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.
