Buhay AMERICA

Akala ng mga tao na nasa Pilipinas kapag nasa America ka akala nila madami ka ng pera. Ang totoo, madami kang utang, dahil credit card lahat ang gamit mo sa pagbili mo ng mga gamit mo. Kailangan mo gumamit ng credit card para magka-credit history ka, kase kapag hindi ka umutang o wala kang utang, ibig sabihin wala kang kapasidad magbayad. Akala nila mayaman ka na kase may kotse ka na. Ang totoo, kapag hindi ka bumili ng kotse sa America maglalakad ka ng milya-milya sa ilalim ng init ng araw o kaya sa snow. walang jeepney, tricycle o padyak sa America. Akala nila masaya ang buhay sa Amerika, Ang totoo, puro ka trabaho, kase pag di ka nagtrabaho, wala kang pambayad ng bills mo sa kotse, credit cards, ilaw, tubig, insurance, bahay at iba pa. Hindi ka na pwedeng tumambay sa kapit-bahay, kase busy din sila maghanap-buhay pangbayad ng bills nila. Akala nila masaya ka kase nagpapadala ka ng pictures mo sa DisneyLand, Seaworld, SixFlags, Universal Studios at iba pang attractions. Ang totoo, kailangang ngumiti ka, kasi nagbayad ka ng $70.00 para makarating ka dun, kailangan mo naman ng 10 hours na suweldo mong pinangbayad sa ticket. Akala nila malaki na ang kinikita mo kase dolyar na sweldo mo. Ang totoo, malaki pagpinalit mo ng peso, pero dolyar din ang gastos mo sa America. Ibig sabihin ang dolyar mong kinita sa presyong dolyar mo din gagastusin. Ang 15.00 pesos na sardinas sa Pilipinas $1.00 sa America, and isang pakete ng sigarilyo sa Pilipinas 40.00, sa America $6.50, ang upa mo sa bahay na P10,000 sa Pilipinas, sa America $1,000.

Akala nila buhay milyonaryo ka na kase ang ganda ng bahay at kotse mo. Ang totoo milyon ang utang mo. Ang bago mong kotse 5 taon mong huhulugan o higit pa. Ang bahay 30 taon mong huhulugan. Ibig sabihin, alipin ka ng bahay at kotse mo.

Madaming naghahangad na makarating sa America . Lalo na mga nurses, at yung mga mahirap maging normal na manggagawa sa Pilipinas. Madalas pagod ka sa trabaho. Pag dating ng sweldo mo, kulang pa sa pagkain mo. Pero ganuon din sa ibang bansa katulad dito sa America. Hindi ibig sabihin dolyar na ang sweldo mo, yayaman ka na, kailangan mo ding magbanat ng buto para mabuhay ka sa ibang bansa. Isang malaking sakripisyo ang pag-alis mo sa bansang pinagsilangan at malungkot iwanan ang mga mahal sa buhay. hindi pinupulot ang pera o pinipitas. Hindi ako naninira ng pangarap, gusto ka lang buksan ang bintana ng katotohanan. ...KAYA PAG-ISIPAN NINYO MABUTI KUNG GUSTO NIO D2 SA AMERICA.

WHEN I TRAVEL, PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME, WHY I LEFT THE PHILIPPINES ? WELL HERE IT IS..........

It is the only place on earth where.

1. Every street has a basketball court.
2. Even doctors, lawyers and engineers are unemployed
3. Doctors study to become nurses FOR employment abroad
4. Students pay more money than they will earn afterwards
5. Call Center employees earn more money than teachers and nurses 6) Driving 4 KMS can take as much as 4 hrs.
6. Where Colonial mentality is dishonestly denied
7. People can pay to defy the law.
8. Floodwaters take up more than 90 percent of the streets during the rainy season.
9. Where everyone has a relative abroad who keeps them alive
10. Where insurance does not work
11. Where water can only be classified as tap or dirty
12. Clean water is for sale (35.00 pesos per galloon)
13. Where the government makes the people pray for miracles (AMEN to that)
14. Traffic signs are merely suggestions, not regulations
15. Where being mugged is normal and it happens to everyone; a cellphone costs your life
16. The definition of traffic is the 'non-movement' of vehicles
17. Where the fighter planes of the 1940's are used for military engagements
18. The NEW FIGHTER PLANES are displayed in Museums
19. Where soap operas tell the realities of life and where the news are provides drama
20. Where actors make the rules and where the politicians provide the entertainment
21. People can get away with stealing TRILLIONS of Pesos but not a Thousand
22. Where the squatters have more to complain (even if they do not pay their tax) than those employed and have their tax automatically deducted from their salaries; the government coddles squatters
23. And where everyone wants to leave the country.

According to a Manila businessman: THERE IS SO MUCH WIT IN THE PHILIPPINES BECAUSE 'WE ARE A COUNTRY WHERE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR IS NEEDED TO SURVIVE'. WE HAVE a 24-HR COMEDY SHOW HERE CALLED THE GOVERNMENT AND A HUGE RESERVE OF COMEDIANS MADE UP MOSTLY OF POLITICIANS AND BAD ACTORS.

SO KABABAYAN, WHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE?

Article About the Philippines

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING 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 immigrationand 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 mealtime are 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 t o 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?" "I eat whenever I SEE FOOD!"

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 do or-bell-like combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Even our formerly 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 as resonance 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.