| Pangalang Pinoy
May isang kwento kung bakit nawalan daw ng interes matuto ang isang dayuhan ng Tagalog. Eto kasi ang nadinig niya habang nakasakay siya ng jeep
Driver: Bababa ba?
Pasahero: Bababa
Maraming "variation" and mga ganitong tagpo sa buhay nating mga Pilipino. Kaya minsan sa aking paglalagi sa forum nakita ko ang sumusunod na listahan ng mga kakaibang Pinoy shops and business names.
Alabank (rural bank of Alabang)
Anita Bakery
My Yummy Vice (carinderia sa may UP)
Babalik Karinderia
Bote Nga Sa'Yo (Used Bottle Shop)
Candies Be Love? (candy store)
Christopher Plumbing (plumbing contractor)
Caintacky Fried Chicken (in Cainta, Rizal)
Cinna Von (a laundromat)
Cleopata's (bakahan and manukan)
Crispy per minute ( Crispy Pata Eatery)
Curl Up And Dye (Beauty Salon)
Doris Day and Night (24 hour eatery)
Elizabeth Tailoring
Fagoofyt (a children's hair salon on J. Elizalde
Avenue in BF Paranaque)
Felix the Cut (Barber Shop)
Fernando Pe's Box Office Hits (video rental shop in
Busuanga, Palawan)
Goldirocks (Gravel & Sand Shop)
Happy Birthday Toyo (a soy sauce brand in the 70's)
Holland Hopia (owned by Mr. Ho; next door is Poland
Hopia, owned by Mr. Po in Chinatown Manila),
Leon King Video Rental (Las Pinas)
Let's Goat-Together (kambingan cum beer garden)
Maid To Order (Maids Placement Agency)
MacDonuts (Donut Shop)
Mang Donald's (burger joint, Naga City plaza)
Meating Place (Meat Shop)
Meatropolis (meat shop)
Memory Drug (A Mercury Drug Clone)
Miki Mao (noodle eatery)
Saudia Hairlines (Beauty Salon)
Side-saki (side street eatery beside Mandarin Hotel)
Sophisticut (unisex hair salon)
Susan's Roses (flower shop)
Sylvestre's Salon
TapSi TurBi (Tapa & Sinangag, Turon at Bibingka)
The Fried of Marikina (fried chicken shop)
The Way We Wear (Boutique)
Wrap and Roll (lumpia outlet, Quad, Makati)
Bill's Gate Internet Cafe (in Pasig)
A menu in a seafood restaurant has these entrees:
Isda best,
Pusit to the limit, and Hipon coming back.
A PLDT sign:
SLOW MEN AT WORK
Flower shop sign near U.P. Diliman
Petal Attraction
Along Boni Avenue, Mandaluyong
Pansit ng taga-Malaboni
On Jeepney and Bus signs
Before pay, tell where get the on before get the off
Full string to stop driver
God knows Hudas not pay
For reckless driving, call ###-#####
Don't get closed to me, get closed to God
On window of a restaurant in Baguio.
Wanted: Boy Waitress
On a carinderia
Cooking ng ina mo
Cooking ng ina mo rin (right across Cooking ng ina mo)
In Chinatown
Le Cheng Tea House
Mayroon ding isang British writer na sobrang naaliw sa mga pangalan at pagkaing pinoy. Eto yung dalawang "article" na sinulat niya:
A Rhose, by Any Other Name
by Matthew Sutherland
"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
asoverbearingly 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,
door-bells. 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 door-bell
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)?
There is also a whole separate field of name
games-those where the parents have
exhibited a creative sense of humor on purpose. I once
had my house in London
painted by a Czechoslovakian decorator by the name of
Peter Peter. I could
never figure out if his parents had a fantastic sense
of humor or no imagination at all-it had to be one or
the other.
But here in the Philippines, wonderful imagination and
humor is often applied
to the naming process, particularly, it seems, in the
Chinese community. My
favourites include Bach Johann Sebastian; Edgar Allan
Pe; Jonathan Livingston
Sy; Magic Chiongson, Chica Go, and my girlfriend's
very own sister, Van Go. I
am assured these are real people, although I've only
met two of them. I hope
they don't mind being mentioned here.
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 unbelieveably-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.
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!").
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, cholesterholic 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" (chickeen'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.
|
