Municipal Hall of Senator Ninoy Aquino

I have discussed several times in this blog the differences between the Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino, Barangay Kulaman, and Kulaman Plateau. So if you are wondering why the title of this post is not "Municipal Hall of Kulaman," I won't explain why here. Check instead "Kulaman in Brief," the page in this blog where I compared and contrasted the closely related and slightly confusing terms.

As the title says, this post is a feature on the municipal hall of my hometown. You must be wondering why it has taken me months to post photos of the structure. As we all know, when one is writing about or visiting a locality, one of the first few things one usually does is take a photo of the municipal hall or the city hall. I followed that unspoken tradition actually. I long have these photos (though it's my brother, not I, who took them during a fiesta). I just didn't post them because they looked quotidian.

It didn't help that our municipal hall has no artistic value whatsoever. It's as plain as you can get. It has only one floor level and can be easily mistaken for a public primary school. A few days ago, however, I discovered Pixlr, a photo editing site online that can make photos look vintage. I decided to try it on the earlier-mentioned quotidian photos, and to my delight, after editing, the images no longer looked as bad as they had been. Thus, here they are.

However, the bust of Senator Ninoy Aquino in front of the building still looks creepy after editing. The sculpture, and the municipal hall, are testaments of my hometown's poverty. The local government cannot afford to commission a full-size statue of the hero. I'm not whining about that, though. I like inornate municipal halls and provincial capitols. In the Philippines, there seems to be a competition among local governments as to who could build the biggest and most ostentatious administrative building. I get uneasy with the idea that public officials and government employees "work" in a palace-like building when many people in their locality live in rundown homes.