Pancit: Good food,
bad mathematics
Pancit is one of the favorite foods of the Filipinos. The pancit, made up of long thin noodles, is of Chinese origin (photo by patriciaofoz in flickr). Jose Rizal is also of Chinese origin, his great-great-grandfather being Domingo Lamco, a native of Chinchew, China's City of Springs (Gregorio F Zaide, Jose Rizal: Life, Works And Writings, 2003: 5). And Rizal was fond of pancit. When he was staying in Brussels in 1890, he stayed in a modest boarding house with Jose Albert, later with Jose Alejandrino. Alejandro tells the story of Rizal's pancit (146):

In Brussels, we took our meals in a house and Rizal on one occasion suggested that we eat pancit. We were spending so much a day and so we spent one day's appropriations for the purchase of the necessary ingredients. It seems, however, that he commited an error in his calculations this time for we spent more than what we intended to have. In order to remedy the error we were compelled to have pancit for lunch and supper for two days.

When you make a mistake, you have to pay for it.