The museum of ham was, indeed, odd. But not by any means the zenith of oddity in the DR. Possibly the Museo Folklorico de Tomás Morel could claim that title. This being my third trip to Santiago, but not having seen this particular site before, I decided to use my free (except for homework) time to visit.
When I got there at 3:15 yesterday afternoon, I found it was located in a rather unlikely gritty commercial district, about a block from a busy thorofare. I also found it closed. The building, a dilapidated 19th century home with a wide front porch, looked so negledted that I wasn't sure if it would ever open again. Turns out that like a lot of places here, the museum closes for a couple of hours in the midday, for folks to take a long lunch, which is the main meal of the day, and a brief siesta.
Let me note that the dilapidated exterior did not hide a lovingly restored or well-maintained interior. If anything, the interior was in worse shape. The floor sagged in various places, and a couple of times I thought I was going to fall through to the basement. Where the floor did not sag, there were planks and boards of varying heights and shapes which I presumed were placed strategically around the exhibit area over the worst areas of deterioration. The entire floor was covered in what appeared to be a kaleidoscopic array of different colors and designs of contact paper.
In theory, the museum houses the collection of folk art of a Dominican writer named Tomás Morel. Most of his personal collection seems to have consisted of carnaval masks worn by revelers in the annual pre-Lenten celebration of Carnaval, also known in other locations as Mardi Gras. Beats the heck out of pancakes supper, I'd have to say.
The masks are absolutely enormous -- most having 'horns' of three feet or longer. Many are comical, some frightening, and all are meticulously constructed. The curator (an exalted title for the guy in blue jeans and a t-shirt who seemed to be the boss) explained that every year a contest is heldfor best original mask, and that most of the winning entries eventually end up in the museum.
But so did some other stuff, for example the reproduction of a rustic kitchen of a campesino, complete with the oven that locals use to bake yucca bread. There were some Taino artifacts, some religious pictures and statuary related voudon and santería which I found creepy, and a couple of murals on the walls of a ramshackle backyard. There was also a haphazard collection of other stuff I can only classify as junk: a bunch of old typewriters, movie projectors, and faded and discolored matchbook covers.
Evidently I impressed the curator -- I was asking a lot of questions, and must have demonstrated if not a basic knowledge at least a respect for Dominican culture -- when I left he gave me a book of Tomás Morel's poetry. Glancing through its contents, I noticed an ode to John F. Kennedy. And also another ode written to mourn the death of Walt Disney.
Odd.
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