For people like us who grew up in the Philippines, our palates and taste buds will always long for the familiar taste and smell of Filipino cooking.
Thankfully, several restaurants in Nashville offer Filipino food and cooking.
If you’re missing food from the homeland, here’s the list of where to eat Filipino food in and around Nashville, TN. The list below is not ranked. Instead, I organized them based on relative distance away from downtown Nashville.
Back in October 2018, we applied for Permanent Residence (Green Card) in the USA. We initially did not include the medical examination (Form I-693). The form said that we can submit it at a later time, which, I thought, made sense.
So in June 2019, I sent our Forms I-693 to the USCIS. It had a cover letter and included the receipt numbers for our application, as well as our A numbers.
As it turned out, we should not have done that.
Continue readingI am no stranger to moving to a different house. While I was growing, my father, who was an itinerant preacher, moved from one church to another every 1-3 years.
The longest time we spent at a parsonage (a house assigned to a church’s pastor) was six years. By the time I turned twenty, we have stayed at about 10 houses.
In 2015, my wife and I reduced our belongings, packed the essentials, and moved from Manila, Philippines to Nashville, TN USA as I started a new job.
So I do know about moving and packing things.
Coco’s school is close enough to our apartment. It’s a little over 2 miles away. When we were preparing him for Kindergarten, we talked about the transportation situation. Metro Nashville Public Schools a school bus for kids who live within a certain distance from the school.
For the first month of Kindergarten, we told him that I will drop him off at his school in the morning. And in the afternoon, he will ride the bus home. He agreed.
Every time he gets home in the afternoon, he rides with a bunch of other kids from our apartment complex. He has made some friends, and so the bus ride is pretty enjoyable for him.
It was perhaps a little too enjoyable that he said he wanted to ride the bus in the morning, too!
That presented a bit of dilemma for us.
He tends to wake up in the morning and being the 5-year old that he is, he would dawdle. He wanted to spend an extra 5-10 minutes lying in bed, half-asleep, when we try to wake him in the morning.
And then, he would spend another 25-35 minutes eating breakfast. Then, another 30-40 minutes to take a bath, brush his teeth, and prepare for school! That pretty much ensures that we leave home just in time for us to arrive about 10 minutes before his class time.
For him to ride the bus, we needed to adjust our morning routines at least 20 minutes earlier! That would be even tougher in the winter!
It just feels like yesterday when Coco started attending Pre-School! A week ago, he started attending Kindergarten! Thankfully, I had a full week of vacation before he started school. I came from a 2-week long work trip to South Africa. So we caught up a bit, played a lot, went on a picnic by the lake, and before we knew it, we needed to buy school supplies!
The Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) provide the list of supplies we needed. We logged on to the web page of his school and downloaded the list. The supplies he needed include the following:
Strongly Encouraged Items:
We were starting to get the hang of this process.
It was Tennessee’s tax free weekend. We ended up saving at least $20 on taxes for our son’s school supplies! In addition to the school supplies, we bought a couple of shirts (with collar) that will serve as his daily uniform. This school thing can be a bit expensive. At least we don’t need to pay for any fees for him to go to school!
Before moving to Nashville in the USA, I experienced the coldest natural temperature in Baguio City and Tagaytay City during the month of January. It must have been 14 degrees Celsius, which is about 57.2 degrees Fahrenheit. A lot of Americans would probably say that that is great temperature!
But for Filipinos, that’s sweater weather! It’s great to huddle inside the home and sip a good cup of Kalinga brew.
When we came to Nashville, though, I realized that 14 Celsius or 57.2 degrees Fahrenheit is nothing compared to the cold winter here. I mean Nashville is located somewhere in the Southeastern part of the continental USA. It doesn’t get too cold compared to the Midwest and Northern cities and states such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Wisconsin. But it still gets cold.
Heck, our Filipino bones can get frozen below 10 degrees Celsius.
Here’s what winter is like in Nashville.