Paper #3: Quickie Food Review [I see...Aysee's!] (August 7,2007)

I see…Aysee’s!

Does your wallet perform suicide very time lunch rolls around? Getting tired of haute cuisine that consists of a few microscopic dots of sauce splattered around a scrap of meat as small as your thumbnail? Or are you simply looking for a place where you and a few buddies can hang out, kick back and have a good laugh over a few rounds of beer?

Then try this place, Aysee’s Eatery, along St. Martin Road in Pasig, just across the road from Ultra Stadium. Aysee’s is pretty much a hole-in-the-wall, and I really mean it, so keep your expectations low but your appetites high. Inside a two-story building, it’s easy to miss from the road, so keep your eyes peeled for tables set up on the sidewalks. The building appears to have been a two-story apartment unit that’s been converted into a food establishment. The most likely sight that greets you is a tiny nook crowded with tables, each packed with groups of people huddled over anything and everything sizzling on a hotplate. The floor and walls are made of gray concrete, scrubbed clean and painted garishly. The kitchen is in the back, open for everybody to see. Stacked against the staircase and walls are cases and cases of beer, crowding an already cramped area.

The dim-lit, wooden second floor is much roomier, but be careful climbing up the creaky wood stairs! The way up is dark, narrow and rickety! What greets people emerging from the stairs is an expanse of floor planks, gleaming darkly of wax, or more possible, vaporized oil from the kitchen below. All the tables and chairs are made of roughly cobbled together wood and painted unevenly in white, complementing the tacky vinyl floor mats. All this just makes you go “Ah, just like your friendly neighborhood carinderia”, as car alarms blare intermittently along the street and an unseen but nearby voice (trying heroically but failing miserably) croons out Sinatra’s “My Way” from a videoke machine.

What really makes the place stand out is their food. The menu is not the typical carinderia fare, but is made up of “pulutan food.” Sizzling gambas, sizzling sisig, sizzling adobo, sizzling pork chop, sizzling T-bone etc., it seems they’ll sizzle ANYTHING on a hotplate. What I had was their sisig and gambas, to go with my bottle of Red Horse beer.

The sisig was good, but not exceptional. Chewy and very meaty, sitting in sauce, enlivened by the occasional unknown crunchy bit, topped with an egg, blessed with soy sauce and sanctified by calamansi, you can almost feel your cholesterol rise with each bite, bringing you ever closer to carnivore heaven. And for seventy-five pesos (P75), it’s dirt-cheap! It may not be the height of gastronomic genius, but the cheap price, hefty servings and above average taste make it a very good find.

But the real hidden treasure is the sizzling gambas. It comes on a hotplate (what else!), and it’s got six to eight shrimps, swimming in red sauce. The sauce is nothing to write about, some kind of reddish mystery liquid, slightly sweet, slightly sour (oh wait, maybe it’s recycled from leftover sweet & sour pork or maybe brown ketsap). But the shrimps are just right, not too large, so they are naturally sweet and the flesh is tender and juicy. Some expensive restaurants overcook their shrimps, rendering them rubbery and tough. But the shrimp at Aysee’s is tender and moist, practically dissolving in your mouth.

For a dingy hole-in-the-wall, Aysee’s holds hidden taste treasures that come cheap! So come on down to Aysee’s and maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear your wallet breathe easy for once, having been spared the usual lunch-time massacre of pesos.

Paper #2: Describing my Room [None] (3rd week of July)

I never passed this! Haha..

Paper #1:Any Topic [Down With Basketball!] (July 12,2007)

Down With Basketball!

Has anyone watched a PBA game recently? I did last night and whoa Nellie, half the players running around the court looked like Euro-Slavonic or African imports. I thought to myself, “Isn’t this the Philippine Basketball Association? Where did all the Filipino players go?”

The answer to that question is – everywhere else, except where it matters. At the top ranks, there are few Filipinos, but Filipino – (insert nationality)’s dominate. Fil-American, Fil-Chinese, Fil-European and Fil-Krakoszian players are everywhere. But in the streets and recreational courts, millions and millions of Filipinos swarm over basketball. Go anywhere in this country and you’ll find that we Filipinos don’t love basketball – we are fanatically obsessed over basketball.

The signs of that madness are everywhere. In our small country where space is a premium, you’ll find basketball courts in any place possible. You’ll even find courts in places where it’s NOT possible. It’s a driver’s headache to detour around streets in every barangay that turn into courts every afternoon.

Also, in thius country, the lack of classrooms is a major educational problem. Children have to go in four-hour shifts, attend class in corridors or hold them under the nearest mango tree. But as long as the school has a basketball court, it’s all okay!

And there are the TV ads that are impossible to miss. My after-dinner dose of Philippine free TV isn’t complete without either seeing a Growee or Cherifer growth supplement advertisement. In the background, the jingle goes “Tatangkad din ako, tatangkad din ako, tatangkad with growth vitamins!”, as Filipino kids (with the magic of computer generated effects) metamorphose into NBA or PBA players. Oh the dreams of little Filipino children, to magically turn into Caucasian half-breed giants!

Why these kinds of dreams? Because basketball is a sport for giants, in physical height anyway, since a player’s offensive and defensive capabilities are magnified by the player’s height advantage. Look at the champions of international competitions like the Olympics or FIBA World Cup. It’s extremely rare to find a player below six feet in height, and players with heights approaching or surpassing seven feet are getting more and more common.

In contrast, the average height for Filipino women is four feet and eleven inches and for men, five feet and four inches. No wonder most Filipino kids dream of turning into tall half-foreigners to excel in basketball.

Because of this immense obsession, other sports are totally ignored. The Philippines has not won any major international championships in basketball for decades, but still, there is overwhelming support for it. Schools, universities and corporate sponsors pump massive amounts of support and funding to basketball teams while other sports teams wither away. The Philippine teams for diving, wushu, tae kwon do, gymnastics and others limp behind our basketball teams on meager funding but consistently produce more gold and silver medals in international competitions.

So I say, give other sports a chance! We shouldn’t get stuck in a rut, forever following only one way. We should support more sports, and not just one, for our natural ingenuity and lover for diversity are innate advantages.