Manila of My Childhood

A mental image of Manila for most of us may probably consist of one or two of the following: Jeepneys. Traffic. Poverty. Filthy and congested streets, street children, street vendors, dilapidated buildings and houses, neglected by society.

But underneath the smoke, the dirt, the traffic lie a few more things that most of us have neglected over time. Art. History. Culture. All have been buried deep beneath Manila's dirt and poverty, set aside by most of us in pursuit of other things such as money, success, progress.

My siblings and I visited the Planetarium and the National Museum last November. We had our own little field trip through the Andromeda and nearby galaxies at the Planetarium. It was this round theater with chairs arranged in a circular pattern. Right in the middle of the room is a complex-antique-right-out-of-a-sci-fi-movie looking projector, which had a lot of lenses that shoot up to the dome-shaped ceiling. So we watched this presentation with our heads tilted back to our seats, looking up at the ceiling as if it were the night sky full of stars.

After the visit to the Planetarium, we decided to cross the street to the National Museum. It was a gloomy afternoon. The sun was hiding behind grey clouds. It drizzled quite a bit on our way to the museum. We passed through Luneta Park and there stood a towering statue of Lapu-Lapu. If you are Filipino and you do not know who Lapu-Lapu is, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Just kidding. Anyway, Lapu-Lapu is the first native to resist Spanish forces who tried to colonize the Philippines back in 1500s. So he was regarded as the first Filipino hero. There he was, standing tall, perhaps guarding over Manila somehow. Funny thing is in  the 1500s he fought in Mactan, not Manila. But anyway he also has monument in Cebu.

The National Museum houses the works of most celebrated Filipino artists and displays artifacts which had been part of Philippine history and way of life. Life depicted through paintings, sculptures, sketches, woodworks, textiles, various arts through various media.

This was the very first branch of the Bank of the Philippine Islands, originally know as El Banco Espanol Filipino de Isabell II, ushered in the start of the Philippine banking and finance industry.

We were fast growing up. And as cliche as it may sound, how fast time flies. It's refreshing to revisit the places we had gone to when we were children. The last time I was at the Planetarium and National Museum was when I was in third grade, I think. A lot has changed since then, but some things remain the same.