Taking a tour of Binondo, a living entity

MY friend, Judy Lao, took me on a tour of Binondo last Sunday. Sunday because it’s a day of rest and there is less traffic.

We started off with a visit to the Chinese Cemetery, which is a quiet enclave even on a visiting day like Sunday. There were a few caretakers lounging about the quiet and well-ordered streets fronting mausoleums, some multi-storied, others smaller and more modest in scale but everyone honoring ancestors, ascendants and relatives gone to the next world. Despite the concrete there were a good number of flowering trees and bushes, some grass and small flowers that lent a mixed world of cement and Nature. Caretakers were watering the plants.