Xpat....
A funny story by matthew sutherland that should be read by all filipinos.... stand up and be proud to be a noypi in a very unique way....
Matter of Taste
By Matthew Sutherland
I have now been in this country for over six years,and consider myself in most respects wellassimilated. However, there is one key step on theroad 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 callimmigration and ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will be noturning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duckegg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips, bystreet vendors usually after dark, presumably so youcan't see how gross it is. It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can'timagine anything more likely to dispel sexual desirethan crunching on a partially formed baby duckswimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the eggcomes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat onewithout fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws.Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Othersprefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds the afore mentioned 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, meriendaceyna, 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. Ibet 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 aswell 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. Ithink that's great! In fact, this is frequently even taken one stepfurther. 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 ofit is very good: Spicy dishes like Bicol Express(strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut milk; anything KINILAW; andanything 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, lighta fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feelyour 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 inthe 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 stinkysister, 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 than100 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 andthigh" 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 acontinuing source of amazement and amusement eversince. 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 intoadulthood we tend, I am glad to say, to lose them.The second thing that struck me is that Philippinenames for both girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as over bearingly 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 schoolby pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names likeBabes, 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 ofthem. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of themore common. They can be, and frequently are, usedin even more door-bell-like combinations such asBing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Evenour newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping. None of these doorbell names exist whereI 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 mybrother 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 unusualone: Leck-Leck. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared" symbol, as inLen2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.Then there is the trend for parents to stick to atheme when naming their children. This can be assimple 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 getworse the more kids there are-best to be born earlyor 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 advantageof 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, Josephand 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 thinkit is designed to give a touch of class to anotherwise only averagely weird name. It results increations 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 isthe unbelievably named town of Sexmoan (ironicallyclose to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the world could that really be true?Where else in the world could the head of the Churchreally be called Cardinal Sin?Where else but the Philippines! Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and itis his legal name.....
hahaha... how i miss P.I and Manila
~trickpa Trickyu~
Matter of Taste
By Matthew Sutherland
I have now been in this country for over six years,and consider myself in most respects wellassimilated. However, there is one key step on theroad 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 callimmigration and ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will be noturning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duckegg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips, bystreet vendors usually after dark, presumably so youcan't see how gross it is. It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can'timagine anything more likely to dispel sexual desirethan crunching on a partially formed baby duckswimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the eggcomes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat onewithout fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws.Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Othersprefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds the afore mentioned 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, meriendaceyna, 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. Ibet 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 aswell 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. Ithink that's great! In fact, this is frequently even taken one stepfurther. 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 ofit is very good: Spicy dishes like Bicol Express(strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut milk; anything KINILAW; andanything 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, lighta fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feelyour 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 inthe 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 stinkysister, 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 than100 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 andthigh" 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 acontinuing source of amazement and amusement eversince. 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 intoadulthood we tend, I am glad to say, to lose them.The second thing that struck me is that Philippinenames for both girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as over bearingly 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 schoolby pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names likeBabes, 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 ofthem. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of themore common. They can be, and frequently are, usedin even more door-bell-like combinations such asBing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Evenour newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping. None of these doorbell names exist whereI 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 mybrother 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 unusualone: Leck-Leck. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared" symbol, as inLen2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.Then there is the trend for parents to stick to atheme when naming their children. This can be assimple 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 getworse the more kids there are-best to be born earlyor 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 advantageof 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, Josephand 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 thinkit is designed to give a touch of class to anotherwise only averagely weird name. It results increations 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 isthe unbelievably named town of Sexmoan (ironicallyclose to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the world could that really be true?Where else in the world could the head of the Churchreally be called Cardinal Sin?Where else but the Philippines! Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and itis his legal name.....
hahaha... how i miss P.I and Manila
~trickpa Trickyu~
posted by trickpa trickyu @ 8:37 AM
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