Travelling with Taryn and Brad: A night at the opera

We are back in Buenos Aires now and staying in La Recoleta neighbourhood. It is beautiful!

Just a short cab ride away from our apartment is the Teatro Colon - one of the foremost opera houses in the world! National Geographic ranked it third best in the world and it is acoustically considered to be one of the five best concert venues in the world!

We were lucky enough to be in town during an opera performance - The Fiery Angel - so took this opportunity to actual see an opera live here! You can take a tour of the venue as well, but why do that when you can experience the real thing!

We had tickets on the second highest balcony.

This was our view when standing from our seats. :-s I was promised partial view seats... But these turned out to be partial view if leaning really forward, but still not really. But because we were so high up we got some really great photos!

The venue is amazing! Around the ceiling are names of opera composers, and then around the upper level balcony are engraved names of operas.

So the opera began... In the original Russian... With surtitles en Español... With Brad and I barely able to see the stage. Now normally with any opera, regardless of the language, you kinda get the gist of what is going on. The Fiery Angel is a whole different story. It is weird and dark and there was nudity... And a priest eating a child... And a different priest doing medical experiments on people... And a love triangle where one of the men in the love triangle is never featured on stage (we figured that out by reading the synopsis post-show in English). Anyways - if you are able to see this opera ever - do! It was really good!! Just really strange.

Like any good event-goer, Brad had scoped out some better seats for us to steal for the second half. Our backs were getting sore from all the leaning! So we went one level down to the "standing room only" area. Keep in mind this building was opened in 1908!

But! We had a way better view from here!

We were sitting in some empty seats waiting for intermission to end, when a man came up to us and started speaking Spanish. Turned out that he also spoke fluent English and French - so we were fine. He had to leave part way through the second half to catch a flight and wanted to know if we would switch seats with him! We explained that these weren't actually our seats, but that they were empty so he could sit in them. He still insisted on giving us his seats... So this was our view for the second half!

Quite the upgrade from our initial seats!

After the curtain fell, we snuck down to the bottom level! If you have crappy seats they don't let you enter through the front door so we missed all the grandiosity of it. But they couldn't stop us from leaving out the front!