O Babe of the Bayou, Big Easy on the Big River, Cousin of Cajun, Creator of Creole, Mother of Mardi Gras, Queen of Voodoo, Purveyor of Gumbo, I bow to thee! For indeed thou art the hope, succor, and ultimate recourse to the depressed and debauched, serious and quirky, prosaic and bizarre.
All my doubts about why New Orleans is called the Crescent City vanished as our flight descended. The mighty Mississippi (mighty indeed at this point) made a sharp U turn and formed a perfect crescent of a delta.
We are told ad nauseam that New Orleans is built on layers and layers of alluvial soil that the river has been depositing on the delta for centuries. Which means that the city has no rock bed foundation. It is built on mud, which makes everything sink--buildings, roads, anything that depends on terra firma. On the other hand, buried things come floating up during storm flooding, like coffins.
Which is why, as most of you might already know, the good people of New Orleans decided to build above ground, multistory vaults for their dead, unwittingly creating the most fascinating aspect of the city--necropolises, or little cities of the dead that have been the fount of macabre imagination in pop culture.
It was a wintry, cold day that I left behind in Chicago, so was hoping for warm climes in the south. But Friday evening was rainy and nippy. However, I was adequately warmed by the open friendliness of everybody in New Orleans, starting from other travelers standing in the shuttle queue.
It is one of the very few cities in the US that is not wary of strangers--I mean that in the sense of unknown people and strange people. I guess the more flamboyantly bizarre you are, the more you fit in with the mise en scene of the place.
The excitement (bordering on euphoria) of the tourists is infectious. Bourbon street seems to be that magical Trishanku heaven, suspended between heaven and earth, where all moral codes are dissolved and anything goes. It indeed feels like a vulgar version of some debauched paradise--loud neon signs, music from live bands blasting forth from every fourth door, people walking around with two-feet long cocktail glasses made in plastic, the touts of striptease joints (for men and women) shouting you in while standing in a miasma of XXX girls photographs, restaurants boasting of every cuisine under the sky, street performers in the most bizarre costumes you can imagine, and stores selling beads, feathers and other voodoo curios. All this along an eight block length!
And if you are a single woman like me walking through the throngs of the street after dark, be prepared to be hit on every 10 feet. Be it the two 30-something men who had obviously come looking for action, or the old (perhaps Texan, going by his cowboy boots, hat and jeans) man wearing a quantity of beads, or the black teenager hanging out with a bunch of friends, all of them will step in front of you or call out from the other side of the street. You can feel the peer pressure to get some action!
Bourbon street at 9:00 a.m. in the morning is quite another story. It is not awake yet as it had gone to bed only in the wee hours of the morning. It stinks with yet uncollected garbage. When the neon signs are off and the music has stopped, it looks--well, tired. Devoid of make up.
Nobody but the very hardy of souls are up and about at 9:00 a.m. in New Orleans anyway. Most of the ones who are can be found standing patiently in the serpentine line outside Cafe Du Monde on Decatur Street, which is world famous for its beignets (the New Orleans version of the doughnut) and coffee.
I unfortunately did not have the time to do this. I was taking the French Quarters walk tour organized by the Friends of the Cabildo group which started at St Ann Street, abetting Jackson Square, which is a garden facing the river. On its two sides are the upper and lower Pontalba Apartments which are the oldest apartment buildings in the US and are considered the finest examples of antebellum (prewar) architecture in the country. On the third side are a couple of baroque buildings, one of them housing the Cabildo, or the Louisiana State museum, and a beautiful church.
The French Quarter is an amazing potpourri of architectural styles all crammed into a small old-world neighborhood. French, Spanish, and Creole jostle with each other, with styles such as Creole townhouse and single and double Shotgun houses (called so because the sound of a shotgun fired at the front end will not be heard at the back of these linear structures.)
What you see is a surfeit of wrought iron balconies overhanging sidewalks, pretty pastel colored buildings, and streets with the most interesting nomenclature. Click here to see pictures.
Move away from the tourist trap that is Bourbon Street and the artists’ hothouse that is Jackson Square, you discover small quiet residential alleys, housing tasteful shops and quiet restaurants. Every other building has an interesting story or anecdote, which the very enthusiastic and knowledgeable guides are only too happy to tell you, including the street where Tennessee Williams wrote “Streetcar named Desire” and where Truman Capote lived.
One of the most interesting trivia I heard was an iron rod that passes through the top of old buildings, whose job is to pull up the sinking structures. Every 15 years or so, apparently, based on the measurements, these rods are turned appropriately to pull the building up!
I finally managed to have beignets at Cafe Beignet in the afternoon, the second best place after Cafe Du Monde to have them. At Cafe Beignet, they serve three large square fluffy as cloud beignets (pronounced ben-je) sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar for about USD 4.
I could have written a hundred lines of verse on each of them (channeling Mr. Marvel here: “Two hundred (years) to adore each Breast”) but my tour guide for the Cemetery Tour was standing outside the cafe already. So I gobbled about 1.5 beignet, dumped the rest in the trash (a travesty I know) and rushed out.
We were a small group--a family consisting of a middle-aged couple, their college going daughter and her long-haired, twig chewing, strange footwear wearing boyfriend, and a sprightly and bright 90-year old grandma made the rest of the group. We minced forth to the famous St. Louis cemetery.
Right at the entrance of the St. Louis cemetery is the alleged vault of Mary Lavaeu, the Queen of voodoo. That by itself did not interest me so much, coming as I do from India. But there was a coven of witches from Salem who were visiting to pay their respect. This group consisted of an old woman, dressed in some flowing black gown/cape from top to bottom, a plump young man dressed in black and wearing a quantity of chains and rings, and a Hispanic woman also dressed in black.
They were offering some food at the tomb, as well as flowers. The most arresting ritual they performed was to take a mouthful of rum, spin around three times and spit the rum on the grave! After that, each marked three Xs on the tomb wall. Now I know how the Indian pagan rituals should look like to monotheistic foreigners. Heh heh!
Popular media representation had made me expect dark and sinister tombs, embellished with gargoyles and dragons. Instead, what I found was neat freshly white washed tombs, with some Greek but mostly Catholic statues. It definitely looked like a small town, with rows after rows of little buildings and crisscrossing streets. Click here for the pictures.
We also made a visit to the Temple of Voodoo and sat at the feet of the priestess, Miriam Chamani as she gave a short speech. I unfortunately couldn’t understand anything she said, which sounded like a concatenation of so many new age words.
The hotel had thoughtfully provided me with a list of restaurants in the area, so I chose to dine at Cajun Cabin, deep into the heart of Bourbon Street. It is a casual, sports bar kind of place. Several TVs were following the much anticipated New Orleans’ Saints match with Dallas Cowboys. There was a huge fake tree in the middle of the room. Neon and serial lights illuminated everything from within.
My waiter turned out to be this really nice guy from Chicago who took good care of me. I ordered their New Orleans platter which consisted of sampling of gumbo, jambalaya and red beans. The waiter also quizzed me on my purpose of visiting Nawlins, and suggested that I must visit the Garden District. I am very grateful for his solicitude, which made me feel comfortable despite some interested stares from other tables.
Early next morning, the van from our bayou and swamp tour collected me from the hotel. The place we were headed was Jean Lafitte national park. Now like everything else connected to New Orleans, Lafitte is also an unlikely hero. He was a pirate and a privateer who helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British in 1815!
It was a 30 minute drive to the swamp from the city. I was joined by a French family with two little kids. I sat in the front next to the driver and dozed nicely through out the trip, which I think upset him, because he commented before coming back, “Pretty woman, you are not planning to sleep in the van again, are you?”
The bayou country is completely different from the hustle and bustle of the city. As most of you might already know, bayous are channels of very slow moving or still water found in the wetlands of the Mississippi River region. Nowadays, these wetlands have a many as six man made channels to a bayou and all of them form an intricate and unique ecosystem. Which, like every other place in the world, is under extreme stress, and the government, at least according to our boat captain, is messing up the conservation.
Whatever it is, the place is extraordinarily beautiful and one could almost feel how delicate and fragile it is. Most of the water is covered with duckweed, apparently the smallest water plant in the world. Swamp grass and wetland trees crowd into the blue green waters. On that nippy winter morning, there wasn’t much movement around.
A couple of gator babies swam with us while the grand patriarch of that bayou, the unconquered alpha male, the gator with the Hilton suite who has driven other younger whipper snappers to live in Motel 6 (as picturesquely described by our guide), the 60-year old Joe was basking in the sun. I saw a couple of blue herons, egrets and brown ibises too. Click here for the pictures.
I had no time to stop for lunch before setting forth to the Garden district, on the historic St. Charles Streetcar route. New Orleans’ streetcars, along with San Francisco’s, have been declared as moving national monuments. And like San Francisco, the street car cabs at NO are quaint, old world, and move at a sedate pace.
I found the bookstore where I was supposed to meet my tour group without much difficulty. I had a coffee and a muffin in the coffee shop next to the bookstore which was filled with the avant garde set. A middle aged gay couple there, a couple of women here, a good looking student-type young man in shorts reading something, and an old man with a pipe and some papers outside.
I drank my coffee, ate my muffin and let my eyes stray to the young man with idle interest. Then I realized I had competition. A single gay man on the next table was also giving him lustful glances. I realized that it perhaps was not a pitched battle, so made my exit quietly.
Our tour guide was this old gentleman who seemed to know everything that is to know about the Garden district. This part of the city is as different as it could be from the life in French Quarters. While the latter is the land of unfettered bohemia, this part is all about wealth and refinement. I haven’t seen such a collection of graceful, elaborate, and huge mansions in my life before. Click here for the pictures.
Emboldened by my success the previous evening, I decided to venture out further into the French Quarters beyond Bourbon Street, so I picked up a restaurant called Gumbo Shop. It is situated in a Creole townhouse in a quiet street and retains most of its old world charm. I elected to sit in the enclosed courtyard (a standard feature in these buildings) and was seated near a toasty gas heater.
I ordered their Creole dinner combo, which turned out to be a mountain of extremely delicious and wonderfully flavored local food. I recommend this place highly, both for ambiance and food.
Of course I had a perfect New Orleans moment there too. At the table in front of me was this affluent-looking all American family consisting of mother, father, a teenage daughter and a teenage son. Once when I looked up, the teenage son made eye contact with me and gave me this smile of stunning sweetness and friendliness.
I made my way back to the hotel through the quieter Royal Street. I felt a pang about leaving this highly colorful and eccentrically individualistic city. Chicago was going to look dull in comparison.
All my doubts about why New Orleans is called the Crescent City vanished as our flight descended. The mighty Mississippi (mighty indeed at this point) made a sharp U turn and formed a perfect crescent of a delta.
We are told ad nauseam that New Orleans is built on layers and layers of alluvial soil that the river has been depositing on the delta for centuries. Which means that the city has no rock bed foundation. It is built on mud, which makes everything sink--buildings, roads, anything that depends on terra firma. On the other hand, buried things come floating up during storm flooding, like coffins.
Which is why, as most of you might already know, the good people of New Orleans decided to build above ground, multistory vaults for their dead, unwittingly creating the most fascinating aspect of the city--necropolises, or little cities of the dead that have been the fount of macabre imagination in pop culture.
It was a wintry, cold day that I left behind in Chicago, so was hoping for warm climes in the south. But Friday evening was rainy and nippy. However, I was adequately warmed by the open friendliness of everybody in New Orleans, starting from other travelers standing in the shuttle queue.
It is one of the very few cities in the US that is not wary of strangers--I mean that in the sense of unknown people and strange people. I guess the more flamboyantly bizarre you are, the more you fit in with the mise en scene of the place.
The excitement (bordering on euphoria) of the tourists is infectious. Bourbon street seems to be that magical Trishanku heaven, suspended between heaven and earth, where all moral codes are dissolved and anything goes. It indeed feels like a vulgar version of some debauched paradise--loud neon signs, music from live bands blasting forth from every fourth door, people walking around with two-feet long cocktail glasses made in plastic, the touts of striptease joints (for men and women) shouting you in while standing in a miasma of XXX girls photographs, restaurants boasting of every cuisine under the sky, street performers in the most bizarre costumes you can imagine, and stores selling beads, feathers and other voodoo curios. All this along an eight block length!
And if you are a single woman like me walking through the throngs of the street after dark, be prepared to be hit on every 10 feet. Be it the two 30-something men who had obviously come looking for action, or the old (perhaps Texan, going by his cowboy boots, hat and jeans) man wearing a quantity of beads, or the black teenager hanging out with a bunch of friends, all of them will step in front of you or call out from the other side of the street. You can feel the peer pressure to get some action!
Bourbon street at 9:00 a.m. in the morning is quite another story. It is not awake yet as it had gone to bed only in the wee hours of the morning. It stinks with yet uncollected garbage. When the neon signs are off and the music has stopped, it looks--well, tired. Devoid of make up.
Nobody but the very hardy of souls are up and about at 9:00 a.m. in New Orleans anyway. Most of the ones who are can be found standing patiently in the serpentine line outside Cafe Du Monde on Decatur Street, which is world famous for its beignets (the New Orleans version of the doughnut) and coffee.
I unfortunately did not have the time to do this. I was taking the French Quarters walk tour organized by the Friends of the Cabildo group which started at St Ann Street, abetting Jackson Square, which is a garden facing the river. On its two sides are the upper and lower Pontalba Apartments which are the oldest apartment buildings in the US and are considered the finest examples of antebellum (prewar) architecture in the country. On the third side are a couple of baroque buildings, one of them housing the Cabildo, or the Louisiana State museum, and a beautiful church.
The French Quarter is an amazing potpourri of architectural styles all crammed into a small old-world neighborhood. French, Spanish, and Creole jostle with each other, with styles such as Creole townhouse and single and double Shotgun houses (called so because the sound of a shotgun fired at the front end will not be heard at the back of these linear structures.)
What you see is a surfeit of wrought iron balconies overhanging sidewalks, pretty pastel colored buildings, and streets with the most interesting nomenclature. Click here to see pictures.
Move away from the tourist trap that is Bourbon Street and the artists’ hothouse that is Jackson Square, you discover small quiet residential alleys, housing tasteful shops and quiet restaurants. Every other building has an interesting story or anecdote, which the very enthusiastic and knowledgeable guides are only too happy to tell you, including the street where Tennessee Williams wrote “Streetcar named Desire” and where Truman Capote lived.
One of the most interesting trivia I heard was an iron rod that passes through the top of old buildings, whose job is to pull up the sinking structures. Every 15 years or so, apparently, based on the measurements, these rods are turned appropriately to pull the building up!
I finally managed to have beignets at Cafe Beignet in the afternoon, the second best place after Cafe Du Monde to have them. At Cafe Beignet, they serve three large square fluffy as cloud beignets (pronounced ben-je) sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar for about USD 4.
I could have written a hundred lines of verse on each of them (channeling Mr. Marvel here: “Two hundred (years) to adore each Breast”) but my tour guide for the Cemetery Tour was standing outside the cafe already. So I gobbled about 1.5 beignet, dumped the rest in the trash (a travesty I know) and rushed out.
We were a small group--a family consisting of a middle-aged couple, their college going daughter and her long-haired, twig chewing, strange footwear wearing boyfriend, and a sprightly and bright 90-year old grandma made the rest of the group. We minced forth to the famous St. Louis cemetery.
Right at the entrance of the St. Louis cemetery is the alleged vault of Mary Lavaeu, the Queen of voodoo. That by itself did not interest me so much, coming as I do from India. But there was a coven of witches from Salem who were visiting to pay their respect. This group consisted of an old woman, dressed in some flowing black gown/cape from top to bottom, a plump young man dressed in black and wearing a quantity of chains and rings, and a Hispanic woman also dressed in black.
They were offering some food at the tomb, as well as flowers. The most arresting ritual they performed was to take a mouthful of rum, spin around three times and spit the rum on the grave! After that, each marked three Xs on the tomb wall. Now I know how the Indian pagan rituals should look like to monotheistic foreigners. Heh heh!
Popular media representation had made me expect dark and sinister tombs, embellished with gargoyles and dragons. Instead, what I found was neat freshly white washed tombs, with some Greek but mostly Catholic statues. It definitely looked like a small town, with rows after rows of little buildings and crisscrossing streets. Click here for the pictures.
We also made a visit to the Temple of Voodoo and sat at the feet of the priestess, Miriam Chamani as she gave a short speech. I unfortunately couldn’t understand anything she said, which sounded like a concatenation of so many new age words.
The hotel had thoughtfully provided me with a list of restaurants in the area, so I chose to dine at Cajun Cabin, deep into the heart of Bourbon Street. It is a casual, sports bar kind of place. Several TVs were following the much anticipated New Orleans’ Saints match with Dallas Cowboys. There was a huge fake tree in the middle of the room. Neon and serial lights illuminated everything from within.
My waiter turned out to be this really nice guy from Chicago who took good care of me. I ordered their New Orleans platter which consisted of sampling of gumbo, jambalaya and red beans. The waiter also quizzed me on my purpose of visiting Nawlins, and suggested that I must visit the Garden District. I am very grateful for his solicitude, which made me feel comfortable despite some interested stares from other tables.
Early next morning, the van from our bayou and swamp tour collected me from the hotel. The place we were headed was Jean Lafitte national park. Now like everything else connected to New Orleans, Lafitte is also an unlikely hero. He was a pirate and a privateer who helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British in 1815!
It was a 30 minute drive to the swamp from the city. I was joined by a French family with two little kids. I sat in the front next to the driver and dozed nicely through out the trip, which I think upset him, because he commented before coming back, “Pretty woman, you are not planning to sleep in the van again, are you?”
The bayou country is completely different from the hustle and bustle of the city. As most of you might already know, bayous are channels of very slow moving or still water found in the wetlands of the Mississippi River region. Nowadays, these wetlands have a many as six man made channels to a bayou and all of them form an intricate and unique ecosystem. Which, like every other place in the world, is under extreme stress, and the government, at least according to our boat captain, is messing up the conservation.
Whatever it is, the place is extraordinarily beautiful and one could almost feel how delicate and fragile it is. Most of the water is covered with duckweed, apparently the smallest water plant in the world. Swamp grass and wetland trees crowd into the blue green waters. On that nippy winter morning, there wasn’t much movement around.
A couple of gator babies swam with us while the grand patriarch of that bayou, the unconquered alpha male, the gator with the Hilton suite who has driven other younger whipper snappers to live in Motel 6 (as picturesquely described by our guide), the 60-year old Joe was basking in the sun. I saw a couple of blue herons, egrets and brown ibises too. Click here for the pictures.
I had no time to stop for lunch before setting forth to the Garden district, on the historic St. Charles Streetcar route. New Orleans’ streetcars, along with San Francisco’s, have been declared as moving national monuments. And like San Francisco, the street car cabs at NO are quaint, old world, and move at a sedate pace.
I found the bookstore where I was supposed to meet my tour group without much difficulty. I had a coffee and a muffin in the coffee shop next to the bookstore which was filled with the avant garde set. A middle aged gay couple there, a couple of women here, a good looking student-type young man in shorts reading something, and an old man with a pipe and some papers outside.
I drank my coffee, ate my muffin and let my eyes stray to the young man with idle interest. Then I realized I had competition. A single gay man on the next table was also giving him lustful glances. I realized that it perhaps was not a pitched battle, so made my exit quietly.
Our tour guide was this old gentleman who seemed to know everything that is to know about the Garden district. This part of the city is as different as it could be from the life in French Quarters. While the latter is the land of unfettered bohemia, this part is all about wealth and refinement. I haven’t seen such a collection of graceful, elaborate, and huge mansions in my life before. Click here for the pictures.
Emboldened by my success the previous evening, I decided to venture out further into the French Quarters beyond Bourbon Street, so I picked up a restaurant called Gumbo Shop. It is situated in a Creole townhouse in a quiet street and retains most of its old world charm. I elected to sit in the enclosed courtyard (a standard feature in these buildings) and was seated near a toasty gas heater.
I ordered their Creole dinner combo, which turned out to be a mountain of extremely delicious and wonderfully flavored local food. I recommend this place highly, both for ambiance and food.
Of course I had a perfect New Orleans moment there too. At the table in front of me was this affluent-looking all American family consisting of mother, father, a teenage daughter and a teenage son. Once when I looked up, the teenage son made eye contact with me and gave me this smile of stunning sweetness and friendliness.
I made my way back to the hotel through the quieter Royal Street. I felt a pang about leaving this highly colorful and eccentrically individualistic city. Chicago was going to look dull in comparison.
Comments