I feel like a little kid in church
My friend sat next to me texted me. We were sitting in front row attending a talk by a textile expert from University of the Philippines in National Museum. We were half an hour late because of the traffic. Manila has so many museums so we had quite a discussion about which museum we should go for the talk because suddenly we were confused. It’s good that the driver is one of the calm persons I know. He was so sure where Ma’am would go. Yes, my friend often showed him text or brochure of where she needs to go. Not just mentioning the place.
We were sitting half an hour only but already finished half package of Mentos and started texting each other. My friend started. The lady lecturer seemed to be the top expert on the Philippines textile but the way she delivered the lecture was not… for non-academician ladies that like textiles so much. For one, she often leaped into Tagalog. She talked fast mumblingly. She sat down, looked at her laptop at all times so had very limited eye contact with the audience. Not even with us who sat in front row. I could see the lady next to me dozed off. I made myself busy so my friend. So there we were, little kids in church.
We had traveled ‘that far’ so we maximized the visit by walking the museum after the talk. It’s a huge building but only a few rooms are utilized for museum display that in Jakarta I experienced the opposite. Many places in the museum were tagged ‘Off limit’ meaning ‘you cannot enter.’ National museum here is more for artworks done by the Filipinos. Like a national gallery? I saw one room with huge bones from proto (Filipino’s like to use this word) history but the collection is not enough to show the prehistory of the Philippines. So it’s a bit away from national museum concept. Hey who am I to say?
My friend showed me the huge painting by one of the Filipino maestros, Juan Luna, The Spoliarium. The painting is spectacular because of its size and history. It was submitted by Luna to the Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1884 where it won a gold medal. The Spoliarium measured four meters in height and seven meters in width. The painting depicts a chamber beneath a Roman arena, where bodies of dead gladiators are being dragged into a shadowy area, presumably to be put in a bigger pile of dead bodies. The size of the painting, its color and its massive wooden frame with metal were just indescribable. Fabulous!
Anyway, my friend was nice to ask her driver to make a detour loop to show a bit more of old Manila near the bay. We drove passing the outside of Chinatown. Chinatown looks the same everywhere. An alley with busy cables hanging and signboards written in Chinese with busy lamps hanging and on. I was too tired to accept my friend's idea to jump off the car to taste the crowd. The tour had made me happy. It’s enough!
On the way back, the driver took us passing the cultural complex as part of Imelda Marcos' big plan. It’s a complex for visual art performance and multipurpose big venues with one big parking lot that connects the buildings. The buildings looked old and dirty of pollution; and generally looked massive. There’s one building that looked abandoned. Rumor says a hundred people were buried alive in the collapsed building because the construction was so poor. Too fast to build and corruption had made it. Now the building is haunted!! Cool!
We decided not to do much today as we both needed to slow down a bit. Like in Jakarta, doing things and moving in the city in Manila is tiring. The pollution perhaps. Typhoon Lupit is expected to make landfall in northern Luzon this coming Sunday morning. It may make Manila really wet if not flooded again. I miss reading again…
A Spanish-style fountain in Chinatown in Manila with low water and floating garbage.