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:

    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 to 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?