Teatro Colon Opera House
January 26th, 2026
We are still in Port of Buenos Aries. This ship will not leave until 4:00 today. There are ship excursions to see different areas of Buenos Aries, but we will be doing our own thing today.
It was nice to be able to sleep in. After breakfast, I went on the upper deck for a Tai Chi class. It is a nice way to get the day started. It is a video based class on the large screen on the front deck of the ship. Unfortunately, the video kept repeating Lesson 1 of the class (breathing exercises). On previous cruises, there have been Lesson 2 and lesson 3 videos. Hopefully it will be corrected by tomorrow.
We caught an Uber from the port to Teatro Colon, the famous Opera House in Buenos Aries. This Opera House is amazing. It is named after Christopher Columbus (Colon). It took three architects to complete. The first one died of illness after it started, The second one was killed by his wife’s lover when he walked in on them. Finally they were able to complete it. However, the influences of these different architects can be seen in the design of different parts of the building.
As we saw in the Recoleta Cemetery, all the stone work and stained glass was imported from Europe. Mostly Italy for the marble and France for the stainglass.
The most important part of the Opera House is the acoustics. It is rated as having the best acoustics of any structure in the world. It is so good, microphones are not needed for any of the performers. The sound is also perfect for any seat in the house. The shape of the auditorium is horseshoe shaped and a prefect dome in the center to allow the sound to travel to every corner of the room.
The floor is also hollow with vents under each seat on the main floor to allow the sound to come up from the floor.
There is also a secret room above the chandelier where a 15 person choir or instrument group to play during a show.
Chandelier in the middle of the auditorium. Secret room above it.
The also have “Widow boxes” for widowed women to be seated and not seen during a show. The women were hidden behind the screens of the boxes and the screens were lifted when the house went dark. They were brought back up before the lights came back on.
The five dark rectangles are “Widow Boxes” for Widowed women.
Got an Uber to get us back to the ship after the Opera House tour. Luckily I took a picture of the address of the port to get us back. We got back with plenty of time before the ship left. They have a strict boarding rule. You need to be on the ship by 3:30 for a 4:00 departure. We got back at 1:30.
The weather was still very hot, so it was good to back on the ship. We were hoping to take a dip in the pool after getting some lunch, but got side tracked. This was fine, because all the pools are too warm for a cooling dip.
There is a pool in the front of the ship that I wanted to check out, but could not find on any of the ship maps. It shows up on the Ariel photos from the internet, but there was not on the maps. We talked with a crew member and found out it is just for the crew. I had no idea they had their own pool.
The ship left port at 4:00 as scheduled. It had a tug boat that led us out of the harbor and it took about a half hour to get to open water.
After a quick nap, we stopped by the Wine Bar where our favorite bartender, Karen, was. The wine selection at the Wine Bar is better than the wine in the restaurant on the ship. We always stop there before dinner to get wine to go. You typically cannot take the wine bar glasses pout of the wine bar. They are nicer glasses than the glasses that are used throughout the ship. However, Karen allows us to take our glasses with us as long as we bring them back at the end of the night.
After dinner we caught the show on the Ship. Tonight it is a Nicola Ward, a singer from Great Britain. She did covers from Whitney Houston, Adel and such. She was pretty good and surprised me with some of her songs. We met an older couple sitting behind us that told us this was their 6th time going to Antarctica. They had done the smaller excursion boats that take you ashore, but at 78 years old, they prefer the cruise ship version. They gave us lots of stories of what to expect. I can hardly wait!
