Unrepaired

What I found funny with this country is, despite the whole great system of preserving the earth, such as complicated system for disposing your trash (burnable, not burnable, pet bottle, and so on), big car/electronic companies promoting and selling their new ECO products, convenient recycle shop within bus reach...

...they seemed to lack of simple affordable shoe repair shops!!
Ridiculous, right??!!

I went first time to repair my geta (wooden japanese summer sandal), it's rubber sole had grew thin so I went to replace it with a new one. I thought, it will only cost me like 500 yen or something, but NOOO... it will cost me 2000 something yen! The repairman even suggested me to buy a new geta, which is kind of unnecessary because the upper part of the thing still doing fine (a bit dirty, yes, but fine)... I just needed new rubber sole.

Frustrated, I took the geta when I went home to Bekasi, and ouila! The problem was fixed with just merely 20,000 rupiahs (with good quality of sole).

The second time, when my new shoe's rubber sole (I know, ironic isn't it?---it being new and all) had broken off, I rushed to the nearest shoes repair shop and found out that they will charge me about 1500 yen to glue (glue not sew) them back, but cannot guarantee they will stay that way, especially after rainy days. I immediately withdrew cause the shoe themselves only cost me around the same amount.

I resolved by going to 100 yen shop and bought permanent glue. Haven't try putting on the shoe again, but don't really have high hopes.

The third time, and I think this was the one time that really made me wrote this entry, was the time when I realized that my beloved brown boots has shown bits of it fighting the force of nature. I read/heard somewhere that Japan's shoe repair shops have the service to cover the bruised leather of your shoes, they called it "cleaning".

So I went to ask, not with high hopes of course, after all we humans learned from our experiences. And how that experiences proved themselves worthy! The guy said it will probably cost me about 9000 yen to have that kind of service!!

No more wondering now why they like to buy new shoes better, rather than preserving the old and comfortable ones. Hence, the whole consumerism way of living...

Really really sad, I think though. I can imagine the piling of old/not so old/still wearable shoes in the garbage dump in every cities of Japan.

Anyway, I settled the last problem with buying brown shoe polish. Cannot really fix the deep bruises on my boots, but it cover them a bit... give them character, if I can say for myself...

***deep sighs...