bringing high school to the Grand Mosque

one of the things i was looking forward to with coming home is the Grand Mosque. in a way, it put my hometown(Cotabato City) back to the map. so i was intrigued with how grand it actually is. exactly a week after i came here, friend Agnes invited me to go there with our other friends and ecstatic as i was, i couldn't decline. off we went!



its complete name is Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Masjid because it was a gift from the Sultanate of Brunei. and that enlightened me as to why my friend who have already gone to both this mosque and the famous one in Brunei commented they looked similar.

this part of the sky was so blue.

it's quite remote, it's an approximate fifteen-minute ride from the national highway to get there. it majestically stands in the green plains along the mouth of Tamontaka River flowing out to the Celebes Sea. one can expect a breath of real fresh air as this part of the city is still uninhabited. there were a few houses along the way but that's just it.

that's the mouth of the river

from a distance, one can see the Timaco Hill which fascinated me because it's one complete green landform. it looked really virgin.

Timaco Hill

the mosque operates only during special Islamic occasions like the Eid'l Fitr which is the culmination of the holy month of Ramadhan and Muslims gather all together to pray after our month-long fasting. it is still open though for visitors like us everyday but we're not allowed to enter the inside of the mosque. for getting inside was prohibited, one of the things i actually forgot to do was to see through the doors its interior. now it remains a mystery.

the main entrance to the inside of the mosque

if i'm still not color-blind, the colors used for the exterior were beige, mocha and golden yellow. i love the combination because i know the colors don't fade out conspicuously. i didn't observe thoroughly the other details but i wish they have expanded the grounds more. the fences were too close to the mosque, itself, i found it unseemly that we had to take pictures beyond them just to get a better view of the whole structure. but of course, it's a house of faith and not a park, so it's not that necessary. i'm just saying. hehe.

i couldn't think of any better company to go there with than my high school buds. honestly, they're still the closest friends i've made to date and i'm more than thankful for that. good thing that the mosque doesn't regularly operate because we would have sinned for the all the laughing and jumping we did there. hehe.

them... mga way buot gihapon.

our jump shots were hopeless, we could never get in sync.

in the end, it was one happy excursion. thank you Brunei for the mosque, and my friends for this memory!

and we met this super cute kid who appeared in some commercial ads in Manila.