Here in Cebu you can find some excellent street dining. Sometimes it might even come to you.

A common breakfast snack is taho wich is tofu Cebuano style. Here its eaten warm mixed with syrup and gulaman (coconut jelly). Taho is sold by street sellers who will advertise by yelling loudly before setting down their buckets and scoop up the tofu and mix it with the syrup in a plastic cup. Its quite cheap at 5 pesos. Taho sellers start walking at 4 AM covering huge distances as a part of their daily routine.

Cebu is the peanut capital of the world. You can find peanuts everywhere. It is available in a hundreds of different styles. A common style to enjoy peanuts is fried in the street.

Maybe you have heard of tempura. The Cebuano tempura is different from the original Japanese one. Tempura is basically flavored fish pastry, which is deep fried and dipped into a hot sauce. It is  delicious and costs only 5 pesos.

Another fried snack is the squat bananas known as kardaba. Kardaba is served on a stick. This snack is known as banana cue and is very popular here. A banana cue costs 5 pesos.

Fruit salad is another delicious snack.  Cebuano fruit salad consists of chunks of fruit and jelly mixed in a milky liquid served with ice in a disposable plastic cup. It usually costs only 5 pesos.

There are three kinds of Ice cream vendors here in Cebu. Those who walk around with a styrofoam box selling buko bars, essentially popsicles containing coconut. Another is the trisikad peddler with a large stainless steel drum and a dome shaped cover. This is real home made ice cream served in scoops in cones. These are around 5 to 10 pesos. And lastly there are the Nestle and Selecta vendors, who is wearing uniforms. They sell products consumers are familiar with thanks to TV advertising. A little more expensive from 20 pesos.

An entire meal can be had at the Pongko-pongo stalls that are set up on the sidewalk. The sud-an on offer are usually fried fish, fried drumsticks, fried eggs and fried sausages. These are served with puso rice or hanging rice. Drinks are bottled softdrinks such as Coke or Sprite. A meal is around 30 pesos.

Balut is probably the king of all street snacks. The balut vendors are often approaching by shouting: baloooooooot! What is balut then? They look like boiled eggs but inside are unborn chicks. The degree of their development inside is indicated by a number written on the egg. The numbers  could be 14, 16, 18 or 21. It indicate the number of days that the egg has been under incubation. A number higher than 20 means your snack will be crunchy. Balut are taken with salt and kept hot by rags and towels. Balut vendors can be found after dark mostly on Friday and Saturday nights. The price is 10 peso.

Fruits in Cebu are very different from the fruits we are used to in the west. There is stuff here you can’t even begin to imagine.  The best place to buy fruit is the tourist-oriented fruit stands; on Fuente, near Chong Hua hospital and one in Banilad, near the Gaisano Country Mall. Large tour buses regularly pull up at these stands, blocking traffic while disembarking hordes of tourists. But the same fruit are often sold at the markets for much more reasonable prices. The good thing about the stands is that they are always open. If you arrive late at night, just wake up the vendor. All northern hemisphere fruits like apples, pears, cantaloupes, grapes – are imported from China or Australia. The exception is strawberries, which are flown in from the mountain city of Baguio.

The king of all fruits is durian. Some people live for the rich pungent smell and creamy taste, others detest it. Several different kinds of durian grow in the Visayas. Due to the cooler climate only one variety of smaller durians grows in Cebu in Asturias, not far from Toledo City. But plenty are imported from the durian growing regions in the south of country mainly Mindanao. Durians are seasonal being available only for the first half of the year. But some entrepreneurs freeze them and sell you the frozen flesh of the fruit throughout the year. Durians are considered an expensive fruit, priced at 150-200 pesos per fruit. Opening a durian is not easy. The shell  is prickly and tough to tear off. You’d need a knife and leather gloves would be helpful. The vendor a the fruit stand can offer to open it for you.

Durians are similar to watermelons. It’s difficult to tell if you have a good fruit in your hands or not. I would guess that if you buy ten durians, as many as half could be bad. But the good ones will take you to a new heaven and you may well end up joining the ranks of the addicted. Here is a tip from me: Don’t go for the green fruit. Choose the ones with the browner skin. The uglier the armor the tastier the inside. The flesh of a durian fruit is packed into small pockets within the fruit which are somewhat reminiscent of a fetus. The flesh should be soft and squishy and pure bright yellow.

You might also have heard of mangosteens. These are not the same as mangos. A mangosteen is almost perfectly round, shiny and deep purple in color. Mangosteens are slightly smaller than a baseball but just as hard. Apparently they grow on trees like apples, but they are usually sold tied together in bunches like grapes. The flesh is tiny in comparison to the fruit, pure white and quite sour. The taste is incomparable and wonderful and very addictive. As with durians, telling a good mangosteen from a bad one is hard. But you don’t have much choice since they are sold in bunches. If don’t have delicate fingernails, you can open a mangosteen with your bare hands.

Mangos are the Philippines’ most famous export. You can eat them while they are green, crunchy and sour, with a salty shrimp paste known as bagoong, but also when they are nice and sweet. Since mangos are available the world over you are probably familiar with the taste. If not fully ripe, leave them lying around at room temperature for a day or two. They melt in your mouth.

Another fruit that is similar to a mangosteen is kakao. The seeds can be dried, ground, and used to make chocolate, but kakao is also a fruit. The seeds come enveloped in a thin, sticky layer of white flesh with a sweet and sour taste and found within a thick, strong husk. Kakao are ready when bright yellow and the insides rattle when the fruit is shaken; the trees are common throughout Cebu island.

Less well known are rambutans. These are small fiery balls and bright purple in color. The flesh of a rambutan is soft and very sweet. They are similar in consistency to that of lychees and they are also easy to open.

Jack fruit or nangka in Cebu is the largest fruit in the world, if I’m not mistaken. They are used for cooking when unripe and when ripe they are yellow, chewy but slightly crunchy.They have a sweet and incomparable taste. Nangka can be bought by the kilo at the fruit stand but I recommend getting it from a nangka vendor, who sell nothing but jack fruit in small packs worth between 30 and 50 pesos. Their fruit is usually fresh.

The marang is a relative of the Jack fruit. It is smaller, rounder and browner but the construction is very similar. A scaly tough shell on the outside that protects the sweet and juicy flesh inside. The flesh of the marang is white and softer than that of the Jack fruit and extremely sweet in taste, somewhat like honey.

Another favorite is the lanzones. These are small balls slightly smaller than golf balls. They have to be peeled and the skin is soft. The problem with lanzones is that the seed is bitter. I suppose you could consider lanzones to be the Visayan equivalent of grapes.

Guyabano have a sweet white flesh and the seeds are like small black stones. Atis are similar but smaller and less sour when ripe. Yet another fruit with small black stones as seeds is the sambag or tamarind which is used to flavor sinigang, a kind of soup. The sour pulp of the tamarind is also mixed with sugar, shaped into sticks, wrapped in bright orange celophane and sold as snacks by the roadsidet. These are called tamarindo.

There are about a dozen different kinds of bananas here in Cebu and banana stalls usually sell at least three. The thick, squat kind are called kardaba and are a little bit mushy with a little bitterness and for some reason this variety is usually cooked or served on a cue, fried. Then there is a smallish variety called lakatan and probably the best kind of bananas in the world. The peel is paper thin but blemishes on the skin are not found on the flesh. The taste of the lakatan is sour-sweet and the texture is dense and juicy. A similar kind is the tundan and supposedly the only kind you can feed to an infant. Another good variety is mundo. Lady fingers, the tiny sweet variety of banana, are known as señorita here. Lastly, if you want real bananas, check out the variety known as tinduk.

Papaya grows everywhere in Cebu. Cebuanos cut the flesh into cubes, while still unripe, and uses for dishes such as tinolang manok, chicken soup. When half-ripe, the flesh is pickled, shredded and served as atsara, a small side salad or garnish served alongside barbecue dishes, like chutney. When ripe, limonsito juice is added to the fresh fruit to obscure the somewhat pungent odor. Limonsitos, also known as calamansi or the Philippine lemon, are perfectly spherical native lemons, tiny and full of seeds, which are used in numerous dishes.

Maybe you have come across guava, perhaps in a tropical drink. Here, guavas are eaten unripe with salt. Another example is the balimbing, called star fruit in English.

Another fruit is tisa. It is yellow-orange, slightly smaller than an apple, but pointy. Some people shy away from the orange flesh which resembles that of the avocado in terms of consistency and has a rather strong smell.

A pleasant fruit are the manzanitas, which look exactly like cherries and have a mellow and buttery, rather than a sour taste. Manzanitas are best before they become bright red.. You can recognize a manzanita tree by its sticky leaves.

Santol is a fruit with rich and sweet flesh. Sinegwelas are a tiny Visayan equivalent of plums. They gradually turn from green to purple to bright red, and they are at their sweetest and tastiest when they are about to lose their purpleness.

Bo-ongon are large citrus fruits that look like deformed cantaloups. Thick foamy shells which protect the pinkish flesh inside. Dalandan are also citrus fruits, but much smaller.

This blog will be about my life here in Cebu, Philippines.

My name is Alan and I moved here about 6 years ago. I am married to a lovely Filipina that I met around  10 years ago.

I know that there are many people interested in moving or retiring here in the Philippines.

This site will be the place to go for all the information you will need on how to make a move here and establish yourself in this tropical paradise.