The weather in the UAE is dependably pleasant from December through March — but particularly in January and February.

What’s more, there are things to do. Outside. Interesting concepts. Sports. Concerts. Lazing at the beach. Enormous family groups barbecuing at the parks.

We decided to join some of that today, a day when Everyone Seemed Happy in the city of Abu Dhabi.

New Year’s Day is a legal holiday in the UAE, just as it is in the West, and we took it.

Late start, staring out the window towards the eastern mangroves district and the fingers of the Gulf, as they probe inland.

After a fairly significant stretch of sloth, we decided to see some tennis. Day 1 of the Mubadala Tennis World Championship, an exhibition event featuring four of the world’s top-six-ranked tennis players, and held at the National Tennis Stadium at Zayed Sports City — which is only a few miles from where we live.

We parked near the skating rink and hiked over to the tennis stadium and, as usual, the area around it was set up to amuse fans and kids, before and between matches.

(This is a relentlessly kid-friendly country; nearly every activity will have some kid component to it. A week before, we had seen the same sort of thing at the Volvo Ocean Race’s Destination Village, at the other end of the island.)

We paid 100 dirhams ($27) each to get in, and by the time we got to our seats, in the top row of the surprisingly crowded stadium (capacity, 5,000), Andy Murray and Feliciano Lopez were at 4-4 in the first set of their surprisingly competitive match.

We felt a bit of wind, up there in Row Z, but we had come prepared with multiple layers of clothes, which those of us with the thin blood of desert dwellers know might be needed, as night falls, in January. It could be, oh, geez, maybe 70 Fahrenheit. With a wind chill!

The stadium is a handy one. Big enough, but not so big that it has a bad seat. Even in Row Z.

Perhaps a bit more than usual, it was a multicultural event. Things that go on, here and in Dubai, often get sorted into one of three broad categories — those aimed at Emiratis and, perhaps, expat Arabs; those aimed at subcontinenters, particularly Indians; and those aimed at Westerners.

The Mubadala tournament seems to draw from all three major groups. We could see a knot of abaya-clad Emirati women on the other side of the stadium, and we had lots of Indians and Europeans in our immediate area.

The tennis was good. Lopez is not well known, but he is ranked No. 14 in the world, and many consider him handsome. Judy Murray, mother of Andy, once said the Spaniard was “kind of Roman-god like” and suggested his first name should be “Deliciano”. These fun facts were dug up by The National’s tennis writer.

Judge for yourself.

Lopez has an interesting game. It’s like he gets bored of baseline slugfests, and likes to change up things. Drop shots. Slices. Lobs. He likes the serve-and-volley game, too, which is so 1990s.

He hung right with Murray in what turned into a marathon session, for what was in theory a match of limited importance. (Each would have already been paid nice appearance fees.) Murray, ranked No. 6 in the world, won the first set 7-6, but Lopez took the second 7-5.

And at that point, we decided we had seen enough tennis in one sitting (something like 90 minutes), and it was dinner time, so we left for the city’s best (or certainly best-value) Chinese food, at Noodle Bowl, incongruously located on the second floor of the city’s biggest bowling alley, just behind the tennis stadium in Zayed Sports City.

Some dim sum, some spring rolls, and enormous bowls of hot noodle soup (it’s winter, see?). Mine was a beef noodle bowl (in China it would have been pork, I imagine), with a very nice broth and lots of beef and shiitake mushrooms — for $8.

And there is an upside to a Chinese resto in a bowling alley — the enormous TVs above the lanes were showing the tennis match, and we saw both players fighting with fatigue in the latter stages of their two-and-a-half-hour match, with Murray winning. (Setting up a semi-final tomorrow with Rafael Nadal; Novak Djokovic and Stan Wawrinka are in the other.)

On the way out, looking at kids and adults in the ping pong room, and the pool/billiards room, and along the video games arcade and around the snack/dinner/drinks/ice cream stands, and out in the 40 lanes of bowling …

It just seemed everyone we saw in Abu Dhabi was having fun. Everyone was happy, as far as we could tell.  A holiday, out in groups, fair weather, lots to do.

It made a person smile, if they weren’t careful.