#27 Singing Numbers (Numbers Theme Day)

What can I say, Asians love dried fish. We have all kinds, sorted by sizes, way of drying, way of cutting and slicing, type of fish, etc.. When you're visiting Asia and staying near residential houses and smell something awful, chances are someone in the neighborhood is frying dried fish.

When you go to a market and buy one of these, it's now sold by kilos. Before, they were sold by hundreds or by piles. How do you count small fishes by hundreds?? In the town of Palo (12 km from Tacloban) where there's a tabo (big market day every Saturday), dried fishes are sometimes sold by kilos (as shown in the photo above), or sometimes still by hundreds. There's a tradition here where counting is sung. Yes, old women count by singing the numbers. Their chantings syncrhonize and it is very fascinating to listen. The practice is slowly disappearing though. I had to ask a teenager to give me a sample because it's hard to find these old women now. The video is below if you're interested to see. This is my theme day photo (old stock photo), the one above and the video below. Enjoy!



(A short documentary film of this tradition won the Best Foreign Short Documentary Film at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in 2004. The film is called Singing Songs of Leyte by Eli Africa. Also, I wrote an expanded version of this post about Singing Numbers in my travel blog last year, if you're interested to read about it, here's the link.)

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