Fun Trivia About the Philippines
1. The Philippines is the third largest English-speaking nation in the world, behind the United States and England.
2. Boondocks and Boonies, words that have come to mean “in middle of nowhere” in the English language, are derived from the Tagalog word bundock, which means “mountain”. An educated guess would be that American soldiers fighting in the Philippines a century ago adopted the word. As an example, “Our units going into the boondocks to search for insurgents.” After the war, soldiers brought the term home with them, and the rest is history.
3. The Philippines is the fourth largest Catholic country in the world, behind Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.
4. Though the Republic of the Philippines is roughly the same size as Arizona in total area, it has 36,289 km of coastline. The United States, in comparison, has a “mere” 19,924 km of coastline. How is that possible? The Philippines is composed of around 7,000 islands (some are quite tiny), each of which has its own coastline. All those coastlines combined add up!
5. General Douglas MacArthur, known for his “Return” to the Philippines, was the son of Arthur MacArthur, a Brigadier General in the Army who played a major part in pacifying the Philippines during the Philippine-American war at the end of the 19th Century.
6. The Philippines has the longest accessible underground river in the world.
7. With a total membership exceeding 3 million, the Philippines has the third largest Boy Scouts organization in the world, behind the United States and Indonesia.
8. The first recorded intermarriage of a Filipino to a westerner occurred in 1565, when Isabel, the daughter of a Cebuano chief, Rajah Tupas, was married to a Greek by the name of Maestre Andrea. A widow, Isabel was one of the first Cebuanos to be taught the Catholic faith.
(End of book excerpt – if you’d like the entire text, please consider ordering The ASAWA Guide to Fil-West Relationships. Thank you!)