Day XCVIII

Filipino Rum

     “Cigarilio my friend?” One of them asked, they loved American smokes.

     “Here ya goes, keep em I said,” as I gave them a half a pack, and made them ecstatic.

      “Salamad po, Salamad po, my friend!” they kept smiling, and thanking us. Salamad po means thank you in Tagalog. Anyway, Chino wasn’t around, he was out of town. But I was cool with that, because, at least Kunt now knew I wasn’t lying. We went inside and got a table, and a set up, which is a bottle of Tanduay Filipino Rum, with glasses, a large coke, and a bowl of ice. Man, I felt like I was back home at the Palladium. The music was cool, and it was a place Puente had played on one of his trips to Manila.

     We were sitting there enjoying the music, and our TDY, which is what we called Tanduay. We used to call it TDY, because if you drank enough of it, it would put your head TDY on another planet.

     There we were with dancing hostesses, you could dance with them if you bought them drinks. We were having a grand time, when I heard people at the next table speaking Spanish.

     I turned around, eye balled a guy, and asked him what was his nationality. He smiled, and said he was Filipino. His family was descended from Spaniards, and they had been in Manila for a few hundred years. He had an impeccable Spanish accent, and I was surprise to meet the first Spanish speaking Filipinoes.

     The Filipino people hated Spanish oppression, so much that almost fifty years after the Spaniards left the Philippines, they almost all stopped speaking Spanish, and reverted to their local dialects.