The Philippines straddles two worlds:
-It is an Asian country, but 500 years of colonization by Spain and the United
States have also westernized it (at least superficially.)
-I've seen peasants tilling rice fields with wooden plows pulled behind carabao,
while a mile away there was an Internet cafe filled with schoolboys playing
computer games and adults chatting with foreign penpals.
-Most Filipinos I know trace their roots to "the province" (countryside),
yet live in and are wise to the ways of the city.
Here are two markets in Cebu City which demonstrate the dual worlds of this parapoxical place:
Carbon Market
Located just south of downtown in Cebu City, adjacent to the port, this sprawling
old market has everything: bananas, clothes, fish, flowers, fruit, handicrafts,
meat, rice, and tuba (palm wine, consumed vigorously by some market denizens
and generously proferred to passers-by.)
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This website could really benefit from the new Adobe "Aroma-Rama" plug-in: Carbon Market always wakes up my nose, and those with a faint stomach may want to tour when theirs is empty. Especially bulad (dried fish)!
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SM Mall
If Carbon Market is the carabao, then SM City Cebu is like the proverbial
spaceship landed in a cornfield: a colossal, quarter-mile long box perched in
the middle of the Reclamation Area, a sprawling filled-in swamp otherwise inhabited
by squatter communities, shipping container yards and cemeteries.
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But to thousands of Cebuanos, it is a taste of paradise, an air-conditioned
Disneyland of glitzy shops and eateries where a 4-peso jeepney ride buys them
a few hours of escape from the grim reality of Philippine life.
I talked with SM's leasing manager, who gave me the following information: SM City Cebu was built in 1994. The 5-story building comprises 756,000 square feet, has 350 tenants, and receives 90-150,000 visitors every day (I questioned the last statistic, but she insisted it was correct.) It was built by the Shoe Mart ("SM") Corporation, a Manila-based consortium that is the largest mall-builder in the Philippines with 16 built to date. Outside on the ground, I walked the building off and it measures 920 feet long by 400 feet wide.
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