One week, Three Cultural Events

It's the Abu Dhabi Festival, a month or so of cultural and artistic events around the capital. We are part of a homeschool group here called HENA (home educators something Abu Dhabi) that was able to get free tickets to several of the events. Last Friday we joined in the first of these, a piano duet and computer graphics show called Pianographique. It was held at the Emirates Palace Hotel, and was Jason's first experience going there. The Palace itself is pretty impressive, huge and lots of gold and massive carpets and jewelry displays. Just all around fancy. We got dressed up.

look familiar? Basically the same getups we wore to the ballet in Oman

Pianographique was ... interesting. The first piece set a disappointing mood because it was 20 minutes of mostly just repeating the same chords or keys. The computer graphics projected on the big screen behind added a lot. I hate to appear all ignorantly cultured, but that piece was almost unbearable without the added graphics. There were three other pieces but by the end all four of our kids were asleep. Thankful for free tickets, otherwise that would have been an expensive nap.

There was also an Arabic calligraphy exhibit in the lobby area

two pianos and a big screen

Then on Wednesday we attended another piano performance. This one was at NYU-Abu Dhabi and it was Bach's complete piano concertos. This was very neat. And, the best part about nothing here starting on time, was that Eliza was able to finish her online class (thankful for mobile technology!) while we waited for the start.

Laptop, notebook, college campus: almost fit in with the college students

The performance finished with a four (4!) piano quartet that Bach based on Vivaldi's violin concerto. The conductor called it "an original remix" by Bach. Another interesting part of this concert was that the first chair violinist looked like Donald Trump.

And Friday night we again visited the Emirates Palace for a ballet performance of "Don Quixote". We went into this with little knowledge of the book, but the performance was well done and beautiful. Everyone enjoyed it. We decided that ballet isn't so much about the plot of the story it is portraying. So even with limited knowledge we were able to follow the story which was just a selection from the novel. Greta even noted it was "pretty much Romeo and Juliet" which was accurate.

We're trying to soak up all these great cultural events we have available here. It's wonderful to have the Louve open and this month of cultural focus. We didn't see even half the performances available. But being able to just drive 30 minutes to a professional performance is something we are trying to take advantage of as long as we are here in the Big City!