Christmas Eve Feast

After Christmas Eve Mass I went out looking for some food. This town does not stay open late. The hotel would still have food at 10:00, but it would be approximately 1500 pesos for the Christmas Eve feast. I have found that two blocks from the hotel, the price of everything drops to about 25% of what it costs at the hotel and mall.

I found a little barbecue restaurant with a truly charming wait staff (one delightful young man was hocking loogies into his hand in front of my table) but the smell and the price was right. I looked over the menu and saw that they offered 100 grams of tuna belly for some 45 pesos, and about the same for 100 grams of squid. Now, I love both tuna belly and squid, and since 100 grams is not that much, barely more than a few good mouthfuls, I ordered one of each, plus an order of “Native Style Barbecue Chicken.”

(Carbs, you say? We don’t need no stinkin’ carbs!)

The waitress gave me a funny look, which you would think might have clued me in, but then again I always get funny looks when I order food in Asia. (I don’t always order food in Asia, but when I do, I get funny looks.)

Well, in due course the food arrived. The first plate was the grilled tuna belly. It was not 100 grams. It was 500 grams. That is about 18 ounces of fish. I was paying for it at the rate of 45 pesos/100 grams, and, while you can’t beat the price, 18 ounces is a fairly respectable amount of fish.

When the squid arrived it was, likewise, a hot plate of 500 grams of squid. I love me some fresh grilled squid as much as the next guy, especially the way the Filipinos serve it, stuffed with pico de gallo or mango salsa, but I was now looking at a full kilo of seafood, and my chicken hadn’t even arrived yet!

Fortunately, while the chicken was an entire upper shoulder and wing skewered on a bamboo skewer, it was from an anorexic chicken. I doubt I got much more than a few ounces of meat off of that.

What is a man to do, in such a plight, but begin at the beginning and going on until he gets to the end of it? Washing it all down with fresh mango juice also helps. (See? I am not totally opposed to carbs!) It was delicious, nutritious and very, very filling.

Yes. This sort of thing happens to me. All the time. You get used to it eventually.

God Must Love Weird People... He Makes So Many of them!

I walked up to Mass one day during Simbang Gabi. It was dark, of course, being 4:20 AM, or thereabouts. The church and plastic lawn chairs all being full as per usual, I sat down on the stonework of the flowerbed and began saying Lauds.

A Filipino man sat down next to me. He was an older gentleman, perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties. It is hard to tell with Asians. He had a long, scrawny neck, big ears and nose, and that not-entirely-aware, slightly dissipated look that I associate with chronic alcoholics. He wore a pair of jeans with holes in the knees, and a ratty t-shirt, and flip-flops, and no one else in the congregation paid him any attention whatsoever.

He sat down next to me and looked me over for a few minutes, and then smiled and began speaking to me in Tagalog. I looked up at him and smiled politely, and listened with no comprehension whatsoever. He went on and on, with gestures and significant looks and conspiratorial nods. Finally he said the word, “Tacloban,” with an interrogative upward inflection.

“Tacloban?” I asked, “Yes, I was at Tacloban.”

He nodded knowingly, and went off on another conversational paragraph of Tagalog. Eventually he finished it up with an English sentence, “What is your country of origin, Sir?”

“America,” I said.

“Ah!” He smiled. More Tagalog, more gestures and nods of comradarie. “Are you single?”

“No. I am engaged.”

He exclaimed, “Ah!” and slapped his thigh. More Tagalog, and a couple of winks. “So you are filing for divorce?”

I think maybe at this point my face showed something other than polite attentiveness. “No.” I answered quite emphatically. I didn’t know but that he might be trying to hook me up with a grand-daughter or niece or adult themed dance-club, and I wanted to make sure that my status was quite unequivocal.

He nodded with perfect comprehension. “One woman is enough for you?”

“Yes,” I said. “One woman is more than enough for me.”

He soliloquized in Tagalog for another few sentences, but with enough English scattered throughout that I managed to gather that one was not enough for him. He had had to have two. There was also something about his first wife, and a hope that she was like her. Who “she” and “her” were I have no more idea than you do.

Then he looked at me with the shrewd look of someone who has rapidly seen through an opponent's clever but misguided attempts to pull the wool over his eyes. “Do you understand the dialect of the Pilipino people?”

“No.” I answered. No good trying to trick this guy! May as well just out with it.

The Mass started at this point. He sat next to me for the sitting portions, but for the rest of it he was somewhat unpredictable. He would sidestep throughout the crowd of parishioners, periodically dropping to one knee on the cement pad for a few seconds, and then rising back to his feet. No one else even gave him so much as a glance, except for some of the teenagers who laughed at him a bit.

The Mass was mostly in English, but the homily was in Taglish, an approximately 90/10 mix of Tagalog and English. He came back over and sat down next to me and asked, “Do you understand what he is saying?”

I shook my head and said, “No, I do not.”

So he undertook to translate the homily for me. His method was somewhat unorthodox, but surprisingly effective. He would sit with his head bowed and his arms folded, a studious expression on his face, listening for the space of a sentence or two. Then he would say an English word or two, combined with a knowing wink and a hand gesture. Sometimes he would say a Tagalog word and then give me the English translation, and do this several times, as often as that word was repeated. Sometimes he would sigh and just gesture expressively with his hands. I would say I understood about 20% of the gist of that homily, and enjoyed the whole thing immensely.

He did not speak to me much more for the rest of the Mass, except to share a few choice lines from some of the hymns, but he wished me a very heartfelt “Merry Christmas!” at the end of it. He nodded and smiled and waved as he walked off, for all the world as if he possessed some incredibly enjoyable secret which he had just let me in on.

I have seen him there at Sunday Mass since, but have not spoken with him. He always arrives, sits, and leaves alone. I don't know his story, and although I am sure it has had its darker moments, yet there is some kind of faith there, I am certain of it. May God Bless Him and bring Him safely to his heavenly home!