You may be Married to a Filipina if... Your refrigerator is always full but you cannot find any food that you recognize. Instead of a dowry, you got the whole bill for the wedding and honeymoon. Most of the decorations in your house are made of wicker. You are expected to be able to read her mind just by watching her eyebrows move up and down and which way her lips are pointed. All her relatives think your name is Joe. The instant you are married you have 3000 new close relatives that you can't tell apart. Your house isn't really on fire, but there is a very charred fish right on top of the stove burner. All the desserts are sticky and all the snacks are salty. She eats her fruit with giant salt crystals and her fried chicken with ketchup. Even the ketchup tastes weird... very weird. You throw a party and everyone is fighting to chop the leathery skin off a dead pig. All your kids have 4-5 middle names. Your in-laws take 10 years to acknowledge your existence and to call you by something other than "that white guy". You try to call her up on the phone and someone tells you "for a while" and you want to know "for a while, what??" You are trying to go to sleep and she keeps asking for the comFORT'r, and you ain't got a clue what she's talking about... Your first Christmas present is some funny looking baggy see-thru shirt made out of leftover lace doilies. Your phone bills are all international and average 3 hours per call. She sweeps with something that witches usually fly around on. Her idea of classy, expensive champagne is Asti Spumanteh The rice cooker is on 24 hours a day and uses up 50% of your electric and food budget. On your first trip to the Philippines, you have 18 giant boxes that weigh 1000 pounds each and your "carry on" luggage requires a small forklift truck. The same luggage is over filled with things that cost an average of 15 cents each like old magazines and M&Ms -- the worst part is when you get off the plane, the same stuff you've been hauling around half way around the world is available in every store in the airport for half the price! All her pajamas look like they were worn by the Dalai Lama until they got too faded. The first time she's pregnant you have to go out at 4:00 in the morning looking for some weird type of greasy sausages, green mangoes and bagoong. You buy a new freezer so she can store 200 pounds of SPAM and CORNED BEEF that was on sale. Everything in your house was bought on sale, even if you don't need it .. as long as it was a "bargain" is all that matters. She gets really excited by sucking the fat out of pig knees. Your daughter gets her ears pierced when she's 2 minutes old but your sons are not circumcised until they turn 21. All your postage bills instantly double. You hire a yaya because your wife thinks you clean mirrors with soap and a sponge and the yaya seems cheaper than a divorce. The only "white meat" she likes is YOU, and that's if you're lucky...

ALSO:
Her favorite sauce is called patis, Americans call it turpentine.
She actually thinks that bowling and golf and billiards are real sports and are more important
than baseball and football.
You were married 5 years before she explained to you that "ARAY!" doesn't mean "ooh, baby!"
She prefers bistek to beef steak.
Her idea of new upholstery is rinsing the bagoong stains out of the slip covers.
She can eat and talk at the same time, in fact that's her specialty!
Her favorite meal is leftovers, her favorite fancy dessert is Jello mold and for something
REALLY romantic, she'll offer you a halo-halo with 2 straws.
You still don't know what's the difference between manong and manok.
She and the kids are always saying "Daddy made utot" and you still don't know what it
means, but they think it's pretty funny.
Other than eyebrow raising and lip puckering, her next most expressive form of communication
is grunts and pssst's.
She goes to the movies just for the air conditioning.
Her homeland has more Megamalls than islands.
Before every holiday and visit, her sisters fax you a 10 page "bilin" list which
says "suggestion only".
Your kitchen table has a merry-go-round in the middle.
All the vegetables she buys at the Filipino store look like they were grown at Chernobyl.
Your in-law's first visit lasted 5 years.
Her friends are named Chinky, Girlie, Boy and Bimbo and you are not allowed to smirk.
Her home economics course only taught shopping, eating and siesta; cooking, cleaning
and sewing were not electives.
Her idea of edifying reading is gossip magazines.
All your place settings has the silverware backwards and there are no knives.
She washes her hair with a bucket and her car with a broom.
She uses an umbrella even if it's not raining.
Her favorite book (she has 3 copies) is "1001 New Recipes for Pig Parts You Were
Gonna Throw Out"
You are the only family in a 200 mile radius with 2 VCRs, 3 televisions.
She's done her best job planning a surprise party for you if she manages not to tell you
about it until a week or two before.
She "cleans" her closet by throwing all the junk into your closet.
There's always singing in your house, even when the radio's off.
Your own mom, who was lukewarm about your marriage originally, now calls you long
distance...to talk to your wife, not to you.
Your family announces that in the unlikely event of a divorce between you and your
wife, she will always have a place to stay, but you better find a new family.
Your wife asks to get a job so that you will both have a little extra money, then thanks
you for not complaining about having to drive her to work.
Your wife has a contagious smile.
You both decide to divide your spare income, and you spend yours on a computer game
or a power tool, only to learn that she spent her money buying clothes for you.
She might not have had a second pair of shoes growing up, but she's rapidly
making up for lost time.
Everything in your house is "namebrand".
You have a Western Union "Preferred Customer" card. Really.
You complain when your wife tells you that longaniza is only for breakfast.
You learn to like rice, even plain.
You have a budget.
She may only tell you she loves you once in awhile. But, she SHOWS you that she
loves you in everything she does and says.
You go to sleep each night knowing you're the luckiest man in the world.
AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST: you are pretty proud of yourself because you think you
snagged up for yourself some unique, rare, tropical goddess type until you go
to the Philippines and can't tell her apart from anyone else in the whole country (unless
she's taller than 5'1", then it's a bit easier).


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 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" (chi cken'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 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)?

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.

Jade's Office

Rune's Office

FREE ONLINE DATING PERSONALS, FREE FILIPINA PEN PAL ADDRESSES, NOT MAIL ORDER BRIDES