Four mornings ago, I bought these mongo-ensaimadas from a local bakery where I specifically asked the tindera (saleslady) to get me the ones buried under the bulk believing that the flies swarming inside their crystal estante (yes, the flies were inside already having breakfast ahead of the customers!) have not licked them yet. Before packing them, she bathed the ensaimadas with margarine and sugar.
I noticed that the whole bakery and the commercial spaces selling food stuff in the area were all swarmed with flies, which momentarily led me to think I was in Egypt and experiencing first-hand the Fourth Plague sent as punishment by God.
But I immediately realized there were no pyramids around me and the tindera never had the semblance of Cleopatra, although I felt like the Pharaoh who had to go out of my palace in order to buy bread after having lost all my slaves to Moses. 😂
So, after paying 25 pesos for two mongo-ensaimadas, I walked towards the direction of the Nile River to visit another bakery which, I found out, was also swarmed with local flies. From there, I got me another kind of bread - pan de sal, or bread of salt, at five pesos each and whose sizes I liked better than those costing two pesos because they were bigger and you could spread your butter on a wider surface. This bakery had smaller, pocket estantes where flies had difficulty squeezing in and I observed their tinderas were diligently shooing flies away from the food, unlike the first bakery where flies seemed to be treated as part of the family. 😝
After getting home on foot (I had no chariot since I lost all my slaves and don't know how to drive one), I microwaved the two ensaimadas. But after inspecting a small black spot that I initially thought to be mongo (mung bean), I realized the bean had wings!
Ang ensaimada may pa-aman nga langaw!😡
A fly went home with me!😱
I put the warmed ensaimadas back to the white plastic bag, got on with breakfast and enjoyed the pan de sal instead. And in between bites of the bread with butter and sips of hot coffee, I put myself in the sandals of the Pharaoh and devised a plan on how to tackle this plague.
By mid-morning, I was making calls to the Office of the Mayor to ask which department was in charge of the dirty city's sanitation and of establishments selling flies as foodstuff.
On my first call to the City Health Department using the number I was given, my conversation with a lady, whom I presumed to be a nurse, went nowhere because she told me I was calling 'Maternity'. So, I then thought she was a midwife or she was a pregnant woman who happened to pick up the phone. Maybe she was waiting for her water to break and was just bored, so she made herself useful by answering the phone intended as a Covid-19 hotline.
In the end, when she realized she couldn't help me, she suggested that I visit the City Health Department and speak in person with the doctor in charge. And that was when I had to scold her:
"Ayta. Pakudtu-on mo pa ko dirâ kag e-expose sa mga kagaw niyo? Ano pulos sang telepono?"
"Geez. You want me to go there and expose myself to all your viruses? What's the use of phones?"
The midwife or the pregnant woman, or whoever she was, gave me the phone number of the doctor in charge. Unfortunately, again, 'the doctor is out' - the same words you'd read at his clinic door. His staff told me that he was at a bloodletting event at Barangay 1 in search of blood and probably a nice, free lunch as well.
I then gave the staff the details she needed to know: bakery with flies, ensaimada with a fly, and swarming flies all over the commercial area. And the most important details: my name and my cellphone number.
Yes, I expected the city government to call me back to tell me how they acted on the health concerns I just brought to their attention. (As of this writing, 72 hours since my call, I never received a word from the head of the City Health Department).
That afternoon at around 5, chariot-less but still disappointed, I went back to the bakery and told the owner and his tindera that one of their flies went home with my ensaimadas. I was expecting a profuse apology but instead, he just offered me to refund my 25 pesos or have another bread with the exact value in return.
They almost fed me with a fly, I had to make a trip back to their bakery just to return the dirtied bread, and yet this is the best they could do? 😡
If I were the Pharaoh, other than losing a customer for life, he'd lose his head on the spot and his tindera would be buried alive next to him. I figured he'd need someone to bake him ensaimadas in the afterlife.😹
And since I didn't want to receive a paper bill or coins, which might have been coated with germs, sugar grains and margarine, I chose to receive masa podrida instead.
At five pesos each, I was handed a pack of five masa podrida that also had been licked by flies. I could see there were still flies inside their crystal estante enjoying all the bread on display. There were no more mongo-ensaimada; they all must have been sold already to customers along with a few flies.
Mongo-ensaimadas with a fly exchanged with masa podrida licked by flies. How considerate of them. 😠
I didn't bring home the podridas, by the way. I gave them to a neighbor who didn't know about the story, or about the flies that licked the bread.😂
I waited three days - the period when total darkness covered Egypt because of the Ninth Plague - for me to write about this blog. If Egypt had ten plagues, mine's the eleventh: poor government service and even poorer customer service.😡
It's about the local government that doesn't care about sanitation and health of the locals, and the businesspeople who don't care about the cleanliness of the food they sell as long as they make money out of it.
Now, where can I get mongo-ensaimadas with no flies? 😄
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