Bilog ng mundo:Philippine backlog

Bilog ng Mundo--the world is round. This is the ad for the San Miguel Ginebra (Gin). It's in a clear globular bottle like Red Stripe. It's a sign that we always pass on the way to Laoag.

My parent's quality of life I would like to believe is much better here:
*relatives in close proximity
*criminally cheap 24-hr care
*My aunt and my cousin are doctors (my cousins parents put her through medical school, expressly so that they would have someone to take care of them in their old age)
*All food is organic--it's an economy of size, they can't afford pesticides or hormones for livestock. Just about every day on the highway to Laoaog my father will stop by the road side stands selling the catch of the day or fresh fruits and vegetables, hawaiin mangos, eggplant, bittermelon, all kinds of greens and legumes with no apparent english corollaries. Octopus, Blue Merlin. There's also young deer from the hills. My aunt and uncle's helper who is Visayan but has lived in Ilocos Norte most of her life is an amazing cook. Lots of vegetables contrary to what most people think of filipino cuisine--maybe it's just the northeners who love their greens (even down to the algae growing in the flooded rice fields). My favorite dish, sweet chile charred on a grill and then tossed with tomatoes and fish sauce. Most dishes are that simple. Grilled catfish, some kind of squah in broth with small clams. Every day my parents have pandesal and coffee followed by a full breakfast of whatever canned meat we send them or maybe local longaniza. Then at 10 or 11 there's mirienda, pastries or empanada and coke, then a big lunch, and at 3 or 4 mirienda again, and around 7 a big dinner--additionaly becuase my uncle is the mayor, there are sometimes extra dishes that they have prepared for town meetings. Every meal we had fresh mangos, a hawaiin breed even sweeter and more savory than the small yellow manila mangos.
*One day my father bought a huge box filled with maybe three dozen green mangos (apparently he usually bought more food than he and my mother could possibly eat--and from what I saw neither my mother or father are big eaters. It's a mystery why my father's belly is so big). He bought the green mangos with the intention of pickeling them, but he also had Lilly the cook make fresh bagoong: shrimp paste fried with garlic, so that you dip the green mango in the warm bagoong--two great tastes that compliment each other like no other--the tart green mango and the slighty sweet and salty bagong, with the fried garlic. So simple yet so complex.

There was this fruit, Lonzanas, that gave me a sort of proustian moment--they're these little grape sized, thick skinned fruits, a white fleshy meat with a pit the size and shape of an olive pit. The taste is somewhere between a pomello and a grape. It tasted so familiar and apparently you can't find this in the states. But it didn't really trigger any memories from when I was 2 or even 12 when I first returned. It could have just been a kind of manufactured deja vu of taste and smell.

So food-wise they were pretty well fed, although my mother didn't really care for most of the dishes and often just ate rice with some broth and the mangos. She's thinner than when she was in the states but not alarmingly so. One night when she especially detested the selection I went with the helper to go buy ice cream (the one thing she'll always say yes too) when there was no ice cream and she didn't want the donuts we bought, we bought her balut for dinner instead. See how we live, my father said, but I told him even if he bought a dozen balut every meal it still wouldn't amount to the credit card bills he racked up.