Back to travel posts! Last month, I celebrated my birthday and I decided to finally check out the NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. It is one of the three national museums found in Luneta Park, and its doors only opened last May 18 after a major renovation.
We were expecting the crowd to be just small but lo and behold, there was a field trip even if it was on a Saturday. Also, the free entrance may have enticed more citizens to visit the place so there was a looooong line when we arrived before lunch. (Quick amusing story — a guy asked me about the long wait in line… and turned out that the lady with her is my colleague from our NCL office. Hello Ila!)
If you’re bringing a bag with you, take note that bags bigger than the size of a short bond paper is required to be deposited in their baggage counter.
Upon entering the museum, you will immediately see this iconic DNA Tree of Life structure in the courtyard. It houses an elevator which takes you directly from ground floor to 5th floor and vice-versa.
Before I continue with telling what you can see inside the museum, I was lucky enough that in the conference I attended last Sept 13, the organizer invited Architect Dominic Galicia and he gave a talk on “Reinventing the Museum Experience”.
During the whole talk, you can feel his passion for his craft. Some of the things he shared is how they had to search and see the old blueprints such as Toledo “drawings” dating back to 1930s. Even if part of the building may be old or damaged, he firmly believes that it can be reborn. He also mentioned how he wants to be faithful to the story that is why he wants to know the background of the building/s to be renovated.
He suggested to us to do the processional route of taking the elevator all the way to 5th floor then from there, visit each exhibit and go down each level until you return to ground floor… And that’s what my friends and I did!
All 5th floor exhibits were still under construction, but pretty interesting because these will be about biodiversity, geology, and life through time. We went down to 4th floor which showcased different types of forests in PH as well as the types of animals that one can find there.
I think it was on the 4th floor where we encountered these familiar names from one of our high school classes:
After going down the ramp that led us to 3rd floor, couldn’t help but capture these awesome details by the arch and one of the front doors of the museum:
In the same corridor where I took the photos above, Tomas Bernardo’s orchid paintings were mounted as a gallery.
Theme for 3rd floor seems to be aquatic / marine life — mangroves, beaches, life thousands of meters under the sea (or ocean).
When we returned to the courtyard area, near the ramp, we noticed recreation of dinosaur bones!
One of the highlights for us is seeing the skeleton of Lolong, the world’s largest crocodile in captivity.
When we finished touring the last floor, we headed for lunch at Bugis Singapore Street Food. Sharing the food pics I took before closing this entry:
Aaand, that’s it. A geeky way to celebrate my birthday but I had fun anyway. Cheers to my late 20s time! 🙂
Anne Goes to Places 