"mantika" and colored jeepneys

while i was out on the veranda i saw a boy and a girl who was maybe between 11 to 13 years old. the boy was holding two shopping bags from tesco. suddenly i remembered the time we visited my aunt's family in olangapo around the same age.

my uncle was in the US navy and was stationed in subic, which used to be a military base. everyone of my cousins were there. it was the farthest i have ever been from home at that age. it was exciting because everything was new to me.

i was not a sheltered child as you might think, but i have never been to a wet market by myself at that time. imagine my surprise when my aunt asked me and my cousin nonoy, who was younger only by months, to go to the market in a town i barely knew. i was really scared to go but i was more scared of my aunt. nonoy supposedly knew which jeepneys to ride. he says it's easy, and the jeepneys have specific colors for specific routes. blue, green, pink, you name it. so we went.

we had to buy all sort of things that filled a basket bigger than both of us, from fruits to cooking oil. believe it or not, the hardest thing was buying the cooking oil. we kept asking for "langis" (oil) and people kept pointing us to auto shops, saying they don't have it. they thought we wanted to buy motor oil. it was kinda funny but we finally managed to get a bottle of cooking oil in the end. it turned out that unlike in the south, they strictly say "mantika" to mean cooking oil. i am not so sure if my vocabulary is right, but i always thought "mantika" was used cooking oil or fat produced after cooking. :))

we got lost when we took the pink jeepney on the way back home. it turned out nonoy didn't know the way so well at all. but we managed to get home in the end. even if it took us more time. it was time well spent on one of the exciting adventures of our childhood.