Cocina Manila

The Internet and Web Logs or blogging changed the way we communicate today. Now popular in Canada is podcasting, which is growing at a phenomenal rate and will surely affect the country’s broadcasting industry. There are now supposedly over 16,000 podcasts to choose from.

Podcasts can be best described as radio in demand, where you can pick almost any topic a listener wants with just a click of your mouse. It’s a novel time-shifted media that allows us to listen when we want, not when the program is broadcast.

Audiophiles from a 12-year-old to a retired senior citizen record the programs. They record their individual, specific passion on the Internet for anyone to listen via iPod or MP3 player. The people who listen to podcasts according to a new survey are in their 30s and 60s. it is either replacing the radio or an alternative to professional broadcasting with paid talents and regular programming.

Anyone can start a podcast which means that there are many amateur talents. In Vancouver, a podcaster features interviews with celebrity chefs, another is focused on health, beauty and cosmetics while in Calgary a podcaster will keep you posted on world events while another about the world of sports.

Podcasting like blogging is Canada’s new independent communication journalism. The country’s aging population with time on their hands will surely embrace the modern technology because the retired seniors can write or broadcast just about anything and everything that interests them and still be part of the global community.

Overall, both podcasting and blogging are innovative leisure-time option for everyone. All these communication developments have great benefits but what happens to our society when everybody wants to stay home to do Internet, podcast and blog. We will become a lethargic society without proper social skills in person-to-person situations.

Another growing trend: people in there 50s and beyond searching the Internet for romance, companionship, sometimes leading to marriage.

According to statistics Canada, in the fourth quarter of 2005, one in six (or 9,611) immigrants chose to settle in British Columbia. However, Ontario remained the most popular, receiving 30,194 of the 55,298 new immigrants to Canada. Immigrant arrivals in British Columbia rose by 27.4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2004. B.C. got more family-reunification immigrants than skilled workers, a fifth of the national total. Nearly half are investor immigrants, 29 percent are entrepreneurs and 23 percent are self-employed immigrants planning to settle in British Columbia.

In a nationwide survey, it showed that 31 percent of Canadians named chocolate as the food they crave most. French fries and chips were named second then followed by pizza and ice cream. It also indicated that Canadian women are 1.5 times more likely to choose sweet snacks over salty, and almost twice as likely as men to crave chocolate. Males are supposedly more into pizza, outnumbering females 2.5 to one.

Albertans and British Columbians apparently crave for ice cream, while chocolate is numero uno in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Atlantic Canada. Meanwhile, French fries and potato chips are extremely popular in Quebec and Atlantic Canada and Ontario but British Columbia leads the country in love of pizza.

The best known secret in the Philippine community in Vancouver is that Cocina Manila on Joyce Street, near Metrotown and only a block away from St. Mary’s Catholic church serves the best Filipino food these days.

Without advertising and promotion, the two-year old Cocina Manila, a small turo-turo seats 20 people. There are long lines, specially during weekends, before and right after mass. The lip service still works in the Filipino community. Its success and popularity is amazing for a new business.

Cocina Manila is equal parts neighborhood hangout, one-room fiesta and social central. But the specialty is the Pampanga cuisine (lutong bahay) of owner/chef Liberty Montemayor-Vibar (formerly of Pampanga). Pinakbet is the star attraction but other regional dishes also excel. Thus, the all embracing Cocina Manila name to avoid food regionalization.

Next week: Pin Pin Restaurant — first Filipino/Chinese restaurant.