Waking up on the morning of our sixth day and still feeling full from our gluttony the night before at the Gumbo Shop, we made our way to Louis Armstrong Park, just a six minute bus ride down the street from our rental apartment. New Orleans generally isn’t known for its parks, and coming as a visitor from a city called Minneapolis that frequently ranks highly when it comes to its parks, the parks here in NOLA, like Crescent Park that we visited on our first day, can seem a bit underwhelming.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek them out, though, as they are charmingly wonderful in their own right. Armstrong Park welcomes you with a great, white arch, and on it is written in bold, san-serif typeface, ARMSTRONG, and at night the letters light up by way of a bunch of little white bulbs, emblazoning the arch in a brilliant celebration of a fine musician whose work would leave the world grey without it.

Within the park is Congo Square (formerly Place de Negres), where slaves used to gather on Sundays, their day off, to make music together and sell homemade goods. There are also a number of sculptures to admire in the square, including statues of Charles “Buddy” Bolden and Louis Armstrong himself, in addition to a gorgeous sculpture made to look like stacked, symmetrical cubes and designed with colorful mosaics of green, purple, and gold, and inset within that, old, black-and-white photos of areas of New Orleans.

Also, don’t miss taking a look at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for Performing Arts, which is situated at the northwest end of the park, a large facility named after the gospel singer herself, and which houses the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Orleans Ballet Association, the New Orleans Opera Association, and Broadway Across America touring productions.

Following Armstrong Park, we made our way to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest and most famous of all the cemeteries in New Orleans. The earliest deaths we came across, however, were only in the early 1800s (however, my research afterwards discovered that there are deaths as early as the later 1700s), so not terribly old, but old nonetheless. You can definitely still appreciate the cemetery’s age, however, as there are some tombs that have crumbled away to only the red bricks that originally encased the dead, while others marked with a plaque that indicates “Perpetual Care” are continually watched after by the Catholic Church, and so are in better shape than some of the others.

While visiting this particular cemetery, don’t forget to catch a glimpse of Nicholas Cage’s ridiculous pyramid-shaped, white monstrosity of a tomb, a tomb that is awaiting his body when he dies, and a tomb that people kiss, as evidenced by makeup stains left behind. There is also the tomb of Voodoo priestess, Mary Laveau, her tomb vandalized by countless triple Xs of different colors that must periodically be removed.

Our next stop was brunch at a restaurant called Atchafalaya, where I enjoyed a plate called the Boudreaux that came with sunny-side up eggs, alligator sausage, jalapeño corn bread, breakfast potatoes, and Creole hollandaise. Amy had a plate called eggs Atchafalaya, which came with poached eggs, fried green tomatoes, jumbo lump crab, hollandaise, and brunch potatoes. She also enjoyed a Bloody Mary, too, which you can prepare at their bloody bar, buffet style.

As if it needs saying at this point (if you’ve read all my posts on NOLA in succession), the food at Atchafalaya was absolutely fantastic! And just so we’re clear, all the restaurants we’ve visited so far should be on your list, too!

We moved on from here to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where they had a special exhibit dedicated to Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat called, Basquiat and the Bayou. Just some background about him first:

He originally gained notoriety in the 1970s when he was a part of SAMO (i.e. Same Old Shit), a graffiti art group that wrote brief, satirical statements around Manhattan’s Lower East Side. By the 1980s, he was exhibiting his paintings at high-profile museums. In addition to his art, he was also a musician, forming rock band, Gray, and he also starred in Glenn O’Brien’s independent film, Downtown 81. Sadly, he died in 1988 at the age of 27 due to a heroine overdose.

Since he was African American, you can see that much of his work draws from the inequities of oppressive power structures that aren’t limited to only race, but also class, he himself remarking that his work is “80% anger.”  One painting on display, Exu, seemed quite angry indeed, and painted just months before his death.  It is a depiction of a Yorùbá deity of the same name, and the deity is a personification of death.  At the center of the painting is a horned head crimsoned in red that is attached to a vague semblance of a body.  Surrounding it are numerous eyes, forever staring out of the frame, with several spears pointing upwards, and at the feet of Exu are several rolled tobaccos.  While the style is clearly Basquiat (raw, frenetic explosions of color, heavy lines that meander about and suggest the shapes they want to be, and everything generally done in a carefully planned messiness), this painting seemed to turn all of those elements up to 11.

One particular painting that struck a chord with me was Procession, which to me seemed to be a clear depiction of second lining, which has its roots in funeral processions, and that we partook in on our second day here in New Orleans.  It was a painting of five black men, the head man brightly colored in orange and blue clothes and holding up high a skull, representing the person they are processing for, and the remaining four men are painted in solid, black silhouettes with bright, white eyes, arms out-stretched in solemn celebration.

Also on display at the exhibit were his Zydeco (a tryptic with an accordion player prominently at the center, the player painted in a way that looks like the person is in black face), King Zulu (a bold, blue painting honoring Louis Armstrong who reigned as King Zulu in New Orleans’s oldest African American krewe, Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club), and CPRKR (a tombstone-like tribute to Charles Parker) in addition to Natchez, Untitled (Cadmium), Back of the Neck, and Embittered.

Please read John d’Addario’s article on the exhibition, Basquiat in the American South, which will help you appreciate the paintings on display even more.

Following the exhibit, we made our way through the other floors of the Ogden, but I have to admit that sometimes museums feel like places that people pretend to enjoy.  I can stay concentrated on everything on display for about an hour, but then my attention starts to wane.  We quickly walked by artists including David Butler, B.F. Perkins, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Clementine Hunter, Rev. Howard Finster, John McCrady, Benny Andrews, and Will Henry Stevens in addition to countless others.  All the art on display was powerful and intriguing in their own right, but I’d rather view each of them for an hour on separate occasions and during their own, special exhibitions curated specifically for them.

By this point in the day, it was time for dinner, but unfortunately the weather took a turn for the not-so-desirable.  We had been enjoying temperatures in the upper teens, but on this day of all days the highs hovered in the upper single digits and it was rainy and it was windy.  Now, I understand that back home in Minneapolis you were experiencing temperatures much lower, but I now sympathize with people who live in New Orleans who complain about temperatures that we would welcome any day.  It’s all a matter of perspective, really.  If one day you’re enjoying a comfortable 20 degrees and it drops to 8 the next day, it will feel quite cold.  Conversely, if you were battling a bitter -4 and the next day it’s 8, it’ll feel quite warm.

Even still, after drinks at a restaurant called American Sector (connected to the World War II Musuem), we braced for the cold wind, and we made our way down the #12 streetcar to a donut shop called District Donuts, where we enjoyed two large donuts, one was a king donut, prepared in a way as to resemble its sister, the king cake, and then we went onwards to a restaurant called Jacques-Imo’s, where I enjoyed a fried chicken dinner with red beans and rice and corn macque chow and Amy had a Cajun bouillabaisse of oysters, shrimp, and assorted fish with country greens and smothered cabbage.  Why we had the donuts before and all this food, perplexes me, as we were so full of food yet again, barely having room for beers at the nearby Maple Leaf Bar (the inside of which smelled like my father’s tack shop that houses his horses’ harnesses, a kind of oily, musty, sweaty smell with a hint of old hay and dry manure).

But what food at Jacques-Imo’s!  I am fast running out of superlatives to describe all the most decadent dining we’ve experiencd so far in New Orleans.  It is just all so, so good, the greatest foods I’ve had quite possibly ever!  Nothing so far has disappointed, and I highly recommend that you go to all the places we’ve visited to so far on our trip to NOLA.

Sadly, our days here are quickly coming to an end.  Just two posts remain of our adventures, and neither of us want to return home.

I can’t believe it’s ready our fifth day in New Orleans. We’ve experienced so much so far, but there’s still so much more to do and see.

We began the morning by going to breakfast at Cake Cafe and Bakery. We both enjoyed a breakfast of black beans and rice, eggs, and guacamole and salsa, compete with another one of those New Orleans delights that you simply must enjoy while you are here, a king cake, a confection made of a Danish type dough laced with cinnamon and filled with cream cheese, topped with excited pipings of Mardi Gras colored frosting (gold, green, and purple), and adorned with a small, plastic baby, representing Jesus. This is a traditional cake enjoyed during the days leading up to Lent, and more typically the baby is hidden within the cake, as whoever receives it in their slice will receive good luck, but they also are, incidentally, responsible for bringing a king cake to the next party.

Moving on from breakfast, we took a jaunt outside the city to visit some plantations. Our driver, Richard, who is associated with Old River Road Plantation Tour, was filled with stories about the area around us as we made our 45 minute drive to the plantations, from the cypress tree forests and how the Spanish moss that grows on the trees is neither Spanish nor moss, from how it was more costly to refurbish the Superdome after Katrina than it was to initially build it, to wonderful little facts about the length of the Mississippi and the levees that surround it.

Our first stop was Oak Alley Plantation, which was the less interesting of the two plantations on our itinerary. It’s so named because of these 28 giant live oaks that create a magnificent tunnel of foliage leading to the house, the massive trunks of the oaks columned on both sides of the tunnel that runs for about 800 feet or so. The plantation is home to a mansion that was built from 1837-1839 by slave labor under Jacques Roman who had exchanged the property with his brother-in-law Valcour Aime who had purchased the land in 1830. The mansion, probably designed by Roman’s father-in-law, Joseph Pilié, is a Greek revival design, the building itself a square, painted mainly white, complete with grandiose Doric columns that stand at the perimeter of the house, supporting a balcony that extended around the whole exterior. The inside is smartly decorated as it might have looked in the 1800s, and the tour guides are all dressed in period clothes that white women of the day may have worn.

All things considered, Oak Alley is kind of rather your standard Southern plantation mansion, the kind of mansion that when you hear someone mention “Southern plantation,” you’ll think of Oak Alley. (Indeed, the location has been used extensively in film and television, most notably in the 1994 film, “Interview with he Vampire,” and more recently in 2012’s “Django Unchained.”) Perhaps the tour guide just wasn’t very good (her Southern accent was mesmerizing, nonetheless), or perhaps the content of the tour left much to be desired (we heard mainly about the white owners and not too much about the slaves who lived and worked there), but the whole experience was somewhat lacking in greatness. It all felt by-the-numbers and routine.

However, the whole trip was more than worth our money when we got to visit Laura Plantation. This plantation is built in the Creole style, meaning that instead of Doric columns and a white exterior, there are modest beams of wood supporting a balcony, and the whole exterior is painted in bright, bold colors of blues and yellows.

And our tour guide, Rose, was absolutely fantastic! She had a kind of “preacher” talk about her, adding an “uh” sound to the ends of some of her sentences, as in, “This is a Creole house-uh, and it’s painted so that everyone would know it’s a Creole house-uh,” and while she may not have been dressed up in period clothes (it was a khaki and light blue polo affair instead), she had such passion for delivering the stories about the house to her guests, which made the whole visit so worthwhile. We learned how the house had been built by slaves from 1804-1805 under a man called Guillaume Duparc who had petitioned Thomas Jefferson for the land and how after his death just four years later that the plantation fell under the ownership of his daughter, Elisabeth, who married into the Locoul family. The plantation eventually would be managed by four generations of women (quite unusual in those days), until 1891 when Laura Locoul Gore sold it to Aubert Florian Waguespack.

This was all terribly fascinating, but what was even more fascinating and moving was listening to stories about the slaves. As we headed out to the slave quarters in the back, we were introduced to the so-called “Code Noir,” a list of rules created by Louis XIV that decreed how slaves ought to be treated: they must be baptized Catholic, white men must be fined for fathering children with slaves, children between a male slave and a free female were free, but those between a free woman and male slave were not free, a slave who struck his master or his mistress, wife, or children would be executed, and the list goes on, Naturally, as Rose told us, no one cared about any of the Code Noir.

Even more devastating, however, was how after the American Civil War when the slaves became paid workers, the former slaves had no where to go except stay on the plantation. They may have been paid workers, but where do you suppose they spent their money they earned from the company? Yes, the company store. It was all a terrible circle that lasted all the way until 1977, the last that the slave quarters were occupied by black workers.

And to think that there are people in the world (like despicable people like Bill O’Reilly) who think white privilege doesn’t exist, to this day in 2015, even in the face of stories like these where direct consequences of slavery endure until 1977. The Civil War was only a mere 150 years a ago, and the Civil Right act only a mere 50. These things can’t fix centuries of unjust treatment towards an entire people overnight, and shame on anyone who denies the existence of white privilege, or any other unjust privilege for that matter. It is a fact and it is real.

In the end, though, I highly recommend a visit to these plantations. Seek out Old River Road Plantation Tour if you haven’t got a car while in New Orleans, otherwise just make your way to Laura Plantation for sure. It was an intense, emotional experience that will be with me forever.

As we made our way back to town, we decided first to have some sazeracs and Pimm’s cups at a bar called Napoleon House, then we made our way to Latitude 29, where we enjoyed wonderfully balanced tiki drinks called the Zombie and the Hawaii 504 (so much better than the overly sugary crap you get at Psycho Suzie’s in Minneapolis).

Dinner followed immediately after at the Gumbo Shop where we enjoyed what they called the Complete Creole Dinner, where you got to have a three course meal for a modest $25, choosing from a selection in each category. We decided to go with seafood okra gumbo to start (but we couldn’t resist adding barbecue shrimp for a little extra), crawfish étouffée (Gumbo Shop is known for their crawfish) with macque choux corn (stewed corn with onions, peppers, and tomatoes), and bread pudding to finish. If you’ve read all previous posts on my NOLA trip, you will know that we’ve tried much food and drink while down here, and that everything has been sublimely delectable and supremely decadent and satisfyingly delicious, and all of this applies to our dining experience at the Gumbo Shop. In fact, if I had to choose just three places you simply MUST dine at while in New Orleans, you MUST go to, in no particular order, the Gumbo Shop, Cochon, and Coop’s. Absolutely exquisite dining experiences, all of them!

How could anything possibly top all this?

The morning of our fourth day, we decided to head to St. Roch Cemetery, as it’s in our neighborhood. This cemetery isn’t necessarily one that lots of tourists go to, partly ubecause it’s out of the prime tourist hub of the city, but also perhaps because it’s quite new. The earliest death we came across was 1877, the tomb located in the floor of the chapel in the first of two of the St. Roch Cemeteries. In the bright sun of New Orleans, all the white tombs blinded our eyes as we walked through corridors of the above-ground tombs, also making it difficult to take proper picture. And, as I said, all the tombs were quite new, the overwhelming majority of the deaths occurring in the 20th and 21st centuries. If you’ve been to older cemeteries like the ones I wrote about on my UK trip, the relative newness of St. Roch might disappoint, but the grandiose majesty of the tombs surely won’t. Rows upon rows of tombs above the ground, long corridors that delight a certain macabre sensitivity, surely something unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Following this, we went on a quite wonderful guided food tour, and we happened to be the only two who signed up for this particular day and time, so we inadvertently got to go on our own private tour. Our guide was Michael Batterman, and he was absolutely fantastic. He gives tours through an outfit called the New Orleans Culinary History Tours, and I highly recommend you seek him and them out.

This particular tour took us through some fine restaurants in the French Quarter including Antoine’s where we got a tasting of their seafood gumbo, Arnaud’s where we had shrimp Arnaud, Tujague’s where we had beef brisket with Creole sauce, Davina Cafe where we enjoyed muffuletta and gelato and cannoli, and lastly Creole Delicacies where we enjoyed red beans and rice.

I’ve talked a buch about the food so far on this trip, but it’s difficult not to. Simply put, the food is just absolutely fantastic! Never understated, never dull, never lacking in anything. What was really special about this tasting tour, though, was our tour guide, Michael, and the stories he had to share about all the places we visited. While at Antoine’s he told us about the long history of the restaurant (established in 1840 by Antoine Alciatore, solidly earning the restaurant the title of oldest family run restaurant in the country, run by the Alciatore since it’s very beginnings), took us through the Mystery Room (so named because it was a secret moonshine room during prohibition) and the Proteus Room (so named after one of the various carnival krewes, an organization that puts on a parade or ball during carnival season) in addition to other dining rooms, and we got a glimpse of their fantastic wine cellar, a 165 foot long and 7 foot wide space that holds a magnificent 25,000 bottles. And then we got to also take a stroll through the kitchen, which was fun.

When we moved on to Arnaud’s (established in 1918 by Arnaud Cazenave), we were introduced to Arnaud’s cigar bar called French 75 (it wasn’t quite open yet, so we could only peer through the locked gate), where Michael recommended we get the drink of the same name or perhaps a gin fizz. Upstairs, however, was a real treat: the Germaine Cazenave Wells Mardi Gras Museum, named after a woman who reigned as queen over 22 Mardi Gras balls. We got to view her extravagant gowns, and it reminded me of walking through New Orleans’s version of the exhibit of various monarchs’ regalia on view at Westminster Abbey in London.

The remaining restaurants on the tour were all special in their own right, but didn’t quite have the long history that the first two had, which didn’t make the tour less enjoyable by a any means: at Davina we learned that cannoli were a symbol of fertility (they are, indeed, cream-filled confections shaped into a cylinder which surely suggests a cream-filled phallus), at Tojague’s we learned that the restaurant was the birthplace of the grasshopper ice cream drink, and at Creole Delicacies we learned that red beans and rice was typically eaten on Mondays, which was wash day, so they needed something that could simmer all day while the wash got done.

After bidding adieu to our gracious host and tour guide, Michael, we made our way to Tableau, where we enjoyed some sazeracs, a drink called the bee’s knees, and a Pimm’s cup, along with some redfish beignets and fried boudin balls. We also had a really splendid conversation with our bartender, Clarence, who gave us more suggestions about where to go (it’s good to get the locals’ perspective so you can enjoy the non-touristy attractions), and he told us about how at 25 years old he has a baby sister only 6 years old.

Our evening closed with first visiting Blacksmith (one of Clarence’s suggestions, a very cool little place dimly lit with only candlelight) where we tasted our first hurricanes (a famed drink here in NOLA, but nothing to write home about), and then we had some barbecue at the Joint in the Bywater. Sadly they were out of ribs, but I enjoyed some brisket and pulled pork with mac and cheese. I keep saying this over and over again, but if there’s one thing to remember about Southern food, it’s that it’s never understated. It’s a celebration of the senses, and no expense is left un-spent to provide the fullest dining experience.

And, indeed, our gluttonous adventure in New Orleans cuisine won’t stop here…

In the morning after tea, coffee, and toast in our Air B&B rental apartment, we jumped on the 88 bus to get to city hall from Spain Street in time for a program and march that started at 9am. The grounds around the city hall were bustling with lots of young students who were involved with their school’s various dance, music, and cheerleading programs. Marching bands played their music, dance troupes danced their routines, and cheerleaders practiced their cheers.

Meanwhile, at the entrance to city hall sat onlookers who enjoyed a program that celebrated the life and teachings of Martin Luther King. Sadly, early on the program involved faith leaders from the area who led the congregation in prayer. One of the leaders advocated for spiritual warfare (he used those exact words) and hatred for evil (again, his words) and soldiers of Christ (yes, his words). I found these remarks terribly troublesome. While the Christian god of the old testament was a bigoted, hateful asshole with serious anger management issues, Jesus arrived (supposedly, but no facts substantiate that he ever existed) who essentially told everyone to love everyone. He would never advocate turning his teachings into a vehicle for spiritual warfare to become soldiers in his name to hate evil. Imagine if a shaikh stood before city hall and advocated for such things in Mohammed’s name, and quickly the hypocrisy screams forth.

However, the march afterwards was spectacular. We saw countless marching bands (the first one to perform in the lineup was Martin Luther King Junior Charter High School who played and marched to a Stevie Wonder tune), several dance troupes, a Black Lives Matter group, a Smoke Free NOLA group (which would be nice, a smoke free NOLA, as the smoke in the bars here is stinking up my clothes and making me ill), and a trolly that carried seniors from the Lower Ninth Ward who threw to onlookers fruit snacks. It was such a wonderful site, the whole celebration. and I was so grateful that so many of New Orleans’s youth have such opportunities to express themselves through art.

The rest of our day turned into a wonderful kind of self-guided food and drinks tour. We first made our way to Herbsaint on Saint Charles Avenue where we enjoyed a champaign cocktail, gumbo, and a Louisiana shrimp and fish ceviche. Everything was just absolutely wonderful, so vibrantly zesty, and the service was so very smart and welcoming, and the staff were genuinely interested in providing us with the best dining experience possible.

Our next stop brought us to Cafe Beignet on Royal Street. Here we ordered some tea and, obviously, an order of beignets. Like gumbo, po-boys, muffaletta, oysters, and jambalaya, beignets are another one of those things that you just simply must have while you visit New Orleans. Not doing so would be like going to London and not having fish and chips or bangers and mash.

Like the po-boys we had at Gene’s yesterday, beignets are also quite simple but obviously ultimately altogether different. They’re a kind of French doughnut, I suppose. They’re essentially a square-shaped confection of deep fried choux dough sprinkled generously with powdered sugar. At Cafe Beignet, the beignets come in orders of three and are prepared in the fryer as they’re ordered, so they’re hot out of the kitchen and haven’t been sitting on a shelf somewhere.

Our next stop on this quite fulfilling tour was Kingfish on Chartres Street. It was here where I enjoyed one of the best Pimm’s cups I’ve ever had. As an Anglophile, I naturally enjoy the drink. For the uninitiated, it gets its name and alcohol content from a British, gin-based liqueur called Pimm’s Cup No. 1. The drink itself is quite simple: add some lemonade or ginger ale to Pimm’s No. 1 and then garnish with some strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and a peeling of the skin of a cucumber. It’s a perfect summertime drink and best enjoyed while watching a cricket match, though no cricket is in site in NOLA. (Also, the bartender was quite handsome and well-groomed, hair combed back and parted Mad Men style, wearing black suspenders with a black tie, black slacks, and white shirt, and sporting a perfect mustache that was well-trimmed, not too long, not too short. He looked like he came out of some 1930s Hollywood film. Exquisite indeed!)

Amy got a drink called vieux carre, another New Orleans staple, supposedly created in the 1930s by a New Orleanian bartender called Walter Bergeron. (Fitting, then, that the drink was made by someone who seemed transplanted from the era.) The base of the drink was rye whiskey, to which he added cognac, vermouth, Bénédictine liqueur, and bitters. The 1930s did, indeed, call us today at Kingfish. All we would have needed was someone playing the piano that sat right next to us as we enjoyed such decadence at the bar.

Following Kingfish, we moved onwards to SoBou on Chartres. At SoBou we enjoyed a sazerac, New Orleans’s variation on a whiskey or cognac cocktail, and possibly the oldest cocktail in the world, invented by Antoine Amedie Peychaud before the American Civil War, who combined Peychaud’s Bitters and Sazerac French brandy. By the late 1800s, the drink was altered to use American rye whiskey rather than the French brandy, adding also a dash of absinthe. We enjoyed our sazeracs with shrimp and tasso pinchos, lightly deep fried shrimp and ham on a skewer, the skewers positioned vertically by piercing them into a cross section of grilled pineapple. Divine stuff indeed!

Following in quick succession was Lüke. Our palettes were missing the taste of oysters, so we ordered 18 of them, as it was Lüke’s happy hour and one oyster was 75 cents. We enjoyed these with mint juleps, and I’ve become rather fond of eating raw oysters completely plain, no horseradish, no lemon. It’s the best way to taste the subtle, salty flesh that slides off the shell. And do chew it, by the way, to release the flavors!

Time flies when you’re having fun, as by now the sun has set and it’s time for dinner, so next on our stop was Cochon. And oh my goodness! What a treat!

We began with, obviously, cocktails. I got a drink called Bertrand Road, made of rum, ginger, bitters, rosemary syrup, cucumber, and lemon, and Amy enjoyed a drink called the Rub, made of rye whiskey, apple cider vinegar, bitters, syrup.

Also to start we ordered fried alligator with chili garlic mayonnaise and paneed pork cheeks with creole cream cheese grits and dried figs. This was followed by rabbit and dumplings for me and braised ham hock with sweet potato purée, Brussels sprouts, and pomegranate for Amy, and this was followed by pineapple upsidedown cake for me and chocolate peanut butter pie for Amy.

If this combination of food didn’t just transport you to a world of decadent Southern cuisine, mouths watering and voices mmmmmmm-ing and eyes closing in deep imagination of being here yourself, then I can’t help you. The alligator had such zest, and the pork cheeks just melted in your mouth. The rabbit was so, so savory, the ham hock so, so tender, and the desserts left you wanting to write home (or at least write a blog).Everything about the food we’ve had so far while in New Orleans is far from understated in taste and aroma and appearance and quality and variety. It is just so, so good, and I highly recommend that you make your way to each and everyone of the restaurants we visited. Such wonderful, wonderful stuff to experience here indeed!

The night closed with a short street car ride and a short bus ride to a bar called Allways. (Yes, Allways. Two Ls.) We stumbled across a burlesque show that began with toilet plunger darts (you’ve gotta get a toilet plunger to stand straight up in a hoop on the floor by casually throwing it a distance of about five feet – it’s much harder than it sounds), followed by a man demonstrating how burlesque shows work (he’ll point to an item of clothing as he’s dancing to loud music and the crowd has to cheer to encourage him to take it off), which then led into a succession of female burlesque dancers (yes, men were underrepresented which annoyed me), and all the while we enjoyed some Abita beer (the stuff is growing on me since we first arrived).

Miraculously, after 7 drinks and 2 beers (of course, spread out over 12 hours and over 7 miles of walking), I don’t have a hangover, only memories of a perfectly enjoyable time. And to think we’ve signed up for a guided food tour tomorrow excites me to no end.

This city has a wonderful Sunday tradition called the Second Line parade. I don’t fully know the history, so anything I write about here should be double checked with proper sources. From the brief researching I did about it, second lining is as old as the brass band itself, with young boys tagging along behind the band as they made their way down the street. Various social clubs, church parades, and jazz funerals (funerals seem to be the earliest examples of second lining) embraced people not officially a part of the parade to join in the second line.

The social club that organized the particular parade we saw on Sunday is called the Undefeated Divas and Gents, and the 19 January parade happened to be their 15th anniversary celebration, complete with the Young Fellas Brass Band and also featuring another social club called the Second Line Jammers.

When we arrived at the start of the route, we came across quite the jovial assembly of individuals from New Orleans’s black community, and dotted throughout were white individuals like myself, clearly eager to join in and be a part of the celebration.

Soon the Young Fellas started playing on their sousaphones, trombones, trumpets, drums, and cowbells an upbeat, loud, jazzy number that had an infectious way of spreading the urge to dance amongst everyone involved as the parade made its way down the street. Joining the band and the second liners was a float that had a finely dressed man holding a staff surrounded by elegantly clad women. Later on, a second float joined the parade that had at the head a woman bedazzled in a smart dress and a giant, feathered back piece that sat on her shoulders, feathers extending above her head in an arc a solid four feet or so.

While all this was happening, among the musicians and the onlookers and the second liners and the main liners (that is, the ones with the permit to parade), police officers kindly stopped traffic, and one of their number actually marched with all of us, checking his radio as we went. You could purchase beer and water and pop from parade goers with wagons stocked full, and at the start of the parade and then at the first stop where the second float joined us, you could purchase some various barbecued meats.

And the smell of marijuana indeed permeated the air. Quite strongly. But, that’s just all a part of the whole affair, isn’t it!

We stayed with the parade for a good hour, but each step with them meant one more step for the return trip. So we made our way back downtown via Canal Street to have a late brunch at Ruby Slipper Cafe. Of all the places we’ve dined at thus far, the initial reaction about this place is that it seemed like the least New Orleansian place we’ve yet been to. It’s decor was a kind of standard restaurant style with light yellow walls, chalkboard menus, gym floor wood tables, exposed air ducts, flatscreen televisions playing football. I short, a style that could be transplanted to any other city. However, the food was very clearly New Orleansian, and Ruby Slipper Cafe on Canal is definitely a place to visit.

I got a dish called eggs coubion, a fantastic plate of thin-fried catfish with poached eggs, a sauté of spinach, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and tasso, and a Creole tomato courtbouillon. Absolutely exquisite! While I was expecting it to be spicier than it was (indeed, I still haven’t quite had a meal here yet that was beyond spicy), it was still a real treat to have catfish for brunch with a Creole twist!

Moving on, we headed to Brandan Odums’s ExhibitBE, an art installation located on the West Bank in a suburb called Algiers. Graffiti portraits of various civil rights leaders with accompanying inspirational quotes and sayings cover the walls of the abandoned Woodlands Apartment Complex that was emptied of its tenets on 23 November 2006 when over 100 families were evicted. The art is painted on bare concrete of the buildings’ facade and on walls of individual apartment units that still contain smashed toilets, broken glass, and cracked linoleum. Like the photography of Xavier Nuez or the Heidelburg Project of Tyree Guyton, Odums’s ExhibitBE turns abandoned urban spaces into living art, transforming dilapidated buildings from empty, grey sadness to eclectic, colorful celebrations of life. But while the color and vibrancy of the art reanimates these dead spaces, it also highlights that these spaces used to be people’s homes, and it’s difficult not to wonder what sort of people lived here, what lives they led, and what sadness and happiness once inhabited these walls.

I’m glad I got to see ExhibitBE, as it closes permanently on MLK (it was always meant to be a temporary installation). But, new life will return once again to the Woodlands Apartment Complex, as it’s slated for redevelopment into a sporting complex and hotel.

Out second day on NOLA came to a close with another staple of New Orleans cuisine, po-boy sandwiches at Gene’s Po-Boys on the corner of Elysian Fields and St. Claude. The name of the sandwich comes from 1929 during a streetcar motormen and conductor strike. Of the many support letters written to the strikers, one was from brothers Bennie and Clovis Martin, who ran their very own Martin Brothers’ Coffee Stand and Restaurant and who were once streetcar conductors themselves, promising a free meal to anyone in Division 193. They kept their promise and fed the strikers large sandwiches. Whenever they saw a striker coming for a meal, they would remark, “Here comes another poor boy.”

The sandwich itself, like the Philly Cheese Steak, isn’t really in itself anything remarkable. It’s just some kind of meat like roast beef, spicy sausage, or friend seafood on a long submarine bun with mayo. But, it’s one of those fares that you just kinda have to enjoy when in New Orleans. And I’ve got only the nicest things to say of Gene’s Po-Boys, so do check them out.

What a vibrant day indeed, full of such celebration for life and happiness and such homage to lives of hardship and poverty. But as I get to know the people of New Orleans, I’m being introduced to quite an array of people who have led some hard yet full lives. That even in the face of hardship, disparity, and insurmountable odds, they know how to celebrate life and acknowledge inequity, as should it be with any other great city.

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.