$1 RUM

$1 Rum! Yes it does exist. Now, I had known about this for quite some time, though I never tried it before. Okay, I may have had a shot or two in the ghetto area with the milling around in the story of Grace, but I never bought my own bottle and really drank it. This is stuff is hugely popular. There's a billboard for it on the corner where I live. I hear commercials for it on the radio almost anytime I'm in a taxi. And let's face it most Filipinos could never afford a bottle of Cuervo or some other expensive alcohol.

Now, you may remember in my previous post that I had found a little convenience store just up the street, which I had never noticed before all the times I went by in a taxi. They have just about everything there. They even have individual eggs you can buy for 8 peso each, great if, like me, you don't have a fridge and want a couple of eggs to make fried rice with. I'll have to remember that. So me and Alona walked over there and got some Tanduay, which is the name of the $1 rum. It cost 40 peso, which is actually slightly less than a dollar these days. We also got a big bottle of coke and some corn chips.

Interestingly, we didn't mix the rum and coke as most might expect. That's not the way she and her barkadas (that's like a gang) did it back in the day. We drank the rum as shots and simply had a tall glass of coke nearby for a chaser. With that, the great drinking began, and we finished about two thirds of the bottle. Unfortunately, Alona also spilled a good amount of coke on the table which later brought a considerable number of ants to visit. I started to get worried because I couldn't even work on my computer without some ant walking across the screen.



Today, however, Alona would take care of the ant problem. When we first went shopping, we bought two of most things, so that we would have one to use while the other was in the wash. So she changed the table cloth to the other one we bought and set out to wash the original cloth, by hand, along with some of my clothes and things. She didn't stop there though. Since the rest of the place was getting kind of dirty, she decided to clean it up too. First she swept the place up, throwing all the dust, ashes and naps of my hair into the dustpan and out to the trash. After that, she even mopped the place clean. It looked as good as the day I walked in!



After that, she came out of nowhere with the idea to make crispy fried chicken. That she wanted it was not surprising as we used to eat it all the time at restaurants. That she suddenly claimed she could do it, was pretty surprising. So we trekked off, in a taxi of course, to Metro Ayala and into the supermarket where we got the chicken and some crispy breading mix. We also decided to get some chocolates, but that's no relation to this story. After we came back with all the stuff, she proceeded to mix the breading, which I thought was too thin at first, and I cooked rice and started heating a whole lot of oil in the wok. She thickened up the breading and in the first batch went.



The first was a little too high the first time around. The place got a little smokey and the chicken came out a bit dark. There was also blood inside. Luckily we tested it on only two pieces. Now with the temperature of the oil down we were able to continue. Alona, however, wanted to show me something else. She had her own way of doing fried chicken, without the crispy breading but marinated in a mix of soy sauce, lemon and Aji-no-moto spice. So we did about half the chicken breaded and half her way. The rest came out good. We won't be putting KFC out of business or anything, but it was good, both the breaded and her special mix.

So now here I am writing this update, contemplating the remaining bit of rum or other future adventures. I have been working very well on the couple of freelance jobs and money is coming in, so things are cool and seem to be picking up. I'm about to start creating some things that will lead to what Book II on this site will be about, but that is another story. As for my adventures, as things seem to fall into place and I get a bit more stable, I expect there to be a lot more exploring. There are still many other islands here, 7000 or so I hear, and there's still so much of this city I haven't even begin to see by hitting the streets. It's time to start seeing what I can find next!