We were at the market very early in the morning because of our granddaughter. She, like all first year college students, has to go to weekly ROTC. (If you want to know about this training, you can follow the link and read the Wikipedia article). After dropping her off, we drove to the public market in the city of Dumaguete. That evening, our children were due to return from their vacation in India and our daughter had asked for a hearty pancit and pork ribs for dinner after all the curry dishes. We’ve never been to the market this early before and I, at least, was surprised to see a large table of slaughtered pigs on the access road between the fish, poultry and meat market buildings and the vegetable vendors on the other side. Several of the local butchers were busy cutting up the pigs according to their species. The individual butchers had all already received some of their ordered goods and we were given our ribs from a fresh half of the pig. These were also cut up for us by the butcher. As I stood there watching the hustle and bustle, I realized that I must have missed a lot of the market action. I hadn’t seen how the slaughtered pigs were delivered; how they were heaved out of the truck and brought to this large table on the shoulders of strong men. Some of the severed tails were lying on the ground and the offal in tin cans. The restaurant owners were already waiting there for their ingredients for specialties such as RM and dinuguan I have now resolved to capture this spectacle in photographs and on video by visiting the market even earlier in the coming days. The slaughtered pigs come from the municipal abattoir and are transported in non-refrigerated trucks, whether to the public markets or the supermarkets in the malls and shopping centers.
