the indoor area, there lies a respectable number of video games and rides. Most of these are pretty good. They have a better collection of games and rides than Saad Musa Center.

But the problem is cost. Almost every video game requires 4 coins, and each coin costs 25 taka. That's quite a lot considering the (usually) short amount of time the games can be played during a single session. Also, there are no active attendants to help the gamers in understanding what to do and how to play the games. It is better to first watch someone else play the game, understand the controls and then play. While gameplay, there just isn't enough time to understand the controls and before you know what happened, your lives are over.

As an example, the game House of The Dead requires you to reload your light guns by shooting outside of the screen, and there's another lightgun game that will let you reload by waving the gun from left to right. Unless you know how to reload and aim properly, your game will be over within seconds.

Also, a lot of these machines are often broken; these machines will accept the coins but you won't be able to play. The officials did compensate me on one such occasion, but it took me a while to track them down, and making them understand the problem was even more challenging.

Most of the rides are fun; both the indoor ones and outdoor ones. If you can afford them, they are capable of providing a great, fun experience for the whole family.

Apart from this, there's also a bowling club and pool zone. That

3, Movies ?

I am yet to see a movie in JFP, but I heard mixed emotions from the people who did. Firstly, they are not bringing in any exclusive movies. Most of the titles shown here are also shown in Boshundhora City, but apparently JFP's movie theaters are bigger and houses more people.

I need to experience it first hand before writing more.

4. Overall 5/10

Despite of the hype and hoop la surrounding the place, JFP was surprisingly calm and quiet. The crowd was thin even on a weekend afternoon, and the rides were virtually empty. Air conditioning worked fine for the most part, but some shops were humid which suggested that the central air conditioning is not as well managed as it should be.

All lifts and escalators were working fine, which was great. We took our one year old daughter with us and faced no trouble at all. She had great fun strolling around the seemingly huge place.

It's a nice place for going once or twice, or maybe for watching movies, but apart from eating, playing games and watching movies, there's nothing much to do here.

Things are expected to change when the shops start opening.

Visited November 2013