Join me, if you will, for a crappy iPhone picture tour of the last 10 days of my life!
Kathleen and I arrived to New Orleans on Thursday afternoon and got about doing what people do in New Orleans: Enjoying a cocktail or 17. This is a picture
taken out the window of an ancient old bar called Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. In hindsight, I wish I'd taken a picture of the bar. It was built sometime around 1772, and it survived a couple fires in the late 1700s that nearly destroyed the entire city. So it's a burnt out kind of place, lit exclusively by candles. But instead, I took pictures of the family of miniature livestock that came walking down the street!Moving on ... The picture below is of the beignets at Cafe du Monde. To hear people talk about these things, I expected they'd change my life. I suppose they were okay. Maybe if I were more of a doughnut person I'd feel like entirely new possibilities had revealed themselves to me in the form of piping hot fried bread covered in powdered sugar that left us all looking like we'd had a bit of a cocaine incident? Regardless, it's apparently some kind of rule that if you go to New Orleans, you have to eat these things. So we did. And I took a picture of them.
And these are the hurricanes (named after the shape of the glass -- like a hurricane lamp -- not the devastating storms) at Pat O'Brien's. Like the beignets, it's my understanding that one's trip to New Orleans would be incomplete without parking oneself on the back patio of Pat O'Brien's. Unlike the beignets, these things lived up to the hype. We went back twice.
We took the streetcar out to the Garden District one afternoon and happened to stumble upon this cemetery. I guess it makes sense: Everyone is buried above
ground in New Orleans because of the swamp land. It's an interesting place if you can get past the creepiness!We decided to be good little tourists and take a swamp tour one afternoon. And I'll have you know: Everything about it, including (perhaps even especially) the ride out to the swamp, was excellent. I'd been a little conflicted about the Katrina stuff going out to New Orleans: The part of me that cares about my country and the people who live in it was curious to see the affects of the storm with my own eyes. However, the part of me that lives in a city with a tragic tourist attraction of its own understands that it's strangely frustrating to have people cast a glance over the worst day of my life and then go bargain hunting at Century 21.
So the ride out to the swamp was perfect: We necessarily had to drive through some of the worst-hit areas of New Orleans, and the driver was excellent about telling us what we were seeing out the windows. Some of the stuff was pretty disturbing. Weirdly, the most striking to me was a Six Flags amusement park that had been bathed in 10 feet of water during the storm and is just an abandoned ghost town now. I'm not sure why that one made such an impression on me ...
... At any rate, we drove through all that horrible stuff, and then we did the New
Orleans version of going shopping at Century 21: We hopped on a boat and burned our butts off in the swamp! That's a marsh-mallow that the alligator is eating in the picture below. I don't recall how exactly the swamp tour folks determined this, but apparently alligators love marshmallows, so they deploy them liberally to ensure that their tour isn't like one of those "dolphin encounter" boat trips where you so often don't get much bang for your buck. And those are wild boars in the second shot. They're not native to the swamp. You'll have to forgive me for forgetting the details, but they were introduced to the swamp so they could be hunted and eaten by the people who lived on the land. Turns out they also like marshmallows. Which I suppose is understandable. I mean, who doesn't like marshmallows??
The one thing about the swamp tour: It was really fucking hot. We were afraid it might be bug-y out there in the swamp. But apparently it was too hot even for the bugs. So it was back to the hotel and into the shower for us; and even though the water in Louisiana has a way of kind of sticking to you (Seriously, my first shower in New Orleans might have been my longest shower ever because I just couldn't get to the point where I felt rinsed off.), we emerged feeling like brand spanking new people. Maryclare, unfortunately, had to head back home, but Kathleen and I set off to Mother's for some more fairly disappointing New Orleans food. Seriously. Lest anyone think I'm an elitist New Yorker and/or a Yankee who can't appreciate southern fare, I'll have you know that my second favorite food city in the world is Charleston, SC. I did manage to find the best seafood gumbo I've ever tasted at a place called The Gumbo Shop, but otherwise, the food was seriously underwhelming.
After Mother's it was back to Pat O'Brien's for another hurricane, then out to stand in line for Preservation Hall, which is a jazz venue in New Orleans that
opened in the early 1960s to preserve New Orleans style jazz (and, at the time, provide local, often older, New Orleans style jazz musicians with a place they could play for tips). The place had a great hole-in-the-wall vibe that made you feel like you were seeing something really special, even though the same thing happens there five nights per week. It doesn't serve food or drinks. Seating is minimal -- just a couple wooden benches and some chairs along the sides of the room -- and most people just stand in the back. Kathleen and I were having so much fun that we stayed for all three sets, taking turns ducking out to use the restrooms and replenish our beers at the bar across the street and gradually making our way up to the front row. Just an excellently fun time ...... as was the band we found after Preservation Hall! They came with a terrible name -- The Jumbo Shrimp Jazz Band -- but fortunately for everyone involved,
their musical talent far exceeded their band naming capa-bilities. I don't know what you call their style of music. I even asked the banjo player, and I forget what he told me. (Look, we'd been out for awhile.) But they had a drummer, a guy on the big bass, a banjo player, a trumpet player, and a trombone player. They all sang, and it felt a bit like vaudeville big band as it might be played in a small back room in a southern city some time around 1920. They were totally into it. The crowd was totally into it. It was pretty much everything I loved about New Orleans wrapped up into one amazing experience.
But all good things must come to an end. (Must they, really? Or is that just something we tell ourselves so that we don't feel too bad about spending three-quarters of our lives at work?) But fortunately, the week ahead had not one, but two (!!!) Giants Stadium Bon Jovi shows on the calendar, so coming home wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me.
This is a shot I took last night looking out of the new stadium at what's left of the old house. It was interesting and kind of sad to watch people's reactions to
it: You had to peer through the ugly slats in the new stadium to see it, so there we all were, bending over and cocking our necks and looking a little longer than maybe we thought we'd need to and feeling compelled to comment how sad it all was to the people standing next to us. I don't think this new football stadium will be embraced the way the new Yankees and Mets stadiums have been embraced. It's ugly. It doesn't feel like an improvement. And were there really that many problems with the old stadium anyway? At any rate, here's what's left. I wish I had a camera that was capable of better detail because it was pretty creepy looking. It really didn't look anything like a construction site: It just looked abandoned, or like a disaster had happened. Almost post-apocalyptic.And these are just a couple shots from the shows! Which were incredible. I knew it would be a good time because Bon Jovi are, above all, entertainers. But I didn't know what to expect in terms of the music: The last time I saw Bon Jovi, Jon's voice was a little shot. (In fairness to him, the last show I saw was the last show of that tour.) And I worried that their show might be so choreographed that Saturday's show would be a carbon copy of Thursday's. But the band sounded absolutely fantastic, and it was only the absolute biggest hits that I heard twice. I won't labor the point because anybody who reads this likely knows I'm a big fan of the band, so perhaps I can't be trusted to be objective. It was a great pair of shows, though, and I had a great time. Some parting shots:
