Santa Fe calls itself "the city different," and it is. Like Venice, but dry -- when you've been there you know you've been somewhere else. My husband, Robert, and I visit Santa Fe every few summers, primarily for the opera, but also to sightsee, shop, breathe in the spicy-smoky fragrance of pinyon, and have dinner in one of the many good restaurants there.

Our sightseeing begins the moment we cross Raton pass into New Mexico.

Colorado affords spectacular mountain scenery, but since we lived there for many years, we are too used to it to get excited -- Pike's Peak or bust is not for us.

New Mexico looks different. The greenery fades to brittle stubble and the ground turns adobe pink; the view opens up and you find yourself driving through a wide plain surrounded by mesas that constantly seem to change with the interplay of sun and clouds.

The approach to Santa Fe from the highway is somewhat disappointing. I guess all cities, however exotic, have their Vine Streets. But once you get to the older sections around the colonial Governor's Palace and the Plaza with its market where American Indians seated on blankets and lawn chairs sell their silver and turquoise jewelry, sand paintings, Kachina dolls and textiles, you know you have arrived.

Because of the clear, bright sunlight most days, many artists live in and around Santa Fe, and museums and art galleries line the streets.

A gallery walk up Canyon Road can make even non-connoisseurs wish they had wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Churches like the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis, founded in 1610, and the Loretto Chapel contain numerous antique treasures of religious art. The Loretto Chapel boasts a spiral staircase that appears to defy gravity. Many believe St. Joseph himself had a hand in its construction.

There is lots of kitsch around, too. (You have to use judgment; the boundaries are fluid if they exist at all). Nonetheless, anything with "Greetings from Santa Fe" on it, decorated muffin tins, effigies of coyotes howling at the moon and of St. Francis carved from tree limbs, are all probably over the line.

Culinary arts also are well-represented in Santa Fe. Our favorites vary, but lately we've been going to Il Vicino for designer pizza the first night there, then walking up to the ice cream parlor on the Plaza for dessert.

Gabriel's, a few miles north of the opera, serves incredibly delicious guacamole along with other equally tasty Mexican-American specialties. Il Vicino and Gabriel's are inexpensive by local standards. We usually splurge on our last evening at the Old House restaurant in the Eldorado Hotel, where we know we will have a superb dinner (lamb chops, salade nicoise, for example), elegantly served, and still get to the opera on time.

The Santa Fe Opera, 3 miles north of town, sits like a sailing ship upon one of the low mountains that make this one of the most scenic locations in the area. If you get there in time, you can watch the fading sunlight make patterns on the hills, while lights from adobe villas hidden by day and headlights from the highway below gradually begin to twinkle.

However, the opera is the main attraction. We attended three of the five (Santa Fe stages five operas each season -- two surefire hits, one very new, one on speculation, and one rarely performed work by a major composer.)

First, we went to "The Tales of Hoffmann" by Jacques Offenbach, the speculation. This has been one of my favorite operas ever since I saw the movie back in the 1950s. The Santa Fe production had its good points -- the singing and acting were first rate throughout, and the act in which Hoffmann is duped into falling in love with Olympia, an automaton, was truly funny.

On the other hand, there were places where the production actually harmed the plot and the music. In another act, Hoffmann's beloved Antonia, a singer with a mysterious illness, needs to be offstage when the evil Dr. Miracle begins to cast a spell upon her.

From a distance, she indicates the spell is working with a blood-chilling chromatic scale descending from a d-flat over high c -- one of the iconic moments of the opera. At Santa Fe, Antonia is right in the room and the scale doesn't happen. Enough said.

Next, we enjoyed Benjamin Britten's seldom-performed comic opera "Albert Herring," every bit of which was a hoot. Costumes and scenery were realistic for the setting, a small town in England in the '30s. Since there are no virgins in the town of Loxford, the May Day Festival committee chooses a May King instead of a May Queen.

Albert, a backward, mother-dominated lad, doesn't want the honor, but his mother makes him do it for the 25-guinea prize. At the festival, a friend spikes Albert's lemonade with rum.

Plastered, he runs off and sins all night long. Back in Loxford, they think he's dead when they find his coronation wreath crushed under the wheel of a cart. He returns, tells his tale, shocks the crowd, asserts himself and becomes a man.

We wouldn't miss Mozart's "The Magic Flute," one of the surefire hits. This production, though, despite fine singing and acting, was completely uninspiring. The set looked like the hall of an office building with banks of elevators on either side that opened to emit the players and mythological beasts essential to the action.

The costumes were strange. The Queen of the Night and her three ladies wore ornate 18th-century clothing; Tamino and Pamina wore modern attire; the three little boys were done up like Buddhist monks; others, including the chorus, wore black. For some reason Papageno hailed from Texas and wore jeans and a red T-shirt with a chicken on it (you could buy one for yourself at the gift shop at intermission).

I have one word for such productions: Eurotrash.

But it was all fun.

Ruth Firestone is a supporter of music and theater in Hays.

rfiresto@fhsu.edu.