UNIQUELY 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, 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!&quot. 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?&quot 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 our senator
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.
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.




Rosemarie Burden
UK Service Team
Tel. 00-44-1625-445-288
Fax.00-44-1625-445-262

Only in the Philippines "Walang ganyan sa states..."

Extremely one of the great features of being a Filipino is in this article which im very much happy to see with. I just came to relialize that my wrong prejudices must go right away in the trash. Not all have bad and extremely exfoliating impression of our country with regards to culture shock issues similarly to that of Mr. Art Bell articles with full sway humiliation. Uniquely Filipino is just one opposite articles of Mr. Art Bell which often drive my bloods to high 145 degrees boiling of neither have to break the wall of my e-mail window to send it to hundre of users but I let him play the way of his personal impressioned. Anyway thakz for this uniquely Filipino which pays may lot of smiles and good feelings after all reading " DONG" is also a part with..... Thankz Nenen422 for sharing this...

PROUD TO BE PINOY .... Pinay? hahahaha

this made my eyes teary, not only for laughing but my hearts swells with pride of being a filipino

GO GO PINOY!!!