Sunday, November 28, 2010

Hop and Shop in divisoria...

 Christmas season in the Philippines is incomplete without brushing tthrough the tiangge crowd of divisoria,The streets, alleyways and malls are bursting at the seams with all the pre-Christmas frenzy! With so many people packed into so little a shopping space,  Anyone with claustrophobia would be panicking! 

Divisoria's roots as a commercial center can be traced back to the Spanish period, during which non-Christianized Chinese were forbidden to live or trade inside nearby Intramuros, the Spanish capital. Relegated to the parian, Chinese merchants eventually set up their own community in present-day Binondo and gradually set up shop there and in surrounding areas, which came to include Divisoria.  The area continued to blossom into a commercial center in the 1900s, bolstered by the fact that the Tutuban Central Station, formerly the main railway station of the Philippine National Railways, became a major drop-off center for trade goods coming in from various provinces.

Divisoria is a market district in the heart of the City of Manila known for its wide assortment of low-priced goods and wholesale and bargain shopping. Clothes, accessories, toys, novelties, decorations, pirated films and music, electronics, fruits, dry goods, school, office and household supplies, fabrics, textiles, crafts, novelties, decorations and “everything under the sun” can be found in Divisoria, making it “the mecca of value shopping” and “the mother of all markets in Manila.”

No comments:

Post a Comment