Always exciting, the morning of the first day of a holiday. It’s quite wonderful how waking up at 3:45am to catch a 5:40am flight is so easy, when attempting something similar on a less exciting day (say, a Monday morning on Christmas Day, when your family used to be Catholic, to go to something called “mass”), is torturous beyond belief, but on a day like today, of all days, a certain energy ignites the body as we make our way from Minneapolis to New Orleans.
(Of course, then children and adults asking stupid questions and commenting on everything that happens to be right in front of them as you wait in line to take your shoes off and wait at Starbucks to get some tea [because nothing better is about] and wait in the airplane to taxi, can try the patience, and that energy that ignited the body quickly disappears. Best to try to focus on the future, then.)
Still, after subjecting yourself to ridiculous people and ridiculous rules in the name of safety, here we are! In New Orleans! In a state I’ve never before visited and in a city that I’ve long wanted to experience!
Maybe it’s because I’m an avid traveller and have made the rounds about the United States and Europe, but this city feels like an eclectic mix of a whole bunch of other cities (and no doubt this feeling of cities as being an eclectic mix of other cities will only compound itself the more I visit more and more cities around the world). It has that hipstery vibe of Minneapolis with its bearded men on bicycles, that old world architecture reinvented in the new as with Bennington, VT, that problem of Detroit’s segregation between white and black and poor and not-so poor, that oxymoronic mix of palm trees next to low-lying evergreens as with Torquey, UK, that party town way of things (even outside of Mardi Gras) of Madison, WI except multiplied several times over, and my best friend and travel companion Amy remarked that the city has elements of the Caribbean as with places like Utila (I myself have never been).
But through all of it, as I grappled with how best to describe my first impression of New Orleans, is that it is a city that exemplifies a kind of lawless postmodernism. And I’m using that word in the loosest sense of the word to suggest that this city rejects order, it doesn’t want to fit in, and it embraces an unwillingness to accept outsiders’ suggestions of where they do fit in.
So let’s get to what I saw so far so you might understand better why I’m thinking these things. After arriving, we made our way to Samuel’s Blind Pelican, a kind of restaurant-pub famous for its oysters and crawfish. It happens to be oyster season (crawfish season starts in April), and I’ve never had oysters, and I was delighted to discover that they are absolutely wonderful! I like the raw ones and the char-grilled ones both for different reasons, although I think I prefer them raw with horseradish and a bit of lemon, and I recommend you try them that way, too.
The Blind Pelican itself is in one of those typical buildings meant for pubs: hardwood floors, high ceilings, tall doors and windows, walls decorated with various sporting icons like, of all things, a flag with the UW’s white W surrounded by a vibrant red. We ate outside on a kind of veranda with tall pillars (there’s lots of these about) enjoying the comparatively warm temperatures. (There are lots of individuals about wearing puffy coats and scarves, which has amused me to no end, as temperatures here in the mid to upper teens feels gloriously warm compared to Minnesota’s sub-zero.)
In addition to the oysters at the Blind Pelican, I had another staple food of the area: a muffuletta sandwich with alligator hash. The sandwich is a kind of salami and ham and mortadella sandwich with provolone and mozzarella and a kalamata olive salad. The alligator hash is essentially hash browns with red and yellow peppers and cubed alligator meat. In addition to all this food and the oysters to start, the whole affair rounded off nicely with an Abita Purple Haze, a raspberry wheat lager that indeed had a pinkish hue and a somewhat overwhelming sweetness of raspberries.
Although, it might be because Minneapolis along with great swaths of other parts of the county have become meccas for microbreweries and Louisiana maybe hasn’t (indeed, we’ve yet to come across many bars that don’t serve beer exclusively out of a bottle), the Abita brews so far have been a bit lackluster, but do try them in the meantime if not for helping to boost their sales so that more microbrews might develop in future to increase demand for slightly higher quality stuff.
All things considered, do make a stop at Samuel’s Blind Pelican on St. Charles Street in NOLA’s Uptown neighborhood where you can enjoy some pretty fine food and some so-so beer (gosh, I have become a beer snob) out on a veranda while watching the famous street cars role by.
Following lunch and checking into our Air B&B shotgun style apartment (and after meeting our gracious host who happened to be a theatre artist who happened to have performed in Minneapolis’s fringe festival and who gave us more suggestions for what to do in addition to the growing list we already had), we made our way to Crescent Park by way of Chartres Street (where we came across for a brief stretch along the sidewalk tall poles adorned at the top with boldly colorful plastic horses and torsos of women next to Dr. Bob’s Art, an intriguing junkyard style collection that we didn’t quite have time to explore, although the premises looked inviting).
Crescent Park in the Bywater neighborhood, meanwhile, is accessible via Piety Street off of Chartres by way of stairs within a tall, rusty iron arch that take you over a railyard wall that separates the street from the disused tracks. Crescent Park opened a little under a year ago after years of planning and reinvention. It’s a small sliver a land that runs for about a mile and a half along the Mississippi, complete with walking and jogging trails, indigenous plant life, and stunning views of the Mississippi and downtown’s quaint skyline. It is a wonderful example of reinventing neglected areas of the city that used to bustle with various activities via rail and water traffic. You can admire the remains of a pier that perhaps used to be home to a factory of some sort, all the while being reminded of the area’s history with a lookout surrounded by heavy iron barriers.
The park is a bit annoying, however, as once you reach one end of the park, you’ve no choice but to turn back around. However, this is only the first phase of reinventing this area, and it’s exciting to imagine the riverfront slowly becoming revitalized all the way from the Bywater to downtown so the whole park connects several communities.
Moving on from the park, we made our way to the French Quarter, the area of the city that epitomizes what tourists think all of New Orleans is like. And it’s everything you’d expect from descriptions and pictures: French architecture with facades of tall verandas outlined in elaborate wrought iron bars, narrow streets sardined with people, cafes beyond cafes, traffic moving very slowly even though there are only a handful of cars.
After a quick caffeine boost at a cafe that wasn’t worth the visit because it was one of those boring, plastic Italian imitations and I can’t even remember the name of it nor do I have the energy to try to discover its name, we made our way to Coop’s. Coop’s is another one of those restaurant-pub affairs that serves the kind of food you’d expect at a restaurant-pub affair in NOLA.
What Coop’s lacks in outstanding customer service (it was pretty awful) more than makes up in the quality of their food. It’s here where we had jambalaya, and it was absolutely fantastic! If you try to go in the evening (when we did), expect a bit of a wait to get a table or a place at the bar, but while you wait in a line on the street (not a terribly long line) a server might make the rounds and take a drink order. The waiter suggested we try some kind of drink that had the word “punch” in it. It was quite boozy, but what was remarkable about this is that you can just have your drink. Right there. On the street.
But, I do highly recommend making a trip to Coop’s. Amy and I are already talking about making another trip back.
The evening of our first day closed with a hodge-podge collection of bars, but the only one I really want to talk about is Spotted Cat Music Club where we got to listen to a band called Panorama, a band made compete with a sax, clarinet, trombone, sousaphone, banjo, and drum kit. If you can’t imagine the sound of their music simply by knowing the details of their ensemble, you perhaps need to live a little more and get out a bit. In any case, it’s a bit of Dixie, a bit of klezmer, a bit of traditional jazz, a bit of zydeco. And the group performed magnificently! I was particularly impressed with the clarinetist’s ability to double on tambourine, and the dynamic range of the sousaphone player was remarkable, especially in the softer end of the spectrum to allow space for the banjo to sing through its solos.
So, there we have it. First day down. Quite a city indeed! And part of me feels that by the time I write my next post that this city’s unwillingness to fit into any single category will throw me for a loop, and I may have to rethink whether New Orleans actually is a lawless postmodern celebration.