PAREDES
As I woke up at dawn to write this column on Saturday, my wife told me that Metro Ayala was burning. She had been monitoring updates on Facebook of the fire which started on Friday evening at around 10.
Fortunately, it was already closing time for the Metro, so customers and most of the workers had already left the place. It would have been a tragedy if it happened during shopping hours.
It also made easier for firefighters to respond to it, as traffic was already light during that time.
It had been also raining hard during that night, although this had little effect on the fire which occurred inside a building that is almost completely sealed in concrete and metal.
Firefighters had to get a huge jackhammer to pound holes into the walls so they could blast their hoses into it or attempt to go inside amid thick, toxic smoke. Adding to their problem is the lack of breathing apparatus to enable them to go inside and fight fire.
Incidentally, this is the second fire that hit a mall in the Philippines in just a few weeks, recently. Last December 23, a fire gutted the NCCC Mall in Davao City, killing 38 people, mostly call center employees working on the upper floor of the building where the fire began. Firefighters also found it hard to operate into a building that had few windows, a typical feature of most malls in the Philippines.
My wife and I were interested in this incident that happened in Ayala Center, which is one of the malls we frequently go to. We usually go there thrice or twice a week as part of our routine.
It’s not only that we shop at the mall to do our weekly grocery run or to check the hardware section at the basement, which is my favorite way of killing time.
Given our hectic schedules, we find it convenient to just head to the mall after school or work, where it’s also just a short drive away.
As we wait for traffic to subside before taking the long trip home, we usually just stay there to hang out at a coffee shop or have dinner in any of Ayala’s wide selection of restaurants and food stalls.
Or, when there’s a good movie and we feel like pampering ourselves, we relax at the cinema.
So the news of the fire in Metro Ayala left us shocked and admittedly sad over the sudden loss of one of our go-to places.
We start to realize how much time we have really spent in the mall through all those years since we first visited them when it first opened back in the early 90s.
There had been lots of personal and shared memories connected with the mall, which has become one of the iconic places in modern-day Cebu.
I cherish those years when as a student, and later as a young teacher, I would go to the mall theater to watch film festivals, plays, and classical music concerts offered for free by the Arts Council of Cebu.
Some of the most memorable reunions with close friends took place at the cafes or restaurants inside the mall. And whenever our parents, siblings and other relatives from Surigao visit us, we always bring them to the mall, which is way different from those smaller malls back home.
In our minds, the mall has always been a place of comfort and convenience. Foreigners don’t understand this Filipino mall mania, which inspired the rise of really monstrous malls that were some of the biggest in Asia, if not the world.
But having been born in this vast urban landscape of poverty, crime and decadence, the seemingly safe and luxurious shopping mall provides a temporary refuge for the Filipino.
Going into a fastfood restaurant to have a cheap but clean dinner or just loitering around window shopping, the whole experience is enough to make us forget about our daily grind in the gutter.
Thus, news of fire and other tragic events happening in a mall always shock us in disbelief as it shatters our notion of the mall as a safe refuge or comfort zone.
Now, we are back to our waking life amid poverty and the realization that nothing is safe anymore as disaster can strike when we least expect it.
Still, we continue to go to the malls as they play an important role not only in our social lives but in our economy as well.
There is also a need to support local retail, particularly Cebuano stores like Metro. So, let’s hope that Metro Ayala will rise again soon into a much safer and more convenient department store.
After all, Cebuanos are proud that what started in 1982 as a small department store originally called Gaisano Metro in Colon, has now grown to become a national chain of department stores and supermarkets under the Metro brand.