Here and There
Highway intersection within Calasiao town
By Gerry Garcia
THE long stretch of road starting from the city’s main traffic intersection and leading northward to its immediate neighbor Calasiao town, is always burdened with heavy traffic from early morning even to the late hours of night during week days . . . and there’s no way to know whether you are still in Dagupan or already in Calasiao if it were not for the welcome arch built on the spot alleged to be the boundary between the city and the municipality of Calasiao.
Business establishments set up on the Dagupan portion of the road are numerous and so continuous that they spilled over to the Calasiao part of the road beginning with the flourishing SOY Auto Supply barely past the boundary arch!
And from this point onward, it is Calasiao territory . . . up to the highway intersection several meters away from where the new De Venecia diversion road begins.
It’s also here where, on account of a non-functioning electric traffic light system, tremendous traffic snarl is always bound to occur. That’s why some Calasiao cops are not happy about being tasked with controlling traffic here.
It would be interesting to know also how the municipality of Calasiao-about-to-become-a-city can afford to cope with the problem of a major highway intersection taking place within its confines.
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Congestion in this intersection center is not helped any by the Jollibee fast-food restaurant built virtually in the middle and doing brisk business. There is also within the intersection area, the well known Chow King restaurant.
And nearby stands the Regency Hotel drawing visitors from Dagupan City and elsewhere.
Along the De Venecia highway leading to Sta. Barbara, the Manila-based retail giant Robinsons has reportedly bought a 7-hectare lot in which it is supposed to build Calasiao’s first ever commercial mall.
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Romulo “Mulong” Villamil, erstwhile Associate Editor of The Punch in the early 50s, who also wrote “This Much”, a weekly opinion column, is now in town, a retired member of the Philippine consulate in California. Also a “Cano” citizen.
Col. Asterio M. Villamil, former Chief of Chaplains, Philippine Constabulary Camp Crame, Q.C. who just died recently was Mulong’s younger brother. We remember “Asting”, by which we used to call the late colonel when he was a teenager, as a young student of the Binmaley Seminary who sang tenor a la Caruso in the seminary all-male choir. His bosom pal, if we remember correctly, was the late Tony Miranda of the local DBP here who was also an ex-seminarian.
We also had an all-male church choir in those years where both Asting and Tony had been helpful in the tenor section. With us then were the late Dagupan Police Chief Bing Calimlim, singing bass with this writer and the late Manuel Fernandez, former dean of UPANG’s college of Engineering.
(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/here-and-there/)
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