Change

After a pretty exhausting week full of mad scrambling, we can all finally look forward to a long weekend break. It's with a bit of pain that I found out that my favorite shopping place for games, gadgets and videos, Virra Mall in Greenhills, is going to be renovated, or worse, torn down to make way for a new mall. It was inevitable, given that the main Virra Mall building has been there since I was a little kid.

I remember several years ago, Virra Mall on the 3rd Floor was THE hub for electronic gaming and entertainment, with all the major and always updated game shops and arcades present in force. Every week was Christmas with new games. It was cool to just watch gamers have at it with the latest Tekken, Streetfighter or other new brawler released. Heaven.
That all changed with a fire that gutted the nearby Jollibee, and drove all happiness from the floor. It would take a long time for things to become regular again- in many ways, the old world and the glory was lost forever. Nowadays, Virral Mall is still rife with bootleg videos, games and dvds. The pirates are irritating in their intrusive persistence, and the place literally stinks of decay sometimes. Yeah, it's about time for change I guess. At least make the place cleaner, better lit and less shady-looking. Will it also entail the place be more expensive? Part of Virra's appeal was the rock-bottom prices of goods, but perhaps even that is something that we cannot bank on forever.

Tomorrow, I'll try to pass by and see what's left, or what's happening to a place I both love and hate. It's gonna hurt to say goodbye to it, but not too much. Well, nothing a trip to other Black Markets won't fix. Heh.