Life in the Philippines

What a title huh? Those are newsworthy terms here in the Philippines lately.  Maybe it doesn’t seem so newsworthy or such a big deal to people who live here always but I am sure if there were a possible case of Pig Ebola on a farm in the hills of North Georgia where I grew up, the news would be rampant.  Pig Ebola was investigated in December and carried through to this month. Last week the news was about a verified case, and then another story was about verified salmonella cases on a pig farm also. Todays headline was possible hog cholera.  I am seeing a trend here and it points me in one direction: HOLD THE PORK!

Yes, today’s post is about food again.  We really are going to do some more site seeing again so I can tell you about something other that what we are eating.  But in the mean time I’ll keep sharing the new foods we try.  Buko means Young coconut.  In the US we wait for the ripe hard coconut in order to harvest and eat it. Here, Buko, the young coconut is used in its soft state for making a drink.  Of course in its natural state it is healthy but thats not the typical way of serving. Everything here is sweet sweet sweet!.  This blog shows pictures of different Buko Drinks (Click here) Johnnie likes these a lot.  I can’t handle all that sugar.  In Laguna, they are famous for thier Buko Pies.  We plan to go there soon to see the area, so we’ll have to have a young coconut pie while we are site seeing.  The kids don’t like coconut so we’ll have to find other things for them to try.  Just for picture association, this tree is just down the street from us.  You can tell from this why there is an abundance of Buko Pie and Buko Drink Stands.

The latest thing identified as what we miss most is a good glass of milk. Milk in the stores is the ultrapastuerized milk in a box.  Now the good side is you don’t have to worry about running out of milk because you keep it on the shelf until you open it.  The bad side is it doesn’t taste quite like milk.  Now trust me, it has come a LONG way. Back in 1991 when I first went to Japan, the choice was predominantly filled milk. There was not a single thing nice thing I could say about filled milk so milk in a box really isn’t so bad.  But it is different and not what you really want with your morning bowl of cereal.  Yesterday we were in S&R, the Philippines version of a Sam’s club, and they had some fresh milk. No clue what country it was from, but we didn’t look long. It was more than $4 for a half gallon and I refuse to establish a trend in buying it. OK call me cheap but that’s just a bit more than I plan to pay for milk when we have a workable substitute. I paid almost $10 for a small bag of shredded morarella because I could not come up with a substitute for it on pizza. The Milk in a Box works just fine for me!

We took a little time today to visit Fort Bonifacio and Hi Street mall.  Hi Street is the place where Johnnie, Chris and a couple of Johnnie’s coworkers played Christmas carols and collected donations for charity. It is an outdoor walking mall with many stores and restaurants. We walked around some, checked out the architecture and fountains and such.  Chris made a picture of Johnnie, Ariel and I.  Yes I do exist even though I don’t do pictures often.

We debated a bit and decided to eat at Italiani’s which is an Italian restaurant. There are a number of Italliani’s in Manila, two of which are in the malls closest to our house (Glorietta and Greenbelt Malls).  There is also an Italliani’s in Fort Bonifacio Hi Street mall so that was our meal choice for today. Ariel and I ordered a pizza to share and Johnnie got his favorite pasta meal with baby clams.  Chris ordered spaghetti and meatballs. The menu said Big Meatballs.  Most menus exaggerate but this one didn’t. They should have said Baseball sized meatalls! Check out the size of the meatballs in the picture below

Recently Chris has been craving Subway. It’s one of his favorite places to eat stateside so we looked for one here. There are a lot of US fast food type restaurants in Manila and Subway just happened to be one of them. We found one in a Glorietta Mall which is close to where we live.  So we drove over, parked in one of the garages and climbed up to street level. I know why there will never be a weight problem with the folks who always live here. The amount of stairs you climb in a week can be a big amount of exercise.  On the same little stretch of street where SubWay is, just on the road level there is Hard Rock Cafe Manila, Haggen Daas, an Italian place, a Indian restaurant, Golds Gym, a Gloria Jean’s coffee shop and a few others that I forget the names.  We’ll try out Hard Rock one day soon. All of this is in the immediate walking area of the Makati Shangri La hotel so if you are ever in the area, and need to stay somewhere with easy access to food and shopping that would be the place to stay.

But I digress…Subway…about the same as what you get in the US. There was nothing really that jumped out as being different except the prices. They have a 6 Inch Sub of the day which is 99 pesos, so less than $2.  For another 60 pesos you can make it a meal.   Of course a 6 inch sub comes no where close to feeding Chris. He needs a foot long, bag of chips, a drink and anything that he can scrounge off of the rest of our plates. The only thing that was unusual about the subs was the pickles on Ariel’s tuna sub.  I took one of them and instead of being a regular dill pickle, it was a sweet pickle slice. It tasted like sweet relish but was cut and looked just like sandwich dill pickles. Definitely not what you expect to bite into but it was good none the less.

We’re hoping the weather is clear to do some more site seeing tomorrow and share some pictures of what we can find.

Oh, and today was class two of Chinese for me.  It is definitely tough to grasp but both Chris and I are getting a little better at it.