a couple of weeks back kim and i made our first venture into the deep south. we packed our jazz and beans appreciation and headed, via charlotte, down to a city i’ve always wanted to see; new orleans.
firstly, the people in the south sound funny. not funny horrible, but funny interesting. there’s a real rhythmic quality to their intonation. as if they’re singing every sentence to you. the accent mimics the city and the cajuns. very much southern u.s.a, but there’s the strong french influence with some spanish and a little bit of anything and everything else.
this describes the food too. kim did get a little tired of nearly every place in town having the same seafood heavy menu, but i loved it. it was fried, it was spicy, it was large. the fried shrimp po’boy was a favourite, as was the ridiculously huge shrimp creole, as were the fresh oysters the size of floppy disks. it was all fantastic, and as usual, i ate to excess.
and the beignets at cafe du monde... where to begin? hot fresh fried donut batter hiding under a pound of icing sugar. we lined up for this place on sunday morning like the tourist suckers that we sometimes are, but it was totally worth it. we returned on the monday morning and sat straight down like the locals we had become.
i should say, we did do more than just eat, believe it or not. we drank. and as is the way in new orleans, especially on bourbon street, somewhat to excess. hey, when in rome!
bourbon street is actually a pretty seedy smutty place filled to the the brim with frat boys trying to convince girls to show some skin by offering them bracelets of beads. and strip clubs. and shop fronts selling over priced daiquiris from icy machines. but the rest of the french quarter is totally wonderful. it’s more european in feel than anywhere else i’ve been in the US. full of cafes and bars and art shops. and music, completely full of jazz all the time. not that either of us are big jazz aficionados, but it just felt right sitting at a cafe, drinking a local brew and watching a revolving troupe of old timers belting out the blues. the music is inescapable, it’s not just in the clubs, it seeps into every crack in the quarter. we watched another incredible ensemble of local musos on the street later on launch into a major ‘when the saints go marching in’ rendition that had the whiteys coming from miles to show off their bad dance moves. my light thigh slapping, heavy toe tapping was bad enough.
we also wanted to get out of town a little to see what else the area had to divulge. so we did a tour of the plantations and a tour of the swamp lands. both excellent trips for totally different reason, but what they had in common was amazing tour guides. both true cajuns bleeding new orleans. both frothing to share their stories.
if you ever find your way to the swamps looking for alligators, owls, snakes and tales of getting beaten by nuns in school for speaking french, you have to find captain ted. he had so much to tell and everyone hung on every word. he knew everything about his surroundings, both the natural environment of the swamp lands and history of his people. we could have listened to him for days. and he certainly could have obliged. we even walked away with a dubious recipe for cooking the rats, that are now damaging the wetlands of new orleans, with garlic and spring onions.
and if you ever find your way out past the devastation of hurricane katrina, into the sugar cane country, to the grandiose homesteads, to see the ugly and utterly fascinating relics of the juxtoposition of obscene wealth built on the back of slavery, you have to go with tours by isabelle. can’t remember the name of our driver, but he started practically every sentence with ma’am or sir and had more new orleans facts than wikipedia.
finally, it was fascinating to see just what hurricane katrina had wrought. once you got out of the inner city, the surroundings were so very run down. houses razed, caravans everywhere, desperation and poverty the defining qualities. apart from the tourism, new orleans was already a very poor city so it was hard to be sure exactly which areas were in their state as a direct result of katrina. to be sure, the entire place is suffering hopelessly.
on a lof of the damaged houses we saw large ‘x’s in circles with numbers in the resulting segments. we were later told that this was the marking the army and other search and rescue groups used once they’d been through a premise. the number in the bottom quarter was how many bodies were found. i think i only saw 0s, but i’m not really sure.