Savour Every Mouthful of Kim's Bob in Robinsons Place's Paseo Iloilo

Food is prepared at your table
Lunch and dinner are popular
Create your own experience

Kim's Bob has many fine offerings for delectable Korean cuisine.

Who could resist the various sensory pleasures of Korean barbecue: the spicy, salty flavours, and the mixture of textures and temperatures (crisp lettuce juxtaposed with succulent grilled meat), not to mention the hands-on fun of going through a pile of lettuce leaves, wrapping your own individual little barbecue sandwiches and popping them into your mouth.

With its modest appearance from the outside, this restaurant is easily overlooked. But as you walk past this restaurant on a busy afternoon and inhale the aroma of beef and pork, you will not want to miss out on the excitement within its walls. The interior decor significantly enhances the cultural and the culinary experience. Their menu is quite extensive and offers many varieties of food, many varieties of meat, and dinner specials which are hearty and filling while being light on the wallet. With their generous offerings in both variety and quantity, Kim's Bob is definitely worth a visit.

Ring (033) 3377950.  They are in for a treat both visually and gastronomically.

And finally, don't worry if you don't like spicy food. Kim's Bob has been in business a long time, and they understand the Filipino palate. They'll make the dishes spicy if you ask, but leave them mild if you prefer. 

Kim's Bob (Korean restaurant)
Robinsons Place Iloilo
Paseo Iloilo
J De Leon Street
Roxas Village
Iloilo City

Cuisine type: Korean
Reservations: Not required
Diet choices: Many vegetarian and vegan options

This Bird

a poem by Roger B Rueda

doesn’t
chirrup,
chirp,
twitter,
or tweet,
or
ruffle
its feathers.

It's not
everything
I'd ever
want
in a pet –
bright,
funny
and
attractive.

It
faces
me
bravely
the way
I
fight
other birds
to the death.

I
think
I need
a rag doll.

I'm going to
doll
myself up
and
show
it off
to all
bird lovers
as they love
dolls
in the dark
more than
their pet birds.

I want
to see
a bird
fight with
my doll
this time.

On Jose Rizal’s ‘An Eagle Flight’

an essay by Roger B Rueda

Juan Crisostomo Ibarra, a young Filipino chap, having graduated and lived in Europe for seven years, returned to the Philippines. Don Santiago de los Santos, a family friend also called Captain Tiago, threw a party for his honour, which was graced with the presence of friars and other well-known figures - Doña Victorina, Padre Sibyla, and ex- San Diego curate Fray Damaso Vardolagas, who derided and insulted Ibarra. Ibarra gave the cold shoulder to the insults, took no offense at what he said about him, and, relatively, excused himself warmly and left the gathering by reason of a supposedly important undertaking.

Ibarra, the day after, called round for Maria Clara, his fiancee, the pretty daughter of Captain Tiago and well-to-do resident of Binondo, Manila. Their ongoing love was undoubtedly manifested in that meeting, and Maria Clara couldn’t help but look back over the letters her dearest had put pen to paper for her before he left for Europe. Prior to Ibarra’s leaving for San Diego, Lieutenant Guevara, a gendarmerie, revealed to him the incidents preceding the demise of his father, Don Rafael Ibarra, a wealthy landowner of the town.

As said by Guevara, Don Rafael was one-sidedly accused of being a heretic, other than being a docile - a claim brought forth by Damaso on account of Don Rafael's abstention in the Sacraments, for instance confession and mass. Damaso's enmity against Ibarra's father is made worse by another incident when Don Rafael helped out on a clash between a tax collector and a child fighting, and the former's death was blamed on him, though it was not intentional. Out of the blue, all of those who thought ill of him went up with further objections. He was incarcerated, and just when the matter was almost straightened out, he died of bad health in prison. Still not pleased with what he had done, Damaso arranged for Don Rafael's dead body to be dug up from the Catholic church and brought to a Chinese graveyard, because he thought it wrong to consent to a heretic a Catholic burial ground. Sorry to say, it was raining and because of the niggling heaviness of the body, the undertakers decided to lob the corpse into a hard by mere.

Settling of scores was not in Ibarra's plans, but rather he wanted to carry through his father's plan of raising a school as he believed that education would pave the way to his country's advancement (all over the novel the author refers to both Spain and the Philippines like chalk and cheese, which form part of a same nation or family, being Spain the mother and the Philippines the daughter). Throughout the inaugural ceremony of the school, Ibarra would have been killed in a disruption had Elias - a mystifying man who had warned Ibarra earlier of a plot to kill him in cold blood - not saved him. Instead the hired killer met an untoward incident and died. The series of events proved to be too hurtful for Maria Clara who got badly ill but was coincidentally cured by the medicine Ibarra sent.

After the launching, Ibarra hosted a luncheon during which Damaso, arriving uninvited at the luncheon, again insulted him. Ibarra closed his eyes to the priest's disrespect, but when the latter disparaged the recollection of his dead father, he was no longer able to bring himself under control and sprang at Damaso, prepared to stab him for his impudence. In consequence, Damaso excommunicated Ibarra, taking this opportunity to convince the already-hesitant Tiago to forbid his daughter from getting married to Ibarra. The friar wished Maria Clara to get hitched to Linares, a Peninsular who had just arrived from Spain.

With the help of the governor-general, Ibarra's excommunication was reversed and the archbishop came to a decision to accept him as a member of the Church anew. But, as fate would have it, some incident of which Ibarra had known nothing about was blamed on him, and he was mistakenly arrested and imprisoned. The indictment against him was then taken  precedence because during the proceedings that followed, nobody could bear witness that he was indeed involved. Alas, his letter to Maria Clara in some way got into the hands of the judges and was manipulated such that it then became substantiation against him by the parish priest, Fray Salvi. With Machiavellian precision, Salvi framed Ibarra and ruined his life just so he could stop him from marrying María Clara and making the latter his concubine.

In the interim, in Capitan Tiago's residence, a party was being held to proclaim the upcoming marriage of Maria Clara and Linares. Ibarra, with the help of Elías, took this chance to break out from prison. Before leaving, Ibarra spoke to Maria Clara and accused her of being disloyal to him, thinking that she gave the letter he wrote her to the jury. Maria Clara made clear that she would never work against him, but that she was compelled to submit Ibarra's letter to Father Salvi, in exchange for the letters written by her mother even before she, Maria Clara, was born. The letters were from her mother, Pia Alba, to Damaso alluding to their unborn child; and that María Clara was thus not Captain Tiago's natural daughter, but Damaso's.

Later, Ibarra and Elias ran away by boat. Elias instructed Ibarra to recline, covering him with grass to put his being there out of sight. As luck would have it, they were spotted by their enemies. Elias, thinking he could outmanoeuvre them, jumped into the water. The sentinels rained shots on him, all the while not knowing that they were aiming at the wrong man.

Maria Clara, thinking that Ibarra had been killed in the shooting incident, was, to a great extent, overcome with angst. Robbed of hope and severely disheartened, she requested Damaso to confine her into a nunnery. Damaso half-heartedly agreed when she threatened to take her own life, demanding, ‘the nunnery or death!’ Unbeknown to her, Ibarra was still alive and able to get away. It was Elias who had taken the gunshots.

On the eve of Christmas, Elias roused in the jungle seriously injured, as it is here where he instructed Ibarra to meet him. Elias, instead, found the altar boy Basilio holding his already-dead mother, Sisa. The latter lost her mind when she learned that her two sons, Crispin and Basilio, were chased out of the convent by the sexton on suspicions of stealing sacred objects. Well, it was the sexton who took the objects and only pinned the blame on the two boys. The said sexton actually slew Crispin while cross-examining him on the supposed site of the sacred objects. It was understood that the body was never found and the incident was hidden by Salví.

Elias, won over that he would die shortly, instructed Basilio to build a funeral pyre and burn his and Sisa's bodies to ashes. He told Basilio that, if no one reached the place, he would come back later on and dig for he would stumble on gold. He also let him (Basilio) know to take the gold he would find and go to school. In his dying gasp, he instructed Basilio to keep on dreaming about freedom for his motherland with the words: ‘I shall die without seeing the dawn break upon my homeland. You, who shall see it, salute it! Do not forget those who have fallen during the night.’ He passed on then.

It was put in plain words, in the epilogue, that Tiago turned out to be hooked on opium and was seen to frequent the opium house in Binondo to slake his dependence. Maria Clara became a nun where Salvi, who has lusted over her from the opening of the book, recurrently used her to fulfil his lust. One tempestuous late afternoon, a fine-looking fanatical woman was spotted at the top of the convent, shedding tears and cursing the heavens for the lot in life it has given her. Even as the woman was never known, it is put it to the readers that the said woman was Maria Clara.

The novel was a call to the affirmation of nationalised distinctiveness and the fight for parity with the vanquishers. With its presentation and examination of Spanish oppressions, it emphasised the need for transformation.

Finished when he was all of twenty-six, ‘An Eagle Flight’ was Rizal's earliest novel. He had already written essays and poems with patriotic topics up to that time.

Jose Rizal was laid blame on of being a revolutionary caused by the general idea of his book, which in a while stimulated revolutionaries in their cause.

On Philippines Education

an essay by Roger B Rueda

Philippines education sucks. I don't know, our government doesn’t place great importance on education. This, in consequence, is no negligible issue. Equality rests or collapses with us and our habits of mind, and education produces habits of mentality. We, even so, are seeing deep-seated changes equally in pedagogy and curricular content, and these changes have not been well thought throughout. Keen for cost-effective intensification, this nation, like many others, has begun to think of education in barely instrumental terms, as a set of practical skills that can create quick-fix turnover for business (of other countries, perhaps). What is getting misplaced in the cutthroat outbreak is the opportunity of social equality.

We, as citizens, need to tend the ability to pass judgement on practice and authority, to keep examining self and other, to accept no talking or suggestion until we have tested it with our very own way of thinking. We have a disquieting capability to defer to authority and to peer pressure. Social equality can’t go on if we don’t limit these baneful tendencies, cultivating habits of intrusive and critical thought.

We also could do with historical knowledge, the basics of the major world religions, and how the global economy works. We need to learn to weigh up evidence, to think for ourselves about the unusual ways in which it can be put together, and brought to bear on current reality.

The humanities, the arts, and even history are being cut away to make room for profit-making skills (or merely profit-making by schools). When such changes are made, business itself suffers, because healthy business cultures necessitate ingenuity and critical thinking, as leading business educationists have long stressed. Even were this not factual, however, the liberal arts are essential for the sort of government we have chosen and for the sort of the Philippines we have long sought to be.

The role of education is extensively understood to be essential in our society for both the encroachment of the nation over and above the enhancement of individual life. The power that results from learning provides people with the ability to do well physically, rationally, and psychologically, and contribute their resources to the betterment of their environment. The fact that a person who has worked hard at his or her education will be offered countless opportunities for his or her future is something that no one can contest in our culture, because it is based on a philosophy that has fueled the growth of our country. But it seems that only a small number are working hard.

The Philippines has need of public education in the hope that everyone would be offered an equal opportunity to realise this dream and to pursue a life full of goings-on and dispensation. Yet, when it comes down to it, this presumption has failed to provide each student with the same opportunity to accomplish his or her goal and instead has only fostered isolation, bigotry, and mass disproportion.

The biggest problem in our public educational system is the relentless lack of financial support and the gross inequalities that are present amongst schools. While many children of middle and upper class neighbourhoods are given the material and intellectual resources that will allow them to get hold of high social standing, solid employment, and wealth, many other children are denied this dispensation because of their economic background and location. Observably within almost any society there are going to be varying levels of material goods and power, but it seems that in the Philippines, the dissimilarity between rich and poor is greatly puffed up. How is it that low-income populace are not being offered the same resources as superior class citizens? It is this lack of fiscal resources in poor neighbourhoods that is the foundation of all the other problems found in the individual district schools. Unproductive and inexpert teachers, textbooks, lab instruments, and general supply insufficiency, and inapt building conditions all stem from the fact that there is not enough money being put into such institutions. However, because of both societies’ approach towards the low-income class and personal greed, this fiscal disproportion is not going to change; political power, and public unresponsiveness also contribute to the overall lack of knowledge of the problem.

The educational system is an institution that is not only an integral piece of our social structure but also is responsible for teaching children the fundamental learning tools, simple values, and social skills that are essential for continued existence in our culture. The facility to read, write, solve problems, and understand numbers is essential for almost any job, and knowing how to interact with others in a social context or in the workplace and respect authority (as in a employer-employee bond) is vital if one intends to work or even live in our world nowadays, and these are all things that are taught in school, through positive student-teacher interactions and class coursework. The perspective on how a society stays together is based on the idea of a set of agreed upon norms, beliefs, values, and expectations of appropriate behaviour that is to be internalised by each individual. Consequently, if education serves the purpose of instilling this harmony, when all the public school students are not held to the same set of standards, there is going to be a mainstream of the population that will not be capable to fulfil a task in our society, and thus accordingly will become a strain on the other parts of society as a whole. A malfunction of one part of society that interferes with the smooth functioning of the whole, is a social problem, and then, the movement towards testing and answerability is trying to lighten the pressure that our current system has upon institutions like the economy and family structure. 

The biggest problem, in terms of what the primary issue in education is today is the lack of funding that occurs in schools all over the country, as well as the fact that the massive disparity, so clearly perceptible within our system, receives such little attention from the public and accordingly remains up in the air. Reading about the wretched building conditions, the lack of proper educational resources, and the inefficiency of the teachers was to me such an unknown and sickening impression, because I have led a life full of unbinding freedom; that these kind of situations and circumstances exist in such alarming numbers is, in my opinion, totally undesirable and immensely duplicitous of our country. It would not take much money from each individual to restore schools and perhaps even whole neighbourhoods; and the fact that personal greed plays such a huge role in the withholding of monetary support is disgusting of us as humans. The fact that in the Philippines, there are children crammed into decrepit classrooms with uninspiring teachers, no books, no hope for a better future, and little solace from the harsh realities of life is a self-mockery.

On university education, our government is handing over millions of pesos to incompetent professors in state universities. Incompetent university professors are good for nothing. The Philippines has no framework of higher education that can match up to the rest of the world. The universities are a quagmire of despotic professors. The PhDs can not function in the real world. There is no standard of research in the country in hard sciences or social sciences. Knowledge is passed by rote and memorisation in a continual loop from teacher to student to teacher. Teachers do not undertake or tolerate critical thinking. Any old place can slap a university sign on the door and become an accredited institution to meet the criteria for government financial backing.

I think our educationists and politicians should require all graduate applicants to take the GRE, set up tenure review and administrative review, push student unions on campus, strengthen cultural and social discourse and, most beguilingly, exert a pull on Filipino teachers.

Our education should give us a sense of place, instil in us much self-confidence and self-worth, and give us the power to do something good with our life. Does it? The notion that there are thousands of students just that are being shorn of this opportunity because of either their economic status is nauseatingly inequitable in my eyes. I sense that the more pressing issue lies in the already present dreadful circumstances in which a lot of poor students are being taught, especially because it is a problem much easier to tackle and would have such discernible and perceptible results. It is unmistakable that with apposite fiscal organisation and support that this problem of inequity could be easily solved, and would in turn help assuage the burdens of many other issues that come to pass within hard-up neighbourhoods about the country. Teenage pregnancy, drug use, and other problems still would turn into many families all but dysfunctional. The family, though, differs from the school in the considerable respect that government is not conscientious, at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in education. Schools, on the other hand, could make striking changes almost overnight if fiscal equity was a reality. I blame our government for not taking the fitting actions to resolve the situation. It cannot be disregarded that in each social system there are going to be people better off than others, but it is the job of each citizen and each elected official to make certain that every single person is in any case given the prospect by any means possible to make it.

Felt Desperation

an essay by Roger B Rueda

The life of the poor is not a pleasant life of simplicity in contemporary Philippines. It is an unvarying struggle, a constant fight, an unvarying pasture of contending chances, opposing tasks, commitments, and necessities, a continuous attempt to accomplish the unworkable. For many at the underside of our social ladder, a legally recognised, honest life can at times look as if to be an obvious hopelessness.

A lot of poor children in urban Philippines often find themselves fighting to stay alive each day. These children often go without food, water, health care, and education. Time and again, they also face each day with no hope. Some astonishingly dreadful things - like glue-sniffing boys ambling down the streets of Iloilo City, with impunity - never change (they conduct their self-destruction without fear of being challenged by passersby or social workers) - basically because people are ignorant that it is their own indifference to, and tolerance and acceptance of this and other ignominy, mistreatment, decay, dreadful conditions, and dysfunction that allows tremendously noticeable tragedies like this to persist for many years and take their appalling toll. Many young, poor, slothful, uneducated glue-sniffing victims are not only abandoned, but whose public self-abuse is readily accepted and tolerated in this city. Young glue-sniffers are in many places in Iloilo City, out in the open at night.

A lot of poor Filipinos go through a sticky patch these days. For instance, they have to keep buying mobile phones worth Php 500 or less as they’re what they can come up with the money for, and then having the phones go kaput on them, because there’s not a Php 500 phone in the Philippines that’s worth a blameworthiness.

They just hope their terrible toothache or stomachache or headache makes well. They can’t even find the money for a paracetamol or ibuprofen.  And to a greater extent poor people live at the side of the streets. It seems paradoxical to me, developments are in evidence.

They get unsafe China toys for their children, the government officials imprudent and negligent about this problem even this has caused colossal loss to the national economy. Their house does not have enough room for each one who lives with them. Things are seldom what we seem, they are more of canned sardines. They most often feel the glued soles tear off their shoes when they run about the park. Their child’s school has 30-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning, the donors of the books think the books are what they ought to have even supposing they can provide better ones. They are not out of their depth to donate rubbish books.

They think Php 100 a day is a really good transaction. They put their faith in people who don’t give a damn about them. They stop the truck to take a lamp or old bits and pieces from a stranger’s rubbish. They don’t mind even if, while making lunch for their child, a cockroach or mouse skitters over the food.

Poor and illiterate people are misused during election campaign. They are all given freebie meals and pocket money. Elections are the only time when they get the recognition.

They keep on believing that a degree from a state university can actually make a difference even though the professors are not up to it and even though their prospectus doesn’t fit to their aptitude or even probable work at some point. Some people are annoyed at them just for walking about in the shopping mall. The police force busts into the house right next to theirs. These problems spawn more severe corollaries that make this society more squalid, intellectually, morally, and religiously.

The way they talk has turned out to be a basis by most people as to know a bit about them. Evidently, possibly because being poor has become a label, and prevalent. Aren’t we making a peat bog to make this country a gigantic quagmire of paucity or adding exasperation to this curse?

They work as hard, too, as any person, wherever, in the periphery of dishonesty, discrimination, and disproportion, however. They shocked us as we learn they are not really brainless and they are not actually indolent. They have to pass the time in a casualty with a sick child dead to the world on their knee for six hours. See? This society is unfeeling, I don't know. The poorest sections of our society are not empowered because we are rapacious, especially our politicians and businesspeople.

They are always judged. Their cough doesn’t go away. Their eczema stays as if it was permanent. Their goitre, visible as distension at the front of the neck, seems to be a curse put on them. Many die with it. They have few choices. They grin with missing teeth. For many, it is hard to stop their being poor. I think so. This society is so thoughtless. They, though, are disposed to give a gift certificate worth Php 500 to a well-off friend but detest to give even a peso coin to a tramp.

By reason of poverty caused by this society’s avarice and thoughtlessness, a lot of children cannot go to schools, even to a school with 30-year old books. They only watch others go to schools and can simply wish to seek knowledge. It is on account of a lot of hindrances and difficulties - desperate conditions that they face in life. Having been forced to kill their aspirations, dreams and other wishes, they are pressed to earn a living for themselves and for their families. So then this country has lot of child workers. These children work due to the psychological, social, and materialistic pressure. Isn’t the nation’s future namely children shorn of pleasures of life? Well, ignorance has reduced their abilities of thinking right or differentiating between right and wrong, as well as their life-chances, to their non-access to education.

This problem on poverty calls for swift action from our government, from people who have the power to change things by far, and from the churches that think religious belief is a justification for this negligence. Due to having a large family already, combined with financial and/or medical privation, poor people should espouse the use of artificial contraception for the purpose of preventing more children. It is a national problem that needs to be taken in hand by all of us.

For one, as poverty is getting worst, poor people won’t be stopped to steal from people - relatives, associates, neighbours, unfamiliar persons. Others are tempted towards prostitution, a nightmare of squalor and ill-treatment for all concerned or are trafficked under false pretenses, such as jobs, then are forced into prostitution in brothels. Others are talked into to carry illegal drugs into other countries even though it means death penalty when proven at fault. Others twist their arm towards suicide.

And when we, as a society, are found time and time again not to be up to snuff to elevate those at the very base, let us not castigate or punish them for trying to continue to exist as best they can, as they rob, burgle, kill, take advantage of others, pimp, shoplift, swindle others out of thousands of pesos, steal things out of pockets or bags in a crowd, and agree to carry illegal drugs into another country./ Panay News Sunday