The Big Easy: 7 - 12 February 2010

7 - 12 February - The Big Easy

Who Dat Say Dey Gon Beat Dem Saints?

Laissez le bon temps roulez!

New Orleans was fantastic - a beautiful city, and great, great fun. They really do know how to party, I really don’t know how they have the energy. There were 800,000 out for the Saints (NFL Superbowl winners for 2010) welcome home / victory parade! And then a few hundred thousand out the next night in the same city streets, for a mardi gras parade (the Druids Krewe). And they would have been out again on the Friday night that week, but the Parade was postponed due to inclement weather (it was absolutely freezing, with snow predicted. The energy for celebration is incredible, but maybe not so incredible when one remembers this city is still very much in recovery mode from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And the Superbowl win was a HUGE thing for the city - the Saints having been underdogs (‘The Aints’, with fans wearing paper bags on their heads) since about their inception in 1967.

We arrived in the city as the Superbowl game (ie the footy grand final) was beginning in Florida, watched on giant screens throughout the french quarter, we noticed, as we were shuttled to our hotel.

WIthin a couple of hours the streets below us were jam packed, with cars heading in from all over to celebrate together. We watched people in the gridlock leave their cars, stand on the roofs, hug strangers, and one particularly elaborate dance that involved leaping into the air, twirling around and ‘bumping’ buttocks with another doing the same thing was performed, remarkably gracefully, by a very large black woman who had leapt out of her car, and a gangsta looking black guy who was walking along the street with the crowd.

For the whole week we were there, and into regional Louisiana, complete strangers greeted each other with cries of ‘Who Dat!’ (the response to which was also ‘Who Dat!) Angus loved this, and joined in with enthusiasm.

Angus got millions of mardi gras beads at the Druids parade, caught from floats - enough for the whole school, but sadly they were too heavy to keep. Everyone was in friendly, happy party mode and we made lots of friends that evening. Pictured are some from Ohio.

Food

I know New Orleans is meant to have excellent food. But our dislike of seafood, other than fish, meant we didn’t try too much cajun (french canadians who settled in Louisiana) or creole (overseas born of french and often other European and African descent) food - with a few exceptions, which I’ll get to. This meant that we had some very average food, as the city didn’t seem to do other types of cuisine that well. Bad mexican, weird Thai, and the free hor d’ouvres at our hotel, were some examples (except the BBQ sauce at the hotel - will have to track that down, it was great).

In New Orleans as in other places, my coffee whitener assured me it was a “non-dairy product” (though at least liquid, and not powdered). I can’t believe places, even otherwise decent restaurants, serve this sort of thing and not plain, simple, and good, milk!

We saw a McDonalds ad for Happy Meals, that showed a kid’s soccer team winning the grand final, but the captain leaving the team celebrations to go and get a happy meal. The explicit message was that McDonalds makes you happy. We talked about how sad this was, that surely playing soccer made you more happy than eating McDonalds food?

Then, we went that afternoon to Cafe du Monde, which was established in 1750-something. There, we learned from experience that beignets with cafe au lait and chocolat chaud do make you happy. They really did. We were tired and a bit grumpy before, then we had the beignets, and started smiling and feeling good. They were amazing. I want some more now.

Other stuff

We did a few touristy things: a trip on the Steamboat Natchez on the

Mississippi River was okay, not that special really. I found it more awe-inspiring to drive over it several times on various country bridges in rural Louisiana, past old plantation homes along the River Road (unscheduled - ahem - “detours” notwithstanding).

We went to Laura Plantation, which was very interesting and gave us an overview about creole life (well, the life of one particular family anyway). And slavery, which was pretty sad.

The cemetery tour was interesting, and we met a Voodoo priestess named Miriam, in her temple. We also saw the tomb that Nicholas Cage is having built for his family (they live in town), and made a wish at Marie Leveau's tomb. She was the city's most famous voodoo queen.

The Confederate museum (I bought a real confederate lady's perfume button, turned into a necklace) and the National World War 2 museum were both excellent. The WWII museum had a strong focus, naturally, on the US involvement in the war, and told the story of how they became involved after wanting to stay out of it and do their own thing (referred to as their “isolationist position”). The displays included voice recordings of people who’d fought in various battles, or who had other involvement (eg. Japanese people who’d lived in Hawaii for generations) and they were all very moving. As with the Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos, there was a strong message that the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, while profoundly changing the world and killing so many innocent people, was the lesser of two evils and in fact, was required to end the war and will now help to ensure ongoing peace. The pilot of the Enola Gay was one who expressed that view, not surprisingly. And a Japanese soldier who had been actively involved in bombing Pearl Harbour expressed the same view (as though to illustrate that this is what everyone thinks, even those most affected). But to be fair, some Japanese people also expressed a strongly different view in the same film.

I’d known next to nothing about D-Day, the landing at Normandy, before seeing this display. We learned about the planning of it, keeping it secret, and the implementation. I hadn’t realised Australia wasn’t involved, just the US, Canada and the UK (is that right, or was Australia there?) It all sounded like a great movie plot, but then the people who were there told of how many died, and that made it seem a bit less exciting and a lot more devastating for all involved.

The weather was unseasonal while we were there - it was freezing, and snowed on the outskirts of town. There was a day of rain, too, and that seemed to cause quite a bit of flooding. We got to see how the levee system worked, and a creole woman who took us on a cemetery tour, wouldn’t refer to Hurricane Katrina as a natural disaster - she very adamantly put the blame on engineers who designed and built the levee system intended to drain the water away from this city strangely built below sea level.

After 5 days we decided to head off to explore elsewhere.

The taxi driver who took us to the car rental place from our hotel expounded at length, when he realised we were not Americans (“I knew it, I knew you were an intelligent person, you couldn’t be an American”, he said) about the poor quality of the US education system, and the resulting lack of knowledge Americans have about the world outside the US. He was a Bosnian, clearly a Serbian one, based on some of his other very strongly expressed views).

I think it isn’t just about the education system, but is deeper than that and about the patriotism and the ‘isolationist’ mentality that has probably been part of the country since it became independent of European rule. It then occurred to me that perhaps having all that ‘fakery’ (Disneyland, Las Vegas) is part of that too - we don’t need you, look, we can do it even better ourselves. Or maybe it’s about only getting two weeks annual leave, and with such limited opportunity to see the rest of the world, why not bring it here. It probably isn’t the latter, but it is shocking to me that people in a first world country only get 2 weeks leave a year, unless they negotiate more individually with an employer (and how many can do that?).

Cajun Country

We rented a car - a very cool looking Chrysler PT Cruiser, which turned out to be quite a gas guzzler.

We headed north west to Baton Rouge and Lafayette (still in Louisiana), the heart of Cajun country. Angus felt that my loud singing of 'Me and Bobby McGee' wasn't that good, but I know he's wrong.  It was awesome.

There were lots of mardi gras celebrations happening there too.

An aside - I was shocked at how many fast food outlets there are along Interstate highways! Every single exit seems to have about eight! Square brick or concrete boxes, all looking exactly and unattractively the same.

The Cajuns (from Acadians) are descendants of French Canadians, who were kicked out of Canada a few hundred years ago and offered land by the Spanish who owned Louisiana at that time, because they wanted more catholics to settle in the area.

The Cajuns have their own style of music, strongly celtic influenced (from Cape Bretons, and Brittany in general, presumably. They love to fiddle, play accordion and dance up a storm - a favourite time for such being the mornings!

We went to a Cajun music hall for a Saturday morning session. It was at a music store, that consisted of a couple of sheds on the outskirts of a town called Eunice, and it was absolutely packed. A combination of visitors as well as cajuns. It was a real jam session, like in an Irish pub - anyone who wanted to had their instrument there, joined the large circle, and played along. It was indoors because of the weather being so cold, but apparently was often outside. The music was great.

On the way out of there, we saw the Eunice mardi gras courir, which is where all the men of the town dress up in costumes and ride on

horseback from house to house begging for ingredients for the town gumbo, including chasing poor chickens around to be part of that same gumbo. The town gumbo is cooked up that night, and the town has a party.

We headed back to Lafayette for the evening, and had dinner at the Blue Dog Cafe which is apparently something of an institution. I really enjoyed my ‘Louisiana Purchase’ - a spicy, creamy chicken dish. Angus had catfish, and didn’t think it rave-worthy. Angus had some colouring in sheets, and we coloured the Blue Dog (which looked like a cattle dog, and is the subject of lots of art by some local artist and the namesake of the cafe) red, Angus telling the receptionist our red dog was an Australian Blue dog. They got it in the end.

The next morning we headed back to New Orleans, for our flight to Florida and on to Mexico.

Things we've learned:

• Voodoo is quite different from Hoodoo, and is like many other religions, about ancestor worship.
• Beignets make you happy.
• WHO DAT!