A Trip to Cat Museum, Kuching, Sarawak

coloringiship (65)in #teammalaysia • 7 years ago

This is my first non-art related post on Steemit and I am going to share with you some photos of my family. Today is Saturday and since my husband is not working, we decided to bring our children to visit the Cat Museum. This is my second time visiting this museum but the first for my husband and children. Any tourist who are visiting Kuching (literally means cat in Malay) City must include this museum in their itinerary. The museum is located at the ground floor of Kuching North City Hall which is 20 minutes away from the city center.

Kuching North City Hall is located at Bukit Siol (Siol Hill) which is 60 metres above sea level. You can see Gunung Serapi (Serapi Mountain) from the top of the hill.

This is the entrance to the museum located at the lobby of the building. You will not miss it because there is a huge cat statue at the entrance! The admission is free but there is a charge for photography/videography, meaning if you are bringing your camera you will need to pay a small fee before you can use your device.

Upon entering the museum you will be greeted by this creepy Bad Omen Cat Statue! This statue was discovered in 2006 and was believed to be originally from Kalimantan or further south, the Java Island. It was believed to be used as a bad charm to make someone fell sick.

This museum has 4000 cat related artefacts including paintings by famous Asian artists like Jane Yap Jian Yi and reproduced paintings by Matsumura Goshun from the Edo Era.

As an artist these paintings attracted me the most so I took a lot of photos. Here are some of the exhibited paintings.

When I visited this museum in the 90s I remember seeing an exhibit of a mummified cat from ancient Egypt but I didn't see it today. Perhaps it was on loan from Egypt and had been returned. However there was a replica of the cat's sarcophagus exhibited in one of the galleries.

Other interesting exhibits were the preserved cat cadavers of the rare Borneo cat species like Sunda Clouded Leopard Cat and Borneo Bay Cat.

But the most fun exhibit was the 3D cat pictures gallery! My daughter was so fascinated by the pictures and we spent longer time at this section. I even took a short video of one of the pictures. You can see it below.

We spent about an hour to explore everything. I wished we could stay longer but my son was getting restless and wanted to eat ice cream. I took a lot of pictures but of course I couldn't possibly upload everything here. In fact I was having a hard time to choose which one to share. Overall it was a very fun and interesting trip even though my children were expecting to see actual life cats LOL. I highly recommend this museum to every cat lovers or anyone really, who wish to visit Kuching. This is Cat City afterall and your trip would not be complete without visiting a cat museum. There were some souveniers sold at the museum but we didn't check them out because we didn't intend to buy anything.

Right after this trip, my husband and I decided to bring out children to another famous tourist attraction which is The Waterfront. I would save that for my next post. So that's it for now. See ya in the next post!

Just a tiny announcement:

I won first prize for the 9th ARTstyleART Challenge hosted by @aksinya . WOOOOHOOOO! It was a tie with another artist @errymil who painted a very beautiful painting of Steemit galaxy. You can read the post here . Am sooo happy! Looking forward to the next challenge!