Picture this, I sit on a crowded 13C jeepney on the way to Colon and I use “sit” very generously because three quarters of my rear end are sat upon nothing but air molecules.  The anachronistic hands of my tablet’s clock app read 2:00PM, the horizon remained to be tinted blue with orange bronze hues a few hours from engulfing the sky.  The museum closes at 4:30PM, forty minutes had passed and the jeep had only just now passed Country Mall, this is bad.

I never liked Colon, to many the concentrated essence of Cebu City and while I do legitimately love Metro Cebu, I avoid the oldest street in the Philippines as much as I can.  Weirdly enough any time where I’m forced to be in Colon I find it quite enjoyable actually, but any second spent outside of Colon any desire to return is completely absent within me.  I’d have to be forced to go because I can’t possibly be compelled, which is exactly where I found myself when I hopped off in front of Colonnade.

In those aforementioned times where I had no choice but to go, a few fragments of the labyrinth of Colon had engraved itself on my brain. Its turns and intersections that serve as the urban intestinal tract of Central Visayas have manifested themselves into a blurry imaginary map in my mind’s eye.  As much as I dislike the place, I have undeniable pride that this grid I used to see as a nightmarish maze of Metro supermarkets at love motels at every corner, has become somewhat familiar to me.  Miraculously after passing Country Mall, 13C got me to the dizzying smoggy concrete web of Colon in half an hour, I was consoled that my journey could now be a stroll instead of a marathon.

Upon reaching the renovated former Malacañang sa Sugbo, the security officer at the gate explained to me that visitors come in batches and that until the group of people in front of me who are sitting underneath a white tent go inside, red metal bars will continue to come between me and the museum.  Luckily I didn’t have to wait that long and it was soon my turn to sit amongst the students on a field trip eagerly anticipating.  The guard played an audio recording of proper conduct when inside the museum… on loop, honest to god it was probably less than 10 minutes but the ceaseless reminders of allowed bag sizes and prohibited liquids blaring on the speakers over and over again, I could’ve sworn I’d be witness to the coming of Christ while perched on that cheap plastic chair.  Time marched on monotonously as it may be, but it continued forth and I got in by the last hour of the museum’s schedule and headed straight to the art exhi- okay they told us AGAIN the conduct and guidelines that had already clogged up our drums more than ear wax at that point but after that I was on my way.

I didn’t have a cellphone, it broke a month and a half ago and despite being one of HALANGDON’s two photographers, a camera is not within my repertoire.  Instead I lug around a tablet everywhere I go like a ten-year-old boy whose parents can’t be bothered to deal with him.  Tapping on it to capture a picture shakes the whole device and results in the blurry photographs of expensive artworks that lie in this article.