I came to the Philippines in 2004 after a friend invited me over. After the visit, I often come to the Philippines and stay for at least a few months. I’ve been doing this for the past 6 years. I can understand quite a bit of Tagalog words but I can’t actually construct sentences. This is going to be one of my goal in the future to be able to learn how to speak it fluently.
After 6 years of being in and out of the country, I think I can label myself as half Pinoy ( according to my Filipino barkadas ). I understand the culture pretty well and most importantly I know the difference between Kapuso and Kapamilya. Hahahahaha…..and my barkadas told me that if I want to be a full fledge Pinoy, I got to master the language. Another reason why they would not accept me as a full blown Pinoy is because I do not embrace Filipino food as much as they do. I have travel to many parts of the world and in order to make your host happy is to love their food. I am very familiar with Filipino food but I am sad to say that I am not loving it as much as other Asian food. I am not saying that the food is not good but is just simply too blend for my taste as I am accustomed to spicy food.
This is one of the reason why I started cooking a little bit more as I prefer to prepare spicy dishes for myself. Every now and then I will cook and then invite my barkadas over for lunch and dinner. They seem to like the spicy dishes and ask me to give them the recipe. I hardly cook when I am in Singapore as eating out is really cheap. I will post more about the eating scenes in Singapore in the future.
Whenever I come back to the Philippines, I will bring back quite a decent amount of spices that would last me for at least 3 months. Everytime I do get request from my friends for pasalubong. They often suggest that I start a business to supply all these spices for the Philippines market. I am very keen of the idea but I have zero knowledge on how the business works. I don’t think it would be so easy to just convince the masses to embrace different food. Careful planning must be made in order to introduce new taste to the Filipino market. This is one of the main reason why I started this blog and hope to get some response regarding the idea.
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