A Quick Peek at Cebu’s History: Visiting Cebu Museum

I always hear my classmates before how they rave on the boringness of our history classes, which I always thought as nonsense because it always fascinates me. Even in my primary years, I loved listening to how my teachers slowly introduced the lives and customs of the people from olden times.

I may not be keen on memorizing the dates, but I’m much more attentive in remembering the narratives. It became my favorite subject—especially in my fifth-grade year, when a really good teacher taught that subject. My usually slacking classmates became quite active due to his unique teaching strategy, and that’s why I mostly didn’t forget what he taught up until now. Anyway, I remembered those memories because today I’m gonna share my experience last Friday at National Museum of the Philippines-Cebu.

I already shared on my previous blog about my visit in city that we just hitched a ride with my uncle and his wife so we arrive at the city earlier than my scheduled orientation. That’s why we decided to look for a place to kill our time, and my younger sister had a brilliant suggestion. She’d been studying in the city for years, so it’s no surprise that she knows it more than I do, and also that’s the reason why I asked her to accompany me. I’m quite worried that I may not know my way through those busy streets, so I definitely need someone that can guide me.

After we were dropped off, we thanked them before making our way to the museum! It’s been a while since I visited a museum; perhaps the last time was almost a couple of decades ago when I was still in my daycare years. And so, I can’t hide my excitement when I finally get to see the museum again.

It's like it awoke my younger self because upon seeing the first area, which featured the rich biodiversity of Cebu, I became giddy. Seeing both the familiar and unfamiliar animal species got me amazed because I never thought that they would feature a lot of animals that I haven’t encountered yet.

For example, there’s this like marine organism that was exist way back Cretaceous era and up until now you can see them in the Pulangbato, Cebu City. Further, I saw a lot of taxidermized and replica aquatic and land animals, which really captured my interest. I took my time reading the facts about them and looking at their figures.

They all look cool in their own ways, but there’s this certain animal that captured my attention immediately, and it’s the bat! I have already seen bats a lot of times because sometimes there are times of the year when bats visit our place, mainly because of the various fruits that they eat there. Those times I enjoyed them afar, but when I saw this taxidermized bat at the museum, I was really amazed because it’s like I was able to see it up close.

We were about to proceed to the next part of the museum when we saw another cool part of the museum—the life-size replica of a whale shark. It’s so huge that I can’t help but marvel at its size and imagine how terrifying it would look in real life. Near the life-size whale shark was the interactive corner where you can color and also have fun with the screen.

The finished outputs were clipped on the corner, and when we looked at them, my younger sister’s colored tamaraw was still there. I laughed because it looked so lazily colored. Enough with the animals, we went to the next, which featured a lot of things that were from the past.

Several jars, jugs, plates, chinaware were there—some restored while some were left broken. It’s oddly mesmerizing to see those old things preserved because just by gazing at them, they give me the feels of how it was to live in that era.

Before we went to the second floor, we look at the models of boats from different municipalities and cities of Cebu. Cebu is basically an island and since we are surrounded with bodies of water, it is not surprising that have high marine biodiversity. There are a lot of styles of boats all over the city and province.

If there are models of boats, there is also fishing equipment that was near the life-size boat from Alcoy, Cebu. I haven’t visited Alcoy itself, but I have seen it a lot of times along the way to our trip to Santander, and it definitely has beautiful beaches along with the lush greenery on the mountainside. When we’re done with ground floor, we went up to second one which features mostly paintings, maps, and some urban structure models.

We were greeted with a huge painting that depicted the Battle of Mactan which happened way back 1500s. We continued walking and saw more paintings and later on various old maps that depicted a lot of variations of early interpretation of how the world looks before and the routes.

The maps displayed were enthralling because the way they’re drawn so detailed—like I can’t imagine how taxing it is to made those. We checked some more paintings along the way, and when we were finally at the next destination, which was the last part of our museum trip, my attention was immediately caught by the huge painting of our national hero.

The details in the painting were so eye-catching, from the death-hugging-life symbolism to the sword that was hanging away from him like it was never his option to resort to that; the painting indeed depicted well the essence of Rizal’s life. By the way, the paintings there were all painted by Martino Abellana, so that part was basically like his exhibit. There are different kinds of his artworks that were made with different kinds of mediums.

From pastels, oil paints, and charcoal to ink and pencil—everything looks so amazing. It’s somehow enviable to see how consistently good he is even in various mediums, and you totally can see it in his works. As we gaze at his works, we both can see how passionately he lived his life, and that kinda made me ponder on mine. I mean, where did all the passion that I onced felt go?

Ok, ok before I lose myself to some life prattling, after checking all his paintings there, we head our way down. But before we went out, we went inside the restroom to freshen up ourselves. We also had a quick photo op, and since it was almost 12:00 at that time, we decided to hasten our way out because my orientation will start at 1:00. And that’s how our museum visit ended—filled with new learnings and memories.

---

Before I forgot, here are some other pictures I took during my visit there: