New Orleans, LA: City of Jazz

Day 1: 

I arrived in New Orleans on Thursday afternoon. After picking me up from the airport, my family and I went to check out the Destrehan Plantation, one of the most well-preserved plantations in Louisiana. 

It was interesting to see how the plantations were run and what the quality of life was like (for plantation owners as well as slaves). All the employees were dressed up in historical costume, which was adorable, especially if you were our guide, an old lady who seemed half-bored by her presentation but knew an inordinate amount of information about anything and everything related to the house.

 

According to her, there will be a movie coming out called Twelve Years a Slave (also a book!) that was shot on the plantation. So that's cool.

 There were also chickens, which was unreasonably exciting. 

We may or may not have gotten beignets Thursday night at Café du Monde. Maybe it was Friday. Either way we got beignets and they were delicious and messy and delicious.

Side note: One of the great things about Louisiana for a (semi) French speaker is that everyone kind of almost speaks French. This means that in words like "café," companies and people actually understand where to put the accent and what an accent even is. Pro-tip: If you want to NOT look like an idiot, don't use an apostrophe like an accent ( cafe' or Renee' ). Better just to exclude the accent altogether. But if you want to actually do it right, here are the rules: In English (or words English stole from French), the accent is probably an accent ague, or forward slash, above an E, not beside it. If there are two Es, it goes above the first E. Renée. Café. Probably the only time you will use the accent grave, or backwards slash, in English is in Shakespearean poetry, when you pronounce the -ed at the end of words to add a syllable, as in "slashèd" (pronounced SLASH-ehd as opposed to one syllable SLASH'd). Got it? Good. Just a little lesson for you.

Sorry, I am both an English and a French major, so these things are real problems in my life. 

Moving on. Heh.


Day 2:

On Friday we woke up and hopped on the Natchez Riverboat, a windy Mississippi lunch cruise aboard an old-style steam-powered (or something?) boat (think Mark Twain).

It was quite neat (and windy). We ate soul food and learned some things about the Mississippi and its banks, such as that every one second, the river deposits one million gallons of water into the Gulf. That's a big freaking river.

After the boat, we chilled, walked around, looked at the farmer's and flea markets and all the shops, and generally explored the city. Everything there is named Jackson, for Andrew Jackson I guess, which made me chuckle.

A little later on we went on a mule-and-carriage tour led by a neat and knowledgeable local lady, who showed us everything from the French Quarter sights to the "ghetto" to Frenchman Street.

We learned that the area is called Dixieland because the original Confederate mint used to be in New Orleans, and the first note they printed was a ten dollar note. Because it was Louisiana, though, they printed the English word Ten as well as the French word Dix on the notes, but the English-speaking Americans pronounced dix phonetically instead of Frenchly, so they started calling them dixies, and Louisiana became Dixieland.

Later on we went down to Frenchman Street, a more local, musicy place (much cooler than Bourbon Street, although with just as many drunk people). We ate dinner at a cool place called Snug Harbor and then went to look at the nighttime art market next door.

 

And I saw this neat sign. 

  

AND I got this amazing poem, written by fellow English major David, one of several Poets for Hire on Frenchman, who would write poems on any subject for whatever price you thought they were worth. 

"The Life of an English Major" 

You will live inside the words of other, rooms without walls, a universe without boundaries, stories that pull around your neck like a scarf on a cold winter's night.

You will be one of a dozen who still appreciates a library.

Books will be your great love, and men will fall short of your romantic expectations.

Grammar mistakes on social media sites will drive you insane.

You will be sensitive to the thoughts of others. 

You will ask a lot of questions and be unsatisfied with most answers. 

Your life will be an endless source of storytelling material.

Then we went to listen to music at The Spotted Cat Music Club, where my Dad (naturally) started talking to these two British guys, a filmmaker and an aspiring chef, who are on a mission to taste food across America so that the chef can open a restaurant back in England. They were funny and interesting guys, and the filmmaker is from Falmouth of all places.Weird coincidences.

Day 3: 

On our last real day in NOLA, we went on an airboat tour of the bayou. We saw lots of marshmallow-eating alligators and even got to hold two-year-old Amy. 

We also learned that Spanish Moss can be processed by boiling it and removing the gray bark. Once removed, the plant looks like strands of horsehair and it quite strong. They used it to stuff furniture and car seats (horsehair furniture). 

I also thought it was interesting that they have managed to garner a population of over a million alligators, who were on the very first endangered species list, by stealing their eggs and hatching them at a specific temperature that allows for the correct proportion of males to females. They then notch their tails to mark when they were born and release around 15% of them back into the swamp, about 1600 gators. The rest of them go towards alligator meat and leather.

After that we took Austin to move into his hotel/home-for-the-summer, dropped off Gena at the airport, and went to see Star Trek Into Darkness, which was awesome. 

And that was it!