From a British journalist stationed in the Philippines

British to Pilipino's - FYI


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. "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 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 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.