This Observations would greatly give a smile to a true filipino...
The following is from a British
journalist stationed in the Philippines .
His observations are so hilarious!!!!
This was written in 1999.
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, merienda
ceyna, dinner, bedtime snacks 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 Sky Flakes
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 (food in small container) 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,
cholesterolic frenzy of a good old-fashioned
LECHON de leche (roast pig) 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.
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 purple ice cream.
I have never been able to get my brain around eating purple
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's 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.
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,
doorbells. 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 doorbell 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
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)?
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.
"Onli in d Phils"..inspiration of a true Filipino..
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