Confessions of a mall walker
(Amended version of essay published 3/17/11, Manila Standard Today)
The Tacoma Mall in the state of Washington, USA, is my favorite place this time of the year. The holiday rush is long over. The mall is quiet and the throngs of shoppers are gone; so are the huge sales and discounted items. But that’s all good because I don’t come to the mall to shop. I come here to walk. In the winter when it’s freezing cold out, I become part of a growing constituency in America, the “mall walkers.”
You can tell us apart from other mall habitués by our tennis shoes and our brisk and purposeful walk. Judging by the silver streaks in our hair and the lines on our faces, majority of us are closing in on 60 or beyond.
One does get to be a bit more cautious as the years add up. I walk the mall because it is safer and far less strenuous than braving the elements outdoors. Plus, there are no bicyclists and skateboarders to dodge from and no power walkers with their quick dismissive side glances leaving me in their wake. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” I would mumble under my breath, envying their youth and their lithe, supple bodies.
The mall walkers do not belong to a formal association with bylaws and monthly dues. We do not keep a list of members with contact information and other affiliations. We are not on Facebook as a group; we don’t tweet, we don’t blog, we don’t meet. We are simply a loose group of individuals who acknowledge one another with a short, friendly nod or a soft “Hi,” as we cross paths.
From my office in Olympia -- provided the usual traffic by the military Joint Base Lewis-McChord is flowing smoothly -- I can get to Tacoma Mall within a half-hour drive. I contort my body in the driver’s seat of my SUV to trade my winter boots for tennis shoes; then off to the warmth of the mall I go.
Tacoma Mall is fairly small, about one third of a mile in length. I normally do two laps around, which is about a half-hour’s worth of cardio workout. I walk briskly, though I don’t swing my arms like I would normally do when I walk outside. Health experts say that to maximize the exercise, walkers need to swing their arms in an exaggerated manner as they briskly move their legs.
Now I don’t know about you, but the first time I saw a jogger swinging her arms out in an exaggerated manner, I almost fell to my knees laughing. She looked ridiculous, like a chicken flapping her wings chest high while she trotted her stuff along the water front. So I’m sure others got a good laugh, too, when I started doing it myself, having found out that sticking my elbows out and pumping my arms as I walked, propelled me forward faster. This is not to say I am willing to make a spectacle of myself at the mall, however.
So I walk briskly, trying not to get into eye contact with young people skilled in trapping the often gullible older generation into listening to their impassioned sales spiel. I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not easy to disengage politely once contact has been made. (Persistence is a virtue but not when you’re on the other end of an aggressive sales pitch.) Thankfully, this is not normally a problem as most mall workers can tell the serious shoppers from the “look-sees,” the idlers, the high school kids playing hooky, and regular mall walkers like me.
Having walked the mall for a couple of years now, I’m wise to the traps and pitfalls lurking there. I learned early on not to look too closely at window displays or be tempted by the wonderful scents wafting out of Victoria’s Secret or Bath and Body Works. I made the mistake of going in one time -- just to look, mind you -- and came out an hour later with three bags of deliciously-hued under things, various creams and lotions and body butter, and cinnamon/vanilla-scented candles that I am apparently unable to resist, even in my 60s. I am happy to report that my friends and family are still enjoying the largesse of that unplanned shopping spree.
When I visited Manila last month, I was amazed at the number and size of the shopping malls there; easily three to four times what we have here in Washington State. Most are clean, well lit, and artfully stocked with merchandise. (I’m going to digress here to advise fellow balikbayans not to bother lugging those heavy suitcases when you come to visit the Philippines. You don’t need to pack your bags with US canned goods and chocolates, Taster’s Choice and coffee creamer, blackberry jam and orange marmalade, Pepperidge Farm cookies and apples and oranges and grapes, because those are all available in Manila now. I kid you not. Remember when you could get US goods only if you had access to JUSMAG (Joint United States Military Advisory Group) or Subic Base? Ancient history.)
I cannot, however, imagine walking any of the malls I visited in Manila as I do here in Tacoma. Manila malls are generally packed with people and some have overly loud sound systems that practically blow your head off. (Aging ears are particularly sensitive to the loud, screechy, discordant sounds that pass for music nowadays.)
You don’t want to walk the malls in Manila anyway. If you can tolerate the loud sound and the press of people, you can get yourself some of the yummiest food available on the planet. You can sit at one of the tables and eavesdrop on OFW conversations that include such foreign places as Dahar and Doha, Hongkong, Sydney, Vancouver, Rome, and Bahrain. You’ll leave for home feeling like you’ve traveled all over the world, and you didn’t even have to walk the mall to do it.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Inquirer Opinion / Columns
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20110313-325094/Coming-home
HIGH BLOOD
Highblood : Coming home
By Belma Villa
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: March 13, 2011
THE FIRST thing that greeted me was a blast of hot air. I breathed in deeply, trying to take in as much of the warmth as possible. Home, I thought blissfully. How could I have ever left it? Twenty hours earlier, I was shivering in the freezing rain and snowy landscape of wintry Seattle in Washington State where I have resided these many years. I was back in Manila for a short reunion with my group mates from the University of the Philippines, English Majors’ Class ’69.
My visit turned out to be not just a reunion with my college friends (and a precious, stolen moment with my high school classmates) but also a much-needed reunion with my home country. Seeing Metro Manila again, up close and personal after many years of absence, was alternately invigorating and exciting, frustrating and annoying, but also inspiring and uplifting. So much had changed in the intervening years since I left; some good, some really bad, and a few were downright comical.
Condos. I don’t know when this new trend in housing began, but it was certainly not during the time I lived in Manila. The present-day Metro Manila skyline is dotted with condo high-rises, and in the short time my friends and I were there, we were able to enjoy the comforts of three condo units that had all the modern amenities of Western living. It seemed that each person I met during my trip either owned a condo or was related to/knew someone who did.
I dare speculate that condos are the new status symbol in the Philippines. A condo can be the perfect summer vacation home for balikbayans, a handy bachelor’s pad, a rental property, a convenient pied-à-terre for the rich, and a good nest egg for the smart investor. Whatever the reason, I found the boom in condos initially perplexing, as I have always believed the Filipino people to be industrious and hard-working but essentially poor. “Who has money to buy all these condos?” I mused.
Shopping malls. The question of who has money to spend takes me right to my daughters’ favorite past time—shopping. There were only three department stores worth mentioning when I left: Rustan’s for the more exclusive shoppers with money to burn; Shoemart and Robinson’s for average folks like me. The Manila I came back to had evolved the concept of department stores into huge shopping complexes and malls: Glorietta, Rockwell, Shangri-La, Greenbelt, The Podium, Landmark. There were SM malls (Shoemart’s progeny) everywhere we went including the nearby towns of Laguna, Batangas and Cavite, and doubtless all across the country. And there was the biggest of them all (fourth largest in the world and third in Asia), the SM Mall of Asia. “MOA,” as the natives call it, combines the finest in Philippine shopping and entertainment and boasts average daily foot traffic of 200,000. Two hundred thousand!!!
Again the question: “Who has money to spend in all these malls?”
OFWs. The answer, once I got it, was pretty obvious. OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) and their hard-earned dollars are changing not only the landscape of our home country, but also our shopping habits, our language and the hopes and dreams of our children. Many of our countrymen toil at menial jobs abroad so their families in the Philippines can build new and better homes and their children can go to good schools that in the past, only the rich could afford. OFWs come home with heads held high, money in their pockets to buy SUVs and condos and iPads and other tech toys. They throng the malls and restaurants and movie theaters—God bless them—but alas, they also clog our streets even more.
Traffic. This one is under the category of “really bad.” My friends and I discovered to our chagrin that it is no longer possible to spend the day hopping from place to place in Manila and Makati as we used to do in our youth. Traffic has gotten so bad that you have to factor in hours of frustrating time spent on the road waiting for the vehicles around you to move. Filipino drivers do not let lanes, or traffic rules, or common courtesy deter them from reaching their destination as quickly as possible. As a result, driving in Manila has become a test of courage, cunning, resourcefulness and ruthlessness. On the other hand, I’ve never seen such skillful driving in all my life, as our drivers Jing and Sonny exhibited. I guess you need to, if you are to go anywhere in Manila.
Our people’s propensity for disregarding rules was most apparent in some of the signs I read along the road. “Accident-prone area,” one such sign read. To emphasize the point, the next line warned, “May namatay na dito.” Coming up the toll area from Cavite was a large sign, “Exact Toll,” and under it in equally large letters: “ABSOLUTELY NO CHANGE.” I had to smile in spite of myself. Only in the Philippines!
Still, even with all the changes that I found coming home, getting together with my college friends was joyous and memorable. We quickly made a pledge to meet again in two years. Australia, or Oz, as the Aussies call it, or Spain, to trace whatever of our roots can still be traced, then on to Provence in France. It didn’t matter. The plan would come together just as this first one did and we would be there to share impressions, trade stories of heartaches and triumphs, and try not to think of our waning years coming quickly upon us.
God willing, we would look once more into each other’s eyes and see only the 18-year-olds that we once were.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20110313-325094/Coming-home
HIGH BLOOD
Highblood : Coming home
By Belma Villa
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: March 13, 2011
THE FIRST thing that greeted me was a blast of hot air. I breathed in deeply, trying to take in as much of the warmth as possible. Home, I thought blissfully. How could I have ever left it? Twenty hours earlier, I was shivering in the freezing rain and snowy landscape of wintry Seattle in Washington State where I have resided these many years. I was back in Manila for a short reunion with my group mates from the University of the Philippines, English Majors’ Class ’69.
My visit turned out to be not just a reunion with my college friends (and a precious, stolen moment with my high school classmates) but also a much-needed reunion with my home country. Seeing Metro Manila again, up close and personal after many years of absence, was alternately invigorating and exciting, frustrating and annoying, but also inspiring and uplifting. So much had changed in the intervening years since I left; some good, some really bad, and a few were downright comical.
Condos. I don’t know when this new trend in housing began, but it was certainly not during the time I lived in Manila. The present-day Metro Manila skyline is dotted with condo high-rises, and in the short time my friends and I were there, we were able to enjoy the comforts of three condo units that had all the modern amenities of Western living. It seemed that each person I met during my trip either owned a condo or was related to/knew someone who did.
I dare speculate that condos are the new status symbol in the Philippines. A condo can be the perfect summer vacation home for balikbayans, a handy bachelor’s pad, a rental property, a convenient pied-à-terre for the rich, and a good nest egg for the smart investor. Whatever the reason, I found the boom in condos initially perplexing, as I have always believed the Filipino people to be industrious and hard-working but essentially poor. “Who has money to buy all these condos?” I mused.
Shopping malls. The question of who has money to spend takes me right to my daughters’ favorite past time—shopping. There were only three department stores worth mentioning when I left: Rustan’s for the more exclusive shoppers with money to burn; Shoemart and Robinson’s for average folks like me. The Manila I came back to had evolved the concept of department stores into huge shopping complexes and malls: Glorietta, Rockwell, Shangri-La, Greenbelt, The Podium, Landmark. There were SM malls (Shoemart’s progeny) everywhere we went including the nearby towns of Laguna, Batangas and Cavite, and doubtless all across the country. And there was the biggest of them all (fourth largest in the world and third in Asia), the SM Mall of Asia. “MOA,” as the natives call it, combines the finest in Philippine shopping and entertainment and boasts average daily foot traffic of 200,000. Two hundred thousand!!!
Again the question: “Who has money to spend in all these malls?”
OFWs. The answer, once I got it, was pretty obvious. OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) and their hard-earned dollars are changing not only the landscape of our home country, but also our shopping habits, our language and the hopes and dreams of our children. Many of our countrymen toil at menial jobs abroad so their families in the Philippines can build new and better homes and their children can go to good schools that in the past, only the rich could afford. OFWs come home with heads held high, money in their pockets to buy SUVs and condos and iPads and other tech toys. They throng the malls and restaurants and movie theaters—God bless them—but alas, they also clog our streets even more.
Traffic. This one is under the category of “really bad.” My friends and I discovered to our chagrin that it is no longer possible to spend the day hopping from place to place in Manila and Makati as we used to do in our youth. Traffic has gotten so bad that you have to factor in hours of frustrating time spent on the road waiting for the vehicles around you to move. Filipino drivers do not let lanes, or traffic rules, or common courtesy deter them from reaching their destination as quickly as possible. As a result, driving in Manila has become a test of courage, cunning, resourcefulness and ruthlessness. On the other hand, I’ve never seen such skillful driving in all my life, as our drivers Jing and Sonny exhibited. I guess you need to, if you are to go anywhere in Manila.
Our people’s propensity for disregarding rules was most apparent in some of the signs I read along the road. “Accident-prone area,” one such sign read. To emphasize the point, the next line warned, “May namatay na dito.” Coming up the toll area from Cavite was a large sign, “Exact Toll,” and under it in equally large letters: “ABSOLUTELY NO CHANGE.” I had to smile in spite of myself. Only in the Philippines!
Still, even with all the changes that I found coming home, getting together with my college friends was joyous and memorable. We quickly made a pledge to meet again in two years. Australia, or Oz, as the Aussies call it, or Spain, to trace whatever of our roots can still be traced, then on to Provence in France. It didn’t matter. The plan would come together just as this first one did and we would be there to share impressions, trade stories of heartaches and triumphs, and try not to think of our waning years coming quickly upon us.
God willing, we would look once more into each other’s eyes and see only the 18-year-olds that we once were.
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