I'm multi-tasking today!
I'm writing this posting on my blog while waiting for the laundry cycle in my washing machine to end. So while the precious seconds pass by, I am hopefully making good use of my time. I really could be doing something else. Nowadays, we don't have to do the laundry...laundromats have sprouted all over the Metro and if you can fork out 20-30 pesos/kilo for your soiled clothes then your worries are over.
Our laundromats are quite different though. Unlike the ones in the States, we don't have to bring our own detergent and a stack of quarters to operate the machines ourselves curling up on a sofa reading a magazine while we wait for our turn at the washing machine and drier. Here, you just bring your dirty clothes in a laundry bag and dump it over the counter to a smiling lady that'll give you a reciept and a date to pick up the clothes. As an added service, they can send a boy in a pedicab to pick up the dirty laundry from your house for an extra fee.
Gone are the days when the labandera would be dressed in a tapis with a batya resting on her head and her palu-palo in hand. The nearby batis would be the perfect spot to do her chore. And as she ends with her last rinsing, she proceeds to pick up a river stone which she turns into her pang-hilod and then takes a bath in her duster and tapis. That's a vanishing site now...
And so while modern technology displaces a lot of labanderas, we latch on to another trend in business... Years ago, the laudromat was unheard of... we patiently waited for the labandera to arrive, cajoled her nicely to be gentle with our clothes lest she rip the expensive ones apart with her bare hands as she made kuskos her labada. Or worse make kupas with the white clothes as she taints them accidentally with the running dye from the colored wash. The things we've had to put up with...lest she decides to do the laundry of our kapit-bahay on the day that she's alotted for us.
In my lifetime, I've seen so many things change... 1)The bread delivery we called "potpot". The delivery boy would go around the neighborhood on a bike with two huge tin cans of different types of bread and hit on a rubber bulb that released air on a bike horn that made a hooting sound. It's been replaced by the Hot Pan de Sal trend. Now Pan de Pugon and Pan de Manila are battling out for their share of the market. 2)The biko (rice cake) vendors with kids carrying tin trays lined in banana leaves that contained stickky rice with gooey layers of latik have been replaced by fishball vendors on pushcarts. 3) Andok's Lechon Manok and Liempo have all but overtaken the barbecue vendors on the street corners who have diversified into selling not just bbq and hotdogs but adidas, iud, dugo, itlog na orange, kwek-kwek, isaw and calamares. 4)The mobile disco rentals in the mid seventies to late eighties have been replaced by video carrera and videoke rentals for private parties and inuman and even lamayans.
As a Mabuhay Guide, I would have loved for guests to have seen how we did daily chores in the past. Our enterprising spirit has spurred us to make changes in our way of life. And the current trend now for small business enterprise is... the laundromat!
Let's hope with this current trend they don't continue to dump dirt into the Pasig River. The clean-up drive on the Pasig has yielded positive results so far. From a record 37 million metric tons of garbage dumped daily into the Pasig, it has been reduced and cleaned to the point that the Pasig now has been elevated to class C which means that other life forms are beginning to thrive in the river now.
TRY THE PASIG RIVER FERRY CRUISE... I stayed on the deck one time and was pleasantly surprised that the water no longer stinks... There's hope for us yet!!!
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