Itlog Mo Noy Orange
Back in the 1980s if you took a bus South of Cebu you’d make a few stopovers to drop off and pick up passengers, and buy snacks. A small army of vendors would swarm all over the bus selling ampao and other snacks. Most of them would shout, “Itlog mo noy, orange!” Literally, it means “Your eggs, sir, are orange.” Syntactically, it means, “Sir, buy some hard-boiled eggs and a bottle of Tru-Orange.” Why hard-boiled eggs and orange soda? Older cousins who went on these trips explain that hard-boiled eggs are easy to handle and eat, go down well with just a bit of salt, don’t require utensils or hand washing, and are quite filling. Orange soda helps travellers to swallow the egg yolk, which can be powdery and tends to stick to the sides of the throat. Apparently Tru-Orange didn’t produce as much stomach acid as the other soft drinks did. Bottom line, these were the food items that travellers liked and bought. So this is what the vendors sold. I often tell this story ...