The Story Behind "Siomao Espesyal"

I imagine that several of you reading this blog are wondering what the meaning of our blog's title is. It happens to be a confusing tale of twists and turns, leading us down a strange path of name crafting to form a title for our 'love team'.

It all started just after I returned to the Philippines, back in October 2008. Jonah decided that she would make a new Friendster account. So that you know, Friendster is a social networking website similar to MySpace and Facebook. While she was making the new account she was trying to think of what her alias would be. She happened to be listening to a Filipino band called "Parokya ni Edgar", and the song that was playing in called Siopao Espesyal. Its a song that uses the tune of Radiohead's song "Creep". Now, for a definition of the song title, because its important to understand. Siopao Espesyal means "special siopao". Siopao is like a chinese steamed bun,


and the Filipinos love eating them. They usually serve two different kinds, Asado and Bola-Bola. Now, back to the story...

As Jonah was listening to the song, she decided that her new alias would be Siopao Espesyal. After she created her new account we occasionally called her Siopao.

A few months later, we became a couple. I still occasionally called Jonah Siopao, and all was well. In January, she started craving a certain type of food called Siomai, which is similar to a chinese dumpling.


During this time, she started calling me Siomai. She then decided that we needed a combination of our names, which is usually common here in the Philippines. We discussed the different possibilities of our names: Jomatt, Jonatt, Matnah, Manah, Monatt, etc. However, none of them really had a nice sound to it. She then came up with the name Siomao. A great combination of our nicknames, and also a good combination of foods. After we came up with the name we started to us it in various places. Then, when we decided that we would start a blog we thought that just Siomao wasn't enough, the title had to be more special. So, we added Espesyal, to make it special.

That's the story, and meaning behind our blog's title.