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!

Day 28: Adventures in Fruit Pickin' and Park-n-Floatin'

We started today with a trip to Chyreen Farm, a pick-your-own fruit farm with an abundant bounty of black currants and gooseberries. Luckily it wasn't raining, so we were able to pick almost 3 pounds (or was it kilograms?) of both fruits, which you can see me carrying below :)

Then we went down into Falmouth and rented a small boat to take out for four hours. We (my dad, mostly) drove the poor little 6-horsepower thing all over the bay (in the freezing wind) to Smuggler's Cottage, the cute little coastline pub we've been coming to forever. Recently, though, it has changed hands and lost some of its homey charm, though the food was still good. The significance of the place, actually, is that Eisenhower stopped there to have a meeting when all the boats converged there to set out for D-Day. So that was nice. Then we took it back, trying desperately to beat the high tide. We made it.

When we got home, my grandmother and I made black currant jam. It's actually not difficult. Just a cup and a half of water boiling with a pound of black currants for twenty minutes, then for ten minutes after adding four cups of sugar. We put them into four hot jam jars, and tomorrow they will be cool and ready to eat! I will also be taking some home with me, of course. :)

And that's about it. I have four busy days left before I take the train up to London for a night and leave the next day. Phew! It'll be nice to be home. :)

Day 22: Liverpool, City of the Sea.

In Liverpool, on the very edge of the Mersey River waterfront, are three imposing decorative old buildings, known as the Three Graces. Atop one sits two giant birds, cormorants of sorts. These are the Liver Birds, the only two of their kind (though they are, of course, made of brass), sitting six meters tall on the roof high above the town. The female faces the ocean, calling the sailors home from rough seas, and the male faces inland, watching over the city. It is said that if they were ever removed from their perch, the city of Liverpool would cease to exist.

I learned this charming tale as I took the helpful advice of good ole Gerry and the Pacemakers and "Took a fe-e-rry ... 'cross the Me-e-rsey" today. Though it was raining, Liverpool looked beautiful from the water and I had many interesting buildings pointed out to me by the audio tour. Definitely worth doing if you're ever in Liverpool, as well as the U-boat tour you can choose to do if you're into WWII history, but I decided to save that for another trip. :)

I also went to the other half of the Beatles' Story museum, because my ticket covered it, at Pier Head. The exhibition included an almost astoundingly lame "Fab 4D" show which I guess would be more entertaining for children but was clearly aiming to be all romantic or something and still seriously sucked. I have no idea what it had to do with the Beatles except that it had out-of-context covers playing the whole time. But there was also a fascinating gallery of the lost photographs of some sixteen-year-old guy who did a photo essay on behind-the-scenes Beatles before they were so famous, then forgot about it until two years ago. There were some neat candid shots, and some that sucked but were interesting because they were the Beatles. So that was cool.

Then after a while I decided to walk to the big cathedral to go up the bell tower because I had nothing better to do. Except I didn't exactly gauge how far away it was (or how to get there...or how far uphill it was) but I persisted! Even though I had to go through a pretty crappy part of town to get there. But I did pass through the gates to Chinatown, which is the oldest Chinatown in Britain, if not Europe. Anyway, eventually I got there and eventually I went up the tower (3 elevators and 145 steps later). On the way up I passed through the reverse side of the church's arched ceiling, which was really interesting, as wells the (gigantic) bell chamber. And on the top, I got a 360° view of the city. Then I came back down, glancing at an embroidery exhibition on the way, and browsed through the displayed entries to the city's annual photography competition. Some of it was pretty good, mostly typical nature stuff and some portraiture, mixed in with cultural stuff and avant garde nonsense. But it was neat.

Then I returned to the hostel and collapsed, feet hurting. I read for a long time (The Heretic Queen by Michelle Moran - thoroughly good ancient Egyptian historical fiction) before wandering out again in search of dinner. By this time, though, it was pretty late (by shop standards) and the only places I could afford were closed. So I ambled around Albert Docks for a bit, wishing I could go down to the waterside where the sea had receded for low tide. Then I ended up at McDonalds, out of sheer desperation. And I didn't even end up eating all of what I got because it made me feel sick. I still don't feel great, but now I'm also hungry. Thanks McDonalds. -_-

Oh also, Happy Independence Day, America.

PS - I'm not even gonna bother messing with these photos. The thing with the ferris wheel is Albert Docks. If it has birds, they're Liver Birds. If it looks like a church it's the Cathedral (which apparently has the largest pipe organ in the world with 10,000 pipes. But I forgot to look at it. Poop.) if its something else, take a guess, you're probably right.

PPS - Oh and if you're ever driving in England, watch out - apparently there are some rogue zebras that like to do it in the road.

PPPS - Yes, sometimes I am immature. Shut up, you would have taken a picture of it too.

PPPPS - But did you catch my Beatles reference there? Eh? Eh? ;)