EVERYTIME I find myself in Cebu City, I would always wonder what lies in those mountains I only see from downtown.

Three weeks ago, I bumped into a collector and author at a book launch at the National Museum. We actually had an interesting context. We first met during the 2010 annual conference of the Philippine Historical Association where I gave a lecture on a 19th century Filipino painting and parroted some assumptions on aesthetics by another scholar. In the open forum, he kindly disagreed with me on those assumptions and claimed he owned even better paintings of the artist in question. The incident made me a bit wary of the guy but later, I found out he was indeed right in many respects and all these years I thought he did not have a good impression of me.