The capital has a new mall, they call it G-MOA, or more completely, Gaisano Mall of Antique. the MOA acronym was already made popular by the SM conglomerate when they built the atrociously huge gas guzzling building called Mall of Asia, MOA for short (but i still couldn't get the hang of it. I haven't been there and if people tell me they went to MOA there would be a blank "huh?" from my end and that storyteller would be forced to drop the more popular name "SM" then my face would light up.)
So Gaisano hitched a ride with MOA and called theirs G-MOA. yea, it's gonna be a hit to the brown skinned white trash.
I am just appalled at how these moneymakers underestimate our intellect. It's almost the same thing with the supposed-to-be-indie movie Sigwa, but that's a different topic (which i might be driven enough to rant about someday, yeah, when it's already stale).
Frankly, I didn't expect much from the building because Gaisano is well-known for their kabaduyan, anyway. However, i did hope they will spare my province from their disease, and apparently they didn't. The noise inside was just unbearable. The music from the cheap speakers were so loud and the PA system so bad it's like being in a nightmarish rock fest.
Our kid, on the other hand, remained excited despite these little discomforts. Brown skinned and probinsiya as we are, Gaisano decided to cheapen us some more by not putting airconditioning at some parts of the mall. For one, the lobby of the supermarket was so humid. The smell and air was so bad Keith said it's designed to make you sick.
(a really bad segway coming)
That's the good thing -- probably the best -- about being a kid. you're completely oblivious to the ugliness of the world, or gad, the GMOA, until you learn about good design, art, or cultural sensitivity. Education and knowledge is a double-edged sword that you have to learn to use properly. I think that's what university/college is for, provided of course, that you have educated professors.
(end of the bad segway)
Unable to arrest the kid's hyperactivity we brought him to Mr. Donuts. I half-expect there would be local food stores other than Mang Inasal, Jollibee and Greenwich because we already have a of surplus of those in the City. Their junk is the last thing i'd like eat while i'm here. But none in GMOA, except for a couple that serve lunch fare, and we were too full for lunch. So coffee and donuts is it.
Anyhow, the kid wanted to order all the colorful donuts but i set the limit to only three and he ate everything like he just ordered 1 sungak-sungak meal, dine in, mind you, not talabunan*. not even to go.
"Why is it so noisy in here?" I said to his father.
Christ. the store has its own pipe-in music and at that certain moment they were playing the baylehan dance music. The PA outside was gurgling announcements, competing with the stylized versions of christmas songs--the mall's own piped-in music. It's just noisy. noisy. noisy.
Gaisano, not all brown skinned white trash enjoy everything baylehan**. so please. we are all not without taste.
And because we're just grocery shopping junkies, never department/boutique shopping junkies we capped our small tour by checking out the supermarket section. It lacked airconditioning although Keith said he liked that they are selling big cans of Baguio oil.***
"It's what our favorite supermarket lacks, i think."
"Yeah. But they don't have the Oishi potato chips. And the rest is just bad."
(That comment can't be trusted because i don't live here anymore. and seriously, i can spend an entire month at home without having the need to go to a supermarket. really.)
"They also don't have tortillos."
I did notice a lot of goods you'd get from the sari-sari store are missing from the shelf. For one, the junk food section looked like it just survived a season of panic-buying because there were a number of sections without display.
I paid for the purchases and we decided to just head home. The noise sucked all the energy out of me.
"So that must be the reason for putting these junk food stores near the entrance. It's the only thing that's really "good" here. It's like candy from a pedophile." (Shit, i don;t know why i even thought of that analogy.)
Keith enjoyed it; he never had any of it being a city kid. The kid, too, he enjoyed the shebang, because kids are always happy until we tell them to stop being so. I was disappointed because really, I thought we were more than that.
But hell, this is Gaisano! (insert Gaisano jingle here)
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And here is the part that explains all those asterisks.
*mah friends and i (which one, i can;t remember. Bobong, maybe) had this brilliant idea that instead of naming our combo meals 1-2-3 or merienda or kiddie or some over-used words we'll call it with local terms like "sungak-sungak" (a really big meal good enough to feed a giant), "talabunan" (meaning if you can't finish a meal, you may opt to borrow a "tabon" (cover) and come back for it later -- gross but funny), "2-days nagutman meal" (a meal good for somebody who have not eaten for two days, and you may opt to have it "talabunan", too!)
**not to diss "baylehan" as a culture or history. "baylehan" through times has evolved into something with negative connotation. but i have to do more in-depth research to be able to explain that. i don't have anything against this as i practically grew up going to these, if not watching these from our house second floor window.
***Incidentally, we're, like, fans of buying-things-in-big-packages because it's more economical and environment friendly that way. Oil for one, we usually buy it in 2-liter packages because i for one, believe that we waste a lot of the expensive cooking oil buying it in its iced-candy package.
FIN.
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