The plan was simple.  Visit every single one of the 22 museums participating in this year’s Gabii sa Kabilin, an annual one-night event where museums all across Metro Cebu have their doors open until midnight for people to stop by.  In my USC branded tote bag were a plastic water bottle, a Tupperware of Chips Ahoy cookies, a pair of brown khaki shorts, a blue journal riddled with stickers, two black ballpens, my P300 GSK 2024 premium ticket, and an accompanying fold-out brochure.  The ticket, which was worth two days of my allotted daily food budget, was required for a class and entailed discounts on food and merch, a one-time tartanilla ride, and free bus rides going to every museum that spanned past Cebu City and into Mandaue, Talisay, and Lapu-Lapu.  There probably exists a reality where I did complete this checklist in the six hours given, and below would probably be multiple novels-length of prose detailing every museum spot, to which my EIC would promptly strangle me for.  Instead, we exist in this reality where the paragraphs that await you will talk about foot blisters, 62C, Google Maps, Fit n’ Right, drooling horses, pork belly with two rice, and a measly eight museums.  This was my Gabii sa Kabiliin 2024 as per the current reality.

This story starts the way most stories start in Cebu City, with frustration at the commute.  A handful of students, a mixture of linguistic and literature majors, stood humid and annoyed at the bus stop in front of the Aboitiz Land consulting Google Maps on the best route to the Casa Gorordo Museum.  We had decided we would first embark on the walking route from Casa Gorordo to Fort San Pedro despite having paid for complimentary air-conditioned bus rides, a luxury we ultimately did not avail.  I take pride in my know-how of the Cebuano jeepney routes, but at this moment where the destination was neither a mall nor a university, my confidence stuttered and allowed perfectly good 13C and 62C jeeps and minibusses to pass by us.  We eventually bit the bullet and got on 62C and had a street 3 kilometers away from the Casa Gorordo Museum not had shared the same name, we would’ve gotten off in front of one of Cebu’s oldest houses.  And maybe we wouldn’t have had more walking be the pretext to a walking tour.

“Gabii sa Kabilin?  Murag Gibilin sa Gabii man” says Gian Capitan, a line so witty it frustrates me that I didn’t think of it myself.  Being in the literature program means hearing stuff like that every now and again and getting reminded that these people are gonna be the writers of the future.  None of the six pairs of feet of varying walking capacities belonged to a person with a sense of direction, with even Francis Silvidad failing to match the exploratory expectations of his conquistador-like name.  We were a collection of increasingly sweaty twenty-somethings trudging the uneven sidewalks of downtown Cebu (if there were any pavements to begin with), transforming our soles into that closely resembling the jagged asphalt it stepped on.  Bryan Deliña in particular, having chosen fashion over comfort with his high heels, logically assumed that we’d take advantage of the comfortable commute we paid P300 for.  As we tease him by comparing his pain to that of elderly Chinese women with deformed feet from being forced to wear tiny shoes, it must’ve dawned on him that logic was an incorrect assumption to have on this trip. Glory Cabilete made it known at every interval how frustrating it was that we got dropped at Gorordo Avenue and not the Casa Gorordo House and Lamuel Daan, as is usual with him, proceeded without a sound.  An hour had gone by and we were just now going into our first museum.

As prefaced earlier I intended this article to have a section dedicated to every one of the 22 museums.  But as the night itself stopped being about the museums and became more about being lost in the heart of Cebu City, so too will this piece.  Thus instead of having almost two dozen intro-body-conclusion paragraphs, the entirety of my museum experience that night will manifest itself to you into only one eight-sentence paragraph, a sentence each spot.

RAFI – The Kabilin Center featured Steve de Leon’s sculptures, fashion designs, and tactile paintings that had a mixture of indigenous aesthetics and Catholic subject matter, a dichotomy that made me marvel initially but upon more thought was probably a blunt commentary of the two’s historical conflict.  Casa Gorordo Museum scratched every period piece itch I had, making tangible the daydreams of being a Don and Donya when the Spanish colonial period was discussed in elementary school complete with vintage paraphernalia (a motif France and I would continually eat up that night) and a bat that inexplicably came flying in the windy manor.  Museo Parian sa Sugbo – 1730 Jesuit House prolonged that late 19th century-early 20th-century fascination with its own bourgeois house that was frozen in time with USC anthropology majors contextualizing the century-old walls that were currently being kissed by the presence of air conditioning and Pepsi-branded vending machines.  USPF – Jose Rizal Museum consisted of the smallest space we’d visit and a scope that I’d argue was even smaller, because for seemingly no better reason than the fact that a historical educational venture in the Philippines would feel wrong to exclude Dr. Jose Rizal, a place where 30% of it was a cafeteria was dedicated to that one August Sunday Rizal was in Cebu.  Archdiocesan Museum of Cebu unsurprisingly was two stories of unadulterated Catholicism, a seemingly extensive catalog of the Filipino’s overwhelming choice of flavor of Christianity but one not immune to a certain Lamuel who broke his mute streak and graced us by vocally fact-checking one of the exhibits.  Basilica Minore del Santo Niño Museum had us underneath the site of the oldest Catholic Church in the country, and in its cramped aisles housed yet more church documents and garments but also curiously a series of toys spanning the decades from miniature cars to Gundam underneath; a sight that when explained to be displays of gratitude went from being comical to endearing.  BPI Museum stuck out like a sore thumb diagonally adjacent to Magellan’s Cross as a gaudy celebration of capitalism, showcasing both past and present wealth, making it impossible to think of anything other than the bountiful yield of a hypothetical combo bank-museum heist would have.  Sugbu Chinese Heritage Museum proceeded to smack us in the face with more evident wealth; somehow emanating more money than the museum inside the literal bank as its expansive presentation and obvious constant upkeep and maintenance ring true the old joke of why Cebu City has no Chinatown because Cebu City IS the Chinatown.

After the Archdiocesan Museum where Lamuel soft-launched his career as a fact-checker of the Catholic Church, Gian, Glory, and Bryan parted ways with us.  Through multiple dings of our cellphones, Gian revealed to us three remaining that the complimentary buses stopped operations two hours earlier than advertised at 10 pm.  A combination of having wasted P300 and now having to pay more for a commute home probably exacerbated Gian’s Fit N’ Right-induced palpitations, Bryan’s stiletto-born foot pain, and Glory’s academically-caused stress.  Meanwhile, France, Lam, and I were determined to make our premium ticket purchase at least a little worthwhile.

Our three purple pieces of glossy paper that combined cost 450 liters of gasoline grant us each one horse carriage ride.  In a desire to have the most bang for our buck, the reality of the kalesa horses working overtime for this event did not even register with us until one came into our periphery.  It was not the stereotypical romantic scene I had hoped my first horse-drawn ride would be.  Mainly because instead of being with a beautiful woman I was with two lanky men who along with me had their phones out to record a video because our professor gave additional points to those who took the tartanilla ride.  It also didn’t last long, clopping and rolling a distance that would’ve taken less than five minutes to do with a brisk jog.  Both of these, and how cramped and rickety the carriage was, did not aid the sinking guilt we all silently felt in subjecting the horse to this.  It was a half hour before midnight, a time when even the most arduous and ill-treated workers are asleep, but because three college students had P300 to spare, Jasper the horse had his mouth forced open so he could drag us along what barely constitutes a kilometer.

The thought of six sixty-minute hours paints a picture of eternity but as someone who has definitely spent more than six hours jumping from app to app and site to site procrastinating writing this very article, I should’ve known six hours was nothing.  Sitting there at Plaza Independencia eating overpriced but proportionately tasty pork liempo and sipping overpriced but disproportionately standard calamansi juice, I was still disappointed I wasn’t able to go to every museum.  Due to the mixture of that disappointment, the tartanilla ride, and just general fatigue having walked from sundown to midnight, we decided to just skip the final two museums in the walking trip.  For some probably mentally disturbed reason, my brain continues to fight itself on how to characterize that evening.  Whether or not to dwell on the tantalizing what-could-have-been unfulfilled by lack of time management or the amusing story left behind by the same lack of time management.  As of writing this, however, I think I lean more towards the latter.  It seems pretty set in stone to be a quintessential college story I repeat over and over again, a window into a chapter of my life where I was young and lost in the big city, laughing with my similarly young and lost friends.  Plus there’s always next year.  On the ride home, I was already making declarations to myself that I intend to make this a yearly endeavor and that when Gabii Sa Kabilin 2025 comes I will definitely visit every spot.  

My chronic FOMO prohibits me from calling that night a success. I am always a victim of those other realities I spend too much time imagining, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget those six sixty-minute hours as per the current reality.