Hototay story/Rain again

I was reading Ambeth Ocampo’s 101 Stories on the Revolution when I came upon an interesting trivia about the origin of the word Hototay.

I knew Hototay during my drinking days. Hototay was a soup that looked like nilaga except that it contained (as I remembered it) vegetables, pork, octopus, shrimp and other ingredients that I could not recall. I knew, from the drinking stories, that the name came from a Chinese word—Hototay, sounds Chinese and the soup even looked Chinese.

Ocampo’s book explained where the Hototay came from. Here was the excerpt:

Combat drill was regular, and so were the Sousa tunes played by the Military band for the crew on deck. “There’ll be a Hot time in the Old Town Tonight” was a favorite that Filipinos later corrupt into a name of a soup—Hototay.

On the preceding page:

Hototai sometimes spelled Hototay, is a noodle-and-soup dish often offered in Panciterias. It is the favorite dish of National Artist for Literature N.V.M. Gonzales. WE would not normally associate hototay with the Philippine Centennial, but under the innocent Chinese sounding name is actually the title of the hit song of the Sapnish AmericanWar, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Compress the whole title into one word and you get Hototay, one of the songs the American sang when they occupied Manila in 1898.

There are those who are not in favor with Ocampo’s style of writing history, as is obvious; one tends to remember the trivia rather than the “history.” But I can not imagine reading history without these bits of trivgia—it’s like eating sinigang without the soup.

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It was still raining hard when I woke up at 5 o’clock this morning. It was cold, damp and difficult to get out of bed.  If it was possible, I would just stay in bed enjoying the warmth of my wife’s arms around me, but I got to work or else we would not eat.

I was watching the news expecting that the Department of Education would suspend classes, but the news anchor announced that classes at all levels would resume today.

There were many absent pupils in my classes today. Some of the pupils might still have the “classes suspension” hang over, hearing the rain pounding on their tin roofs, seeing that the sky was still dark,  expecting heavy rains to pour all day that they did not even bother to get up from bed.

Their parents might have thought that it was better to keep their children safe at home absent from classes than waiting for the department to suspend classes. The problem with the department, like what happened yesterday, was that they suspend classes when the pupils were already in school, when the streets and roads were already flooded. The delays in the announcement of the suspension of classes was understandable because floods were localized hence DepEd could not issue a blanket order suspending the classes. Anyway…the local government and the principals had the authority to suspend classes as the situation warranted.

But teachers would rather not have the classes suspended because we would have to conduct make up classes on weekends.