The balintawak is the traditional Filipino costume for females. It is derived from the Filipino dress women wore during the era of Spanish rule in the Philippines. The costume typically features a white or cream-colored blouse with puffy, butterfly-, short- sleeves, a V neckline that is wrapped around the body, and plenty of ornate embroidery, and a low calf to floor length skirt. Females wearing balintawaks are often paired with men wearing barong Tagalogs.

Balintawak is also a place north of Manila, where Andres Bonifacio began the Philippine Revolution.

On August 26, Bonifacio assembled the leaders and hundred of comrades-in-arms in the hills of Balintawak north of Manila. In an emotion-laden ceremony, the fighters tore their residence certificates to symbolize the termination of their loyalty to Spain while shouting the battle cry: "Long live Philippine independence!" The event went down in Philippine history as the "Cry of Balintawak" and is regarded as the starting signal for the Philippine revolution. Today, a monument marks this site which shows a Philippine peasant swinging the "bolo", the national variation of the machete.
From http://www.univie.ac.at/Voelkerkunde/apsis/aufi/rizal/har-cry.htm

shmOOnkie pOOnks' balintawak is more commonly known as baro't saya. This is from http://www.FilipinoHeritage.com:
Like their menfolk, the female indigenes of the archipelago, gradually covered their upper torsos with short, sleeved collarless blouses called baro, through the four hundred years of colonization. And what was, since ancient times, an all-purpose brief wrap-around skirt - metamorphosed into the long skirts called saya.

a close and medium range system of the FMA (Filipino Martial Arts) of Arnis/Escrima, named after the region it was created in. Teaching/training is with a single rattan or bamboo baton. At its basic level, practitioners use a reactive 'counter to counter' style of attack.

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