New Orleans is definitely a thing. Like a thing you can do. Maybe even a thing you should do. I don't know. I'm only willing to go so far as to confirm that it's a thing, a real thing, full of disconcerting amounts of realness mixed in with a tractor trailer's worth of oh-so comforting bullshit.
I liked visiting New Orleans. Don't mistake that for any sort of implicit endorsement, but New Orleans is definitely on that list of places you need to experience, whether you enjoy the experience or not. It's like New York or Los Angeles or London - it's a place you hear people talking about for so long you think you know what it is; you assume you've got the measure of it. TV shows and movies happen there. Important historical tragedies happen there. Scooby Doo probably went there at least a couple times. It's a known unknown, so to speak.
So it's good to go to places like New Orleans because you're wrong about places like New Orleans. And it's not good to be wrong about things like that. So you go and you see and you see that you're wrong. Then you're a better person because you're less ignorant. Good deal.
So New Orleans is a thing. It's damp all the time. I was only there four days, but the locals confirmed that the weather is shit and will make you feel like shit if you allow the weather to control your moods. I don't get the impression that most people in New Orleans much mind the weather one way or the other, unless it's actively trying to kill them, which is a thing that happens.
New Orleans is old and frail and constantly teeming with the kind of young, intoxicated citizens you wouldn't generally place in close proximity to old, frail things if you gave it much thought. But that's the basic gist of how the city operates, so it's a little like seeing a beloved grandmother living in the kind of shitty nursing home where dementia-addled seniors walk around with bruises and sores and never, ever stop smelling like urine. On the plus side, however, they don't remember any of it, so they take to the next night with unabated enthusiasm, never deterred, never put off by the clumsy violence of it all.
This all makes it sound like I dislike New Orleans, but I don't actually. I'm neutral towards New Orleans. It's Disneyland built on the bones of Pompeii. It's interesting and busy and somehow very real and very inauthentic at the same time. It looks beautiful and it smells terrible. Buildings secrete oily black ooze from the bottom end and green neon light from the top end. It's history and commerce. It's America. I love America. It's my home team.
This is the courtyard of the hotel where we stayed. It was pretty, but the ice machine produced no ice. Pretty don't make my tap water cold, do it?
We got in later than anticipated, due to bad weather and multiple highway accidents. "We've had terrible luck," I said. "Really?" said Sarikka. "I think we've had great luck. We weren't involved in any accidents!" This was the kind of logical, good attitude I did not need at the time, so I left Sarikka in Lafayette and continued to New Orleans on my own.
Besides eating a magnificent po' boy and taking a gigantic post-road trip dump, nothing was accomplished on the first night. The first full day started with breakfast at the tavern next door. Nothing funny happened, but I drank a lot of coffee. So there was that.
It was rainy out. Dark and dreary. The French Quarter - and Bourbon Street in particular - was pretty quiet. But then it was 10am on a Saturday. By 1pm the streets were once again filled with glassy eyed girls in crooked sun dresses and wobbly young men in khaki shorts and unbuttoned button-up shirts. Before then though we wandered and looked.
The streets of the French Quarter are generally pretty narrow. Old buildings sag against newer models and everything's covered in wrought iron. It's pretty neat.
There's a funny sort of forced intimacy in the French Quarter. Everyone's on top of everyone else. A lot of these wrought iron balconies are completely covered in hanging shrubs, like little organic privacy curtains.
When you get to the far ends of the Quarter, stretching towards the outer wards, things start to feel more residential, which is funny, because technically most of the French Quarter is made up of real homes, supposedly lived in by real people. Well, real people and Brad Pitt. Out a ways though, the stacked houses get smaller, more unique. Blues, purples, yellows, greens.
I had a calzone for dinner. 1) That probably doesn't seem very New Orleans, and 2) I'm not the type to take pictures of my food, but I'm glad I did because FUCK THE UNIVERSE THAT WAS THE BEST CALZONE THAT EVER WAS. Holy moly. Just...holy. Moly.
Here's Sarikka pouring honey on her pizza. Totally legitimate. And it was good as hell. I have no idea what was on her slices though. She told me repeatedly but I had calzone-induced tunnel vision.
That night we went on ghost tour. I learned that ghost's don't like 1) getting murdered and 2) getting dumped. Those are pretty much the primary reasons ghosts exist - because of murder and strongly mismanaged break ups. I also confirmed that Ghostface Killah is a ghost, and therefore he can't get broke.
After a vigorous evening of ghost walkin' and talkin' we stopped by Cafe Du Monde for beignets, because as tourists we were required to do so, but also because spooky ghosts can't sneak up on you when you scatter a quarter inch thick dusting of powdered sugar in every direction. Take that, spooky ghosts.
The next day we had a tremendous breakfast at a restaurant called EAT, then walked to a nearby park, where we met the park's tree doctor, a genial fellow named Kristof. Kristof talked a little like we were the first people he'd seen in a decade, spitting hot ecological knowledge like thunder from above. He pointed out all the features of the park, including the hordes of non-indigenous piranhas in the waterways - yet another unfortunate side effect of Hurricane Katrina's flooding.
The park also had big, swag-ass monster trees. Here's one advancing on Sarikka cautiously, like the world's most patient bark-covered ninja.
Leaving the park, we went to St. Louis cemetery - a supremely old cemetery. To the left here you can see rows of tombs - over time the whole structure has sunk into the ground, leaving the bottom row of tombs either partially or completely below ground level. In general, most of the tombs throughout the cemetery were busted as fuck. Very interesting, historically significant, busted ass piles of shit.
Finally, this is the grave of Marie Laveau, voodoo priestess. People have marked her tomb with the three Xs in hopes of using her power to cast a spell. Not long after arriving at the cemetery it started to downpour. Caught in the rain with flimsy umbrellas, Sarikka and I stomped through flowing currents back into the French Quarter, where we eventually arrived at Pat O'Brien's dueling piano bar. Drenched though, it seemed like a good idea to wait out the rain by getting hammered while listening to two ladies mash their way through Elton John covers. Later we went back to our room to change, before heading out for some food. And that was largely it - a fun, damp time filled with good food, good company, and ghosts (probably).