Philippine Trivial Pursuit

Before we arrived in the Philippines, I could name only two places here . . . Manila and Subic Bay.  Everyone has heard of Manila, but it was Stan who made me familiar with Subic Bay and its main city, Olongapo.   Back in 1974, when I first met Stan, he was young, enticing, and a recent veteran of the U.S. Navy. He had many stories to tell.  He shared a few with me.  One of his tales has to do with his ship being ported in Olongapo City on Subic Bay. He referred to it as the rectum of the world.  I won’t go into detail.  I hear that since then, the city has graduated from a dismal, hopeless place serving a Naval base to an urbanized, first-class coastal city.  That’s what fifty-three years can do.

Now, I know more about the Philippines. This string of volcanic islands lies south of Taiwan and Japan, but north of the Indonesian islands. I can name a few of the Philippine islands and have an elementary sense of their locations.  We just spent the last three weeks in Cebu in the Visayas, or the beachy group of islands.  Next, we will see Palawan (El Nido and Puerto Princesa), and Luzon (Baguio and Manila) in the North group.  There is the South group of Philippine islands, too, called the Mindanao Group, but we won’t make it there. While our total stay in the Philippines consumes about two months, we will have only scratched the surface here.

This is a bit out of context, but it is a topic on my mind.

It recently occurred to me how many ways there are that people use to eat. There’s the American style characterized by the “cut and switch” method, with the fork as the main tool and the knife used for cutting. We swap utensils depending on whether there is something to cut. The dominant hand uses the working tool. One I have been teaching myself to use because it seems so civilized is the European or Continental style in which the fork is kept in the left hand and the knife in the right hand throughout the meal. I guess this works for lefties. Diners cut food with the knife in the right hand and bring it to the mouth with the fork, tines down in the left. Most people I’ve seen using this method kill time while chewing the bite by using the knife and fork to tidy up the food on their plate. Then, many people of the world cleverly eat with chopsticks, a method that confounds most of us Westerners, no matter how often we practice. Most people in the Middle East and Africa use no utensils. Instead, they pick up food with fingers or a piece of delicious naan or other flat bread. Recently, though, we’ve seen some new ones. In Taiwan, people use chopsticks and a spoon. They gather bits of several foods with chopsticks and load them onto their spoon for a combined taste sensation. Here in the Philippines, people use a fork and a spoon. No knife. They load the spoon with the fork and eat from the spoon. Put this in your trivia box.

Ok! Farewell, Cebu! Off to El Nido in the next few days. Just a short plane trip and a long van ride away.  Let’s see this place.