All hails to our teacher in History 16 for finding such hilarious articles

Matter of Taste

by Matthew Sutherland

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself

in most respects well-assimilated. However, there is one key step on 

the road to full assimilation which I have yet to take, and that's to eat

BALUT.  The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and 

ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will

be no turning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of

newspaper, much like English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how gross it is. 

It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more

likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially-formed 

baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying

stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat

one without fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these

crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', 

the vile,pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus...

excuse me, I have to go and throw up now. I'll be back in a minute.

Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat.

They eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are called,

in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, pica-pica,pulutan, dinner,

and no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the-fridge-so-it-doesn't-count. The

short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating SkyFlakes from

the open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never far from food in

the Philippines. If you doubt this, next time you're driving home from 

work, try this game. See how long you can drive without seeing food and I

don't mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a man on the

sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking through the traffic 

selling nuts or candy. I bet it's less than one minute.

Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines.

Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice-even breakfast. In the UK, I

could go a whole year without eating rice.  

Second, it's impossible to drink without eating. A bottle of San Miguel

just isn't the same without gambas or beef tapa.

Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their house without 

baon and a container of something cold to drink. You might as well ask a

Filipino to leave home without his pants on.

And lastly, where I come from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you

eat with a spoon and fork. You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce

with a knife.

One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always

ask you to SHARE their food.

In my office, if you catch anyone attacking their baon, they will 

always go. "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" ("Let's eat!"). This confused me, until I 

realized that they didn't actually expect me to sit down and start munching on their boneless bangus.

In fact, the polite response is something like, "No thanks, I just 

ate."

But the principle is sound-if you have food on your plate, you are

expected to share it, however hungry you are, with those who may be 

even hungrier. I think that's great.

In fact, this is frequently even taken one step further. Many Filipinos

use "Have you eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA NA?") as a general greeting,

irrespective of time of day or location.

Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other

Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: spicy dishes like Bicol

Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut

milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it's hard to beat the sheer

wanton, cholesterholic frenzy of a good old-fashioned LECHON  (roast

pig)de leche feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on

a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feel your

arteries constricting with each successive mouthful.

I also share one key Pinoy trait ---a sweet tooth. I am thus the only

foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet burgers,

sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man who likes

to put jam on his pizza. Try it!

It's the weird food you want to avoid.

In addition to duck fetus in the half-shell, items to avoid in the

Philippines include pig's blood soup (DINUGUAN); bull's testicle soup,

the strangely-named "SOUP NUMBER  FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one

through four are); and the ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and

it's equally stinky sister, PATIS  (fish sauce) . Filipinos are so

addicted to these latter items that they will even risk arrest or deportation

trying to smuggle them into countries like Australia and the USA, which wisely ban the importation of items you can smell from more than 100 paces.

Then there's the small matter of the blue ice cream.

I have never been able to get my brain around eating blue food; the

ubiquitous UBE leaves me cold. 

And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)... The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food.

Here's a typical Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet. "What's a

seafood diet?" "When I see food, I eat it!"

Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals---the feet, the head, the

guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty

names, like "ADIDAS" (chicken feet); "KURBATA" (either just chicken's

neck, or "neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pigs ears);"PAL"

(chicken wings); "HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken intestines), and "BETAMAX" (video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood).

Yum, yum. Bon appetit.

A Rhose, by Any Other Name

by Matthew Sutherland

"A good name is rather to be chosen than great

riches" --(Proverbs 22:1)

WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the

first cultural differences to strike me was names.

The subject has provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement

ever since.

The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone

here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have

nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I 

am glad to say, to lose them.

The second thing that struck me is that Philippine  names for both 

girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as overbearingly

cutesy for anyone over about five. "Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put

it.

Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy

would be beaten to death at school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never

make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names like Babes,

Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech. Here, however, no one

bats an eyelid.

Then I noticed how many people have what I have come

to call "door-bell names". These are nicknames that sound like- well,

door-bells. There are millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are

some of the more common.

They can be, and frequently are, used in even more door-bell-like

combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on.

Even our newly-appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping. None

of these door-bell names exist where I come from,and hence sound

unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.

Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was 

called

Bing, replied "because my brother is called Bong". Faultless logic.

Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I 

come from "dong" is a slang word for... well, perhaps "talong" is the best 

Tagalog equivalent.

Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before

encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck. Such

names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared" 

symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.

Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming

their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the same

letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy. More imaginative parents

shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy,

Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse the more kids there

are-best to be born early or you could end up being a Baboy).

Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts  (Apple

Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). The main

advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted across

your trunk if you're a cab driver. That's another thing  I'd never seen

before coming to Manila - taxis with the driver's kids' names on the

trunk.

Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the

phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar

(for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for

Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not). That's a bit like me

being called something like "Engscowani" (for England, Scotland, Wales

and Northern Ireland).

Between you and me, I'm glad I'm not.

And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly

inserted letter 'h'. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve, I

have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give a touch of 

class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in creations like

Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-Jhun(Jhun2)?

There is also a whole separate field of name games-those where the

parents have exhibited a creative sense of humor on purpose.

I once had my house in London painted by a Czechoslovakian decorator by

the name of Peter Peter. 

I could never figure out if his parents had a fantastic sense of humor

or no imagination at all-it had to be one or the other.

But here in the Philippines, wonderful imagination and humor is often

applied to the naming process, particularly, it seems, in the Chinese

community. My favorites include Bach Johann Sebastian; Edgar Allan Pe;

Jonathan Livingston Sy; Magic Chiongson, Chica Go, and my girlfriend's

very own sister, Van Go.

I am assured these are real people, although I've only  met two of

them. I hope they don't mind being mentioned here.

How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with names

like John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where imagination

and exoticism rule the world of names. Even the towns here have weird

names; my favorite is the unbelievably named town of Sexmoan

(ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles).

Where else in the world could that really be true? Where else in the

world could the head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin?

Where else but the Philippines!

Note:

Philippines has a senator named Joker, and it  is his legal name.

Blogs, blogs, blogs... now what?

another online site?????? goodness! di na jud ko maibut sa computer....

got eskwela account. friendster account, multiply account, Deviant Art account, Youtube account, crunchyroll account, yahoo account and google account... what's next? a website of my own?

that would be super!!!

but i have no time updating all this accounts. but anyway, that's life.

God's will be done.

~ADIEU~