Food "glorious" food

Some weird and wonderful foodie things from Manila -

The Ice cream thing is called Halo Halo and means mix mix . Basically its ice cream with lots of other things like sweetcorn, vegetables, beans, jelly, cream caramel, ice ....... in fact it seems that anything can go in a Halo Halo - personally I find it rather perturbing to find a sweetcorn or a haricot bean in my ice cream ! The rather bright orange things with legs are day old chicks fried! You can see the stall vendors laughing at the look on my face! They do a lot of strange things with eggs! they boil them, bury then in salted ground and colour then purple ( Very popular food colourant here - purple cakes are very common!) .

They also eat egg embryos - Balut is a popular Filipino street snack and is essentially a duck egg with a fetus inside, typically between seventeen to twenty days in gestation. It is so popular that it is equivalent to what the hot dog is in the states. There are balut vendors who push around carts full of fetal treats and bark their wares in a sing-song chant of “baluuuut, baluuuut!” Balut is also a popular aphrodisiac for men so beware the man with the embryo in his mouth ...........................

The table of vegetables are in fact "medicines" - Filipinos embrace alternative medicine - a lot of the time because they can't afford a real doctor, although there is also a deep respect for faith healers etc.. This table of goodies that claims to fix all known ills including cancer, hepatitis, fertility ..... is outside the big church in Quiapo in downtown Manila. So if praying for a cure does not work u can hedge your bets and buy some herbs to do the job instead. Even educated people tolerate the quack doctors. On an office outing, where one of staff stepped on a sea urchin, the healer was brought in to blow on her toes and announce she had been bitten by a snake!For P125 he claimed to cure her and save her life - until she had to go to a real hospital of course 2 days later for proper medicine to treat infection from sea urchins.....

Theres a huge market in wonder diet therapies and all manner of things claiming to make skin white - a national beauty obsession - along with vitamins and of course formula milk - A lot of money spent on crap cures and inappropriate nutrition by very poor people - having said that Balut is probably quite good for u although I'm not sure of the nutritional value of a day old chick!