Naughty

I must admit, may kapilyahan din ako nung bata pa ‘ko! Anyway, all kids are naughty. Kanya-kanya nga lang ng paraan…

I have 2 elder brothers and next to me is also a brother. Ang youngest – yun ang sister! Sabihin pa, in-between ako ng mga boys so I act and play like a boy! Tomboy nga ang tawag sa ‘kin nung bata pa ko. I play guns, swords, tantsing, jolen… I even climb trees, jump from the tree, nagbabaras din, etc.! Kung ano ang games ng brothers ko, yun din ang laro ko. My mother used to call me ‘barako!’

It was late in the afternoon and I noticed my brother heading to the toilet. I guessed he’s going to have a poo. Masyadong matatakutin ang kapatid kong yun. Well, considering he’s too young then, hindi kataka-taka.  Ewan ko ba kung ano’ng pumasok sa isip ko… There is a small hole at the toilet door so I had a peep. I saw him sitting on his legs on top of the toilet bowl, nakapangalumbaba (say mo? dalawang kamay pa ka mo) at umiikot ang paningin sa ceilings… Napangiti ako and I feel like having a good fun! I thought, “I wonder what he is thinking… probably something scary again!” Bigla akong sumigaw ng malakas, “Waaaa!!!” I banged the door and pushed it hard! Muntik nang mahulog sa unidoro ang paa ng brother ko sa gulat at takot! He stand up and cried really loud!

Grabe ang tawa ko! Kaya lang, I end up crying as well… Bakit kamo? Napalo ako ni mother…! ;(

Digital Scrapping

One of my favourite past time is digital scrapping. I start scrapping digitally because of my grandson. It's lovely to see his pictures with designs!

Here is a layout. I got the kit from Beacon Scrap - Thanks! 
   http://beaconscrap.livejournal.com/

First month with mum

Aiden 6 months

I did the layout myself but I can't remember the site where I got the kits. I love these kits... Pity I lost it. It was saved on my external hard drive (Maxtor).  
Tip: If you want to buy an external hard drive and wouldn't like to lose your files, don't buy Maxtor!

Aiden Jace after a year!

                            Here are some of my favourite scrap booking sites:

                                 http://scrapbyyanna.blogspot.com/

                                 http://raspberryroaddesigns.blogspot.com/

                                 http://snowsmoon-myworld.blogspot.com/

                                 http://creativeelegancedesigns.blogspot.com/

                                 http://lizzgasawaydesigns.blogspot.com/

Kuro-kuro

Sabihin nating nakaka-offend ang obserbasyon ni Matthew Sutherland… Pero bilang isang Pilipino, tayo mismo ang makakapagsabi kung totoo o hindi ang mga observation n’ya.

First the balut. I must admit, I ate balut when I was a kid. Considering that Balut industry is very popular in my hometown, and my uncles and cousins used to work in ‘Balutan.’ I am not surprised on his comment about balut. Please remember that even some of us Filipinos, don’t eat balut and see it as distasteful. Tell me if I am wrong!

I have been to the UK and I have seen what the Brits eat. Their main meal is their dinner, and most of the time sandwiches are what they eat during the day (I don't think we can handle that). Breakfast is very unusual – egg, sausage, tomato, beans, bacon, black pudding, fried bread, mushrooms - but not every morning (usually on a weekend). A cup of tea or coffee is just fine – very  few drink plain water. It’s tea, coffee or soft drinks.  Yes, we eat a lot – at least 8 times a day pero walang masyadong matataba sa atin or mayroon man, di kasing tataba nila!  Matthew could go the whole year without eating rice. I bet he can’t go the whole year without eating potato or bread  which is the same; I could go the whole year without eating potato. Kanya-kanyang version lang yun!

I don’t drink alcohol but I guess it’s nice to drink with ‘pulutan’. Besides, drinking in an empty stomach will get you drunk twice as fast. There is nothing in your system to help dilute the alcohol and it goes directly into your system. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Filipinos like ‘pulutan.’ I’m surprised the Jumping Salad was not mentioned.

Speaking of blood soup, Brits have their own version of Dinuguan. Hindi nga lang soup but still blood! It is called Black Pudding! It is a blend of onions, pork fat, oatmeal, flavourings and blood (usually from pig) and is normally served for breakfast. 

While we look after our love ones when they grow old and sick, they just dump theirs in care homes. Ito ang isang maipagmamalaki natin sa kanila. Kung minsan nga, kahit bata pa, basta’t may kapansanan, or may sakit at nangangailangan ng matagal na gamutan, sa care home na rin ang bagsak! Walang magtiyagang mag-alaga kahit mga mahal sa buhay! Iyun ang kanilang kultura na taliwas sa atin.

Anyway, what I really admire about the Brits are discipline and good manners. They queue and wait for their turn saan man. Kapag sumakay ka ng bus, hindi ka paparahan kundi sa tamang lugar ng sakayan ganoon din sa pagbaba. If you need to cross the street, basta tumayo ka na sa pedestrian lane, lahat ng sasakyan ay titigil at patatawirin ka kahit walang stop light. When driving and you wish to change lanes, Brit drivers slow down to let you in - not try to block you out.  Please, excuse me and thank you is a part of everyday life.

So there you go – every country has their own culture - may pangit man, may maganda rin !!!

Interesting Observation

Nabasa na ba ninyo ang famous articles (written in 1999) about the Filipino culture? This was written by a British expat named Matthew Sutherland. Actually, umikot ito sa internet years ago.

A 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 discernible 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!"). 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 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 high" 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 appetite.

A Rhose by Any Other Name

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!

My first long pants

I never had a long pants when I was a kid. Well, not until I reached my 6th grade in school. Mayroon kaming field trip noon sa Manila before graduation, and s'yempre pa, mas comfortable ang nakapants sa ganoong occasion. I nagged my father, (mas malakas kasi ako kay papa kaya s'ya ang inuungutan ko) :) na bilhan ako ng long pants. Finally, sa kauungot ko, nagpunta kami sa palengke para bumili! I'm so happy! Sa wakas, nagkaroon din ako ng long pants! I still remember the colour - red-orange with black prints ('yun ang uso noon!). My father bought me a matching top as well! Sabihin pa, I was not able to sleep that night!

Field trip day - I'm so excited hindi lang dahil sa pants ko kundi dahil na rin sa first time field trip ko 'yun! Para akong nasa cloud 9! Madaling araw pa lang ('di yata ako nakatulog) gising na ko! Ayos ang porma ko! Isang bus lang ang occupied namin dahil di naman kami marami. Hindi ko na halos matandaan ang mga pinuntahan namin except sa isang lugar… Ang ‘Nayong Pilipino’!

First time ko ring narating ang ‘Nayong Pilipino.’ Gandang-ganda ako dahil makikita doon ang miniature ng magagandang tanawin sa Pilipinas; gaya ng Mayon Volcano, Magellan Cross, Banaue Rice Terraces… atbp. Enjoy na enjoy talaga ako! I went to see the Rice Terraces with my classmate. Inihakbang ko ang isang paa ko paakyat sa terraces. Medyo mataas pero kayang abutin ng legs ko. Suddenly, I heard a creak! Hindi ko pinansin. Akyat pa rin ako! Then another creak! Oh my gulay!!! It was my new pants pala! Natastas ang tahi sa pundyo at pumaitaas na hanggang puwit!  Ano ba yan…? I don’t know what to do… People can see my undies! Hiyang-hiya ako sa mga tao...! Sa isip ko, paniguradong pagtatawanan ako at tutuksuhin ng mga classmates ko kapag nakita…! Hu! Hu! :( Hindi ko alam kung paano’ng paglalakad ang gagawin ko pabalik sa bus…Parang bigla akong pinagtakluban ng langit at lupa…! I tried to find something to cover my bum! Buti na lang may nakuha akong paper plate… So habang naglalakad ako, hawak ko si paper plate at pasimpleng nakatakip sa puwit ko…! Kapag walang tao sa likod ko, kunwari pamaypay ko si paper plate dahil mainit! Nakakahiya talaga! Salamat at tila hindi yata nakahalata ang mga kaklase ko na nabutas ang pants ko!

Oh well…very unforgettable talaga ang first long pants ko...! That's all for now! See yah! x

Luho

"Ayokong masanay sa mga bagay na p'wede namang wala sa buhay ko..." - Bob Ong

I remember when we were kids... pumupunta pa kami sa kapit-bahay para lamang makipanood ng 'Wild Wild West' sa television. And that only happened whenever my father is not around. Kapag nariyan s'ya kasi, siguradong sermon ang aabutin namin.  

Gustung-gusto ko noon na magkaroon kami ng sarili naming tv para 'di na ako nakikipanood sa kapit-bahay. Ang hirap kasing makipanood... kapag may sipon ka at suminghot, nag-rereact kaagad ang anak ng kapit-bahay namin.

Minsan tinanong ko si mother kung bakit wala kaming tv. Sabi n'ya, "May pera man tayo o wala, your father will not buy a television dahil makakasira lamang iyon sa concentration ninyo sa pag-aaral." No comment na lang ako... kung sa bagay, hindi naman necessity ang tv at p'wede naman akong mabuhay ng wala kami noon. So tiis na lang... at makuntento na lang sa pakikinig kay 'Tia Dely' sa hapon at 'Beinte Quatro Oras' tuwing gabi...

Naiisip ko minsan, kahit salat kami sa maraming bagay noon, masaya kaming magkakapatid. We learn to appreciate things... little things... simple things... Naalala ko pa ang dessert namin - lemon candy, yung lima singko. Lima kaming magkakapatid so, tig-isa kami. Minsan hati-hati sa isang bukayo! Enjoy na enjoy na kami! :o) Ha! ha! Until now, hindi ko pa rin nalilimutan ang contentment na minsan kong naramdaman sa buhay ko... and ang sarap ng feeling - naiiba!!!

Anyway, nagkaroon din kami ng tv (sa wakas)! Yun nga lang 'di ko na rin na enjoy dahil nung time na 'yun nasa Manila na ako at nagtatrabaho...