Drinking habits

IF life seemed to be a simple matter of surviving in a hostile world and luxury was unheard of, the native Leyteño cultivated his own excesses where it delighted him most: in drinking. In a way, it gave him the release from tensions and pent-up dreams tangled up in his psyche.

The early missionary Chirino noted that drinks were served on the table regardless of the occasion. He wrote: "The time of feasting in which they ate and drank excessively, though there was more of drinking in it than eating as we have said, in cases of sickness or death or of mourning. On all such occasions, the door was closed to no one who might like to drink with them - for so they name and call it to drink, not to eat. During feasts and during sacrifices, they placed a plate on one side of the table, "from which according to religious usage whoever might be so inclined could pick on a morsel or else avoid doing so in deference to the anito."

One's social standing did not seem evident in the seating arrangement. Chirino continued:" They eat sitting down on the floor and the tables are small and low, either rounded or square, without tablecloths or napkins, but with the plates set down upon the tabletop itself. They eat in groups of as many as can be accommodated around the small table and with guests, all drinking. The viands are laid down all together in several dishes, and so they do not shrink from putting their hands everyone into the same dish or from drinking out of the same vessel. They eat little, drink repeatedly and spend a great amount of time." A custom which is familiar to most Leyteños.

Once sated and intoxicated, they removed the tables and cleared the room and if the occasion was not one of mourning, they sang, played musical instruments and danced, spending thus days and nights with a great deal of noise and shouting until they collapsed from sheer exhaustion and drowsiness.

But Chirino observed: "Yet, we never see them so wild and violent in their drunkenness as to commit improprieties. Instead, they preserve very well their ordinary behavior and act, though drunk, with the same courtesy and circumspection as before; they are merely more gay and voluble and full of wit. It is proverbial among us that not one of them, leaving a feast thoroughly drunk in the middle of the night, has failed to find his way home. And if they then happen to be bringing or selling something, not only do they not act incoherently but in weighing gold or silver for payment...they do so with such steadiness that their hand does not shake nor do they err in weighing."

Nothing was said of women drinking, but from present customs of rural women, it is probable women had their own tables, too, and their own times of intoxication.

Other festive occasions involving entire communities had their own traditional rites, some of which are still practiced today. During the season of the dapdap (when fire trees bloomed), the anibong (merry-making) begins, lasting for a fortnight, and would reach a climax of songs and dances.

Blood sugar monitoring kit

There men and women would alternate in belting out extemporaneous songs (siray or siday), expressing with lofty symbolism their way of life. Then they would dance the balitaw and the tinikling to the lilting music of the kudyapi (a four-stringed native guitar), the plaintive notes of the guimbal, subing and the santuray (bamboo flutes), the rhythmic beats of the agong and the gurimbay (native drums of various sizes). Such rites would take place during full moon.
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