Caroling

On Thursday night we attended a concert and sing-along at the St. Francis Cathedral near the plaza. The church has been undergoing renovation inside and out and inside you could see where they had cleaned the white arched cieling and colorful stencils along the archways. The Catholic churches here are not as ornate as those in Latin America, but they still have some lovely decorations. There was an interesting baptismal font in this one as well in the middle of the chuch made of black granite with a metal flat sculpture under the water.

There were 3 groups performing, a choir, the brass section of the Santa Fe Symphony and the Santa Fe Women's Ensemble. The latter had excellent singing voices and sounded wonderful. The symphony brass seemed to be lacking the rest of their instruments or something. They were somewhat muddy sounding and not always in sync with eachother. The choir was pretty good, but not outstanding. We had fun singing as an audience though. It was difficult for the conductor to get everyone to stay on pace though, so some songs were a little slow!

Afterwards we had dinner at La Boca, a Spanish tapas restaurant a couple blocks off the plaza. We had excellent grilled artichokes with goat cheese and pork sausages with a pomegranate sauce. We also had an eggplant cazuela (basically pureed eggplant) with flatbreads and duck breast with morcilla sausage diced apple. Those two were good but not outstanding. Jake's sangria was very well made!