A taste of Korean food

8:23 PM 0 Comments


I had a taste of Korean food before but not like tonight. Before, I just took a taste from someone's lunch box. Now, I had quite a lot. It's quite what I expected: spicy!. I like spicy foods but there's something about Korean food that just doesn't fit my taste (No offense Hong! hehehe. Maybe it's just my Filipino taste buds hehehe. Or maybe the taste buds I inherited from my Chinese ancestors). However, despite how foreign the taste is, just take a look at the picture, it's almost wiped clean hehehe. Well what can I say? Filipinos love to eat. As what was mentioned in my previous post (as observed by a foreigner, Filipinos love to eat and this is a seafood diet hahaha). To my Filipino friends, it's quite good to experience other countries' foods. We can somehow have a taste of their culture. Carpe Diem!

Where else but in the Philippnes

3:01 PM 1 Comments

Here's another email I received from one of my previous officemates... It's really funny

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED TO RELEASE STRESS..... This is so funny...take time to read all the way to the end.
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.

BEST JOKE in some country

11:34 PM 0 Comments

I would like to share this joke forwarded to me by my friend and high school classmate...

One Chinese person walks into a bar in America late one night and he saw
Steven Spielberg. As he was a great fan of his movies, he rushes over to
him, and asks for his autograph.
Instead, Spielberg gives him a slap and says "You Chinese people bombed
our Pearl Harbor, get out of here."
The astonished Chinese man replied
"It was not the Chinese who bombed your
Pearl Harbor , it was the Japanese".
"Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, you're all the same,"
replied Spielberg.
In return, the Chinese gives Spielberg a slap and says
"You sank the
Titanic; my forefathers were on that ship."
Shocked, Spielberg replies "It was the iceberg that sank
the ship, not
me." The Chinese replies, "Iceberg, Spielberg, Carlsberg,
you're all the same."

Shake it off and step up

8:37 AM 0 Comments

I got this email from a friend who's out of the country, and I thought this is worth sharing :)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do.

Finally he decided the animal was old and the well needed to be covered up anyway, it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey. He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well.

At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement, he quieted down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well and was astonished at what he saw.

With every shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up.

Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off!

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a steeping stone.

We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up!

Shake it off and take a step up!



Remember the five simple rules to be happy:

1. Free ur heart from hatred.
2. Free ur mind from worries.
3. Live simply
4. Give more
5. Expect less

:)

Heaven and Hell is on Earth

11:02 PM 0 Comments

Just last August 4, 2007 at around 3 am, my uncle passed away. Though there were many undesirable behavior he had, many other good attributes overshadowed them. He was a true person who expresses what he feels with neither reservations nor pretensions. He was a true friend who was always there in times of need even if his resources were too limited. At our place in the province, you can see people who are living within and below poverty level. These were his friends and companion and were really at a loss for his death. There were quite a number of people who went to the funeral and until the day of burial. It was just so unfortunate that he wasn't able to stop his addiction to alcohol.
When he was still alive, he often mentioned that "Heaven and Hell is on Earth". People never really understood him. Even now, I still don't get what he really meant with that statement. At least what I've grasped is that we can experience all the misery (hell) and happiness (heaven) in this planet. He lived a life full of misery. That I know for sure. I don't know if he was ever happy. It really saddens me that I was unable to do anything out of his situation. Maybe I'm just too weak. Always pointing to the limited resources that I have. Always blaming even though I believe that people who love to blame are lame. But again, maybe he experienced the happiness through the companionship that we had with our family, and with his workers that served him really well. I just hope that I will eventually understand his words -- "Heaven and Hell is on Earth".

Something New

12:58 AM 1 Comments

I'm really not the blogger type. I must admit, I'm also lazy in reading. This blogging craze however intrigues me. One thing's for sure, I'm a curious person. So why not get into this thing and satisfy my curiosity. "Curiosity Killed the Cat" yeah I know that, but curiosity feeds you with knowledge, and "Knowledge is Power". This is something new and I think it's worth a try. Will I lose something here? Maybe, maybe not. What's important for me is I've made a choice. Carpe Diem! Seize the Day!