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, 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 nameslike 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
favourites 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 unbelieveably-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! Only in the Philippines! Note: Philippines
has a senator named Joker, and it is his legal name.