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Sirena
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Posted: Thu Nov 15th, 2007 02:22 am |
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I found this while wasting some time on the internet, and couldn't resist sharing it. I can really relate to this guy's experiences and first impressions of the Philippines.
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 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 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
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 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'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.
"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, 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 one of the senators
has a doorbell named 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 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)?
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
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Patric THEPHILS.COM
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Posted: Fri Nov 16th, 2007 08:54 pm |
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He he   ..... That was some good reading Sirena !
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rosesweden
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Posted: Sun Dec 2nd, 2007 08:03 pm |
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| You real describe Philippine perfectly he he he
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tom_shor1
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Posted: Sat Jan 12th, 2008 02:41 am |
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Very good.
I wouldn't eat a balut even if you had a pistol.
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acman
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Posted: Wed Feb 6th, 2008 11:57 am |
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| very good imformation
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Carabao Kevin
Super Moderator
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Posted: Sun Feb 17th, 2008 05:10 pm |
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Bravo....Bravo...An excellent post!
I love the name stuff,Thanks Sirena!
-Mabuhay-
-Kevin
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