Museum Wayang - The amazing diversity

When I saw the name " Museum Wayang (Puppets Museum)," my mind immediately turned to the land of Sunda and Java. There must had been a lot of puppets that I already knew inside it. And, they were not far from puppets around those two lands; Wayang golek and Wayang kulit characters, like Cepot, Bima or arjuna which I have known since my childhood.

But, was it wrong for me to reminisce about these puppets?

Finally I entered it by paying 5 thousand / person. Once, inside the ground floor, the puppets seen are those I knew, as I mentioned earlier. On this floor,  it was dominated by puppets in Sunda and Java.

But, once I was heading to the center of the museum, there were many puppets scattered in the cities of Sundanese and Javanese lands as well, not only in Bandung or Yogyakarta that I thought before. There were many cities scattered in various islands in Indonesia which apparently had their own puppet characters. The characters of each puppet were also diverse; they featured a kingdom, scary puppets, or ordinary entertainer characters.

However, what I liked about this museum was, besides showing the name of the city in Indonesia, it also explained the names of each puppet in detail. Like the Menak puppet show from Kebumen, the characters were explained clearly, namely Tanus, Umar Maya, Umar Madi, Tayeng Rana, and others.

Continued to the second floor, with modern architecture, it turned out that not only in Indonesia, puppets were made and preserved, there were many puppets owned by other countries in every corner of the world, such as India, England, Spain and others.

This museum taught me that each country had its own variety of puppets. And, this showed me that the Wayang  was still loved and preserved as a culture to be proud of.

There was one more type of puppet that made me entertained when I saw it, there was the "Unyil and his friends" which reminded me of a happy childhood when I watched this Unyil Show on television.