One of my favorite fruits in the Philippines is mangosteen. A lot of people ask me, “Bob, what’s a mangosteen?“  Well, a mangosteen, as I said already, is a fruit. “Ah, it’s some kind of a mango, then?“  Well, no, it is not a mango, nor is it anything like a mango.  It is not related to a mango, it’s not even the same color as a mango.  I am not quite certain why it has a similar name, but it just does. A mangosteen is a deep purple color.  It has a few green “leaves” on the top.  I put leaves in quotation marks, because they look like leaves, but they are hard, part of the piece of … [Read more...]

Over the years, here on LiP, I have published a “Top Ten List of Davao Restaurants” fairly regularly.  It’s been a couple of years, though, since I have published an updated top 10 list.  The biggest reason for that is because we don’t go out to eat as often as we used to.  Feyma and I have become more “home cooks” than people who eat out a lot.  But, of course, we still do eat out from time to time. This Wednesday, we had the opportunity to check out a new place here in Davao, a restaurant with an unusual name:  CTRES, it is pronounced like:  See Tres (Tres rhymes with dress). I now have a new #1 … [Read more...]

Last week was a nice treat for us here in Davao.  Dave Starr and his family made a journey down south to Davao, and I had an opportunity to spend a fair amount of time with Dave and his family while they were here.  I have met Dave previously, but this visit we got a little more time than previously, I think, to talk and compare notes on various issues.  For those who do not know who Dave is, he is the owner of the PhilFAQs site, and has been living in the Philippines for a number of years now.  I have known Dave, mostly online, for several years now, and he is one of my closer friends on the Internet.  We share a lot of e-mails … [Read more...]

Do you like corn?  I do.  I especially enjoy a really fresh piece of corn on the cob.  There is just nothing quite as good as a fresh piece of juicy and sweet corn on the cob!  Problem is that it can be quite hard to find a decent piece of corn here in the Philippines. The Philippines is really an agricultural Country, so you would expect that you could find some good corn here, but the fact is that it is very hard to find such.  Most of the corn that is grown in the Philippines is feed corn, used to feed animals.  It is very dry and hard.  Not delicious to eat. I can remember when we lived in the States, we lived in an area where … [Read more...]