Where else do you see a very busy city (Metro Manila) with 10 or 11 million people, DESERTED? Only in the Philippines. This usually happens once a year only during Good Friday. Everyone seems to go out of the big city and into the provinces during this time. Quezon City to Makati which on a normal Friday morning would take an hour or so because of the heavy traffic, usually only takes 15 minutes to drive. You would see a handful of other vehicles, but not much. If you haven't been to Metro Manila, imagine Chicago on a busy Monday morning. Now, imagine Chicago with very very little amount of vehicles driving around and not very many people walking around either. Weird huh? I doubt if it will ever come true for Chicago, but in the Philippines, NOTHING is impossible.
Okay... where else do you find people selling quail's eggs, hardboiled eggs, balut (I don't have time to explain this one), chicharon, green mango with bagoong, salted peanuts and cigarettes and roses all in just one traffic stop? Only in the Philippines. I remember this clearly. Specially on a heavy traffic jam. People would haggle and sell these on the street. Worse, some people actually try to clean your car (without really cleaning it) and end up begging for 5 or 10 pesos. People sell cigarettes by the stick, and they even light it for you. Only in the Philippines...
Where else in the world, of all things, do people of all walks of life have one thing in common? Yes, I'm talking about cellphones! If you read my Text Messaging article, you would understand. Almost everyone in the Philippines (Well, in Manila at least) owns a cellphone. No, they don't use it much for voice talk, everyone is addicted to 2-way text messaging. It's a rather amusing scene, I tell you. Even in the malls, you see everyone typing so quickly in their cellphones. Yeah, ONLY in the Philippines!
Oops, sorry about drifting. I know my column is about Filipino websites. Anyway, I stumbled upon three very unique Filipino search engines. Guess what, they are somewhat Filipino versions of the regular search engines.
The first one is http://www.ALLEBA.com In their website, they explain that alleba is their last name spelled backwards. ABELLA. See for yourself. It very much resembles a popular search engine (hint: Google)
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