We planned our trip around tickets to the Royal Opera House to hear Joyce di Donato sing.
The Oman Opera House is the cultural pride of the city; its impeccable programming is mouth-watering to Abu Dhabi residents who are spoon-fed Cindarella on ice and Moscow City Ballet's back up corps. (A child could leap higher than most of their principals.)
We didn't get a great picture of the building -- but check it out on this dress, which at least
one of us wanted to bring home.
But the inside is better. Here is the lobby.
The theater itself is small, but piled high with balconies and boxes, from which -- by some freak of chance -- the Omani ushers decided to extract us. Perhaps they knew that it was past our bed-time, and that sky-scraper dwellers like us are no longer pleased about the existence of stairs.
They deposited us in the second row.
And there we sat, on our violin-print chairs, listening to a heart-wrenchingly beautiful voice, and watching the tiny minutia of each musician's movements, surrounded by gorgeously arrayed expats gathered from all over the Gulf region, and a sizeable Omani contingent. (Omanis are always gorgeously arrayed.)
We have always wondered why friends from Abu Dhabi can do nothing but rave about Oman. But now we know. Oman is just the best.
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