98 Degrees F
Driving to Savannah
Writing on July 1, 2011
We woke up in our beautiful suite at about 8 am. We were out by 8:30 or 9 and Bourbon Street smelled light a giant hangover. We were off to get some beignets at the most famous beignet place in the world—Café DuMonde. They only serve café au lait and beignets—24 hours a day. The outdoor area was packed to the brim with people—the overhead fans did little to stifle the heat. Our beignets and chicory café au lait were exceptional. They pour about a full cup on powdered sugar over these fried puffs of dough. We’ve eaten the local fried delicacy every chance we got on this trip—Navajo fry bread in AZ, funnel cake in CO, soipapillas in NM and now beignets in New Orleans. It’s been wonderful, really.
Scarlett in front of Scarlett's
Beignet nose
Beignet Chin
After purchasing a Café DuMonde mug (we’ve been collecting mugs on the roadyssey), we headed out to our first museum. I wanted to see some New Orleans culture from a museum standpoint—Mardi Gras, New Orleans history, etc. Also, I wanted to see it from an air-conditioned standpoint. So we walked out of the French Quarter and into a more residential area to go to The Backstreet Cultural Museum. I read about this place on the NOLA tourist website and decided to give it a go. What a funky little joint. It is an old funeral parlor with two rooms and a long hallway. Each room is dedicated to one element of Black New Orleans culture. Our tour guide, Anita, kind of just walked around with us and explained what the heck we were looking at. The room on our right was just striking. Dozens of costumes of all different wild colors lined the walls. There were feathers, beads and rhinestones everywhere. I wasn’t sure if I had walked into a Brazilian Carnaval shop or a female impersonator’s dressing room. It was neither. This room holds some of the costumes of the Mardi Gras Indian tribes. This is a tradition started in the late 1800s and early 1900s where the black communities showed solidarity with native tribes in the area by dressing in these costumes during Mardi Gras….I think. Anita kind of spoke to us under the assumption that we had a working knowledge of this very interesting, but very obscure practice. Anyway, she explained—in a fairly unintelligible Cajun twang—that each family was a tribe and there was a Chief, a Queen, a Wild Man (who always wore horns), a Spy Boy (who watched out for any mischief), and a Play Boy (I have no idea what he did but I think he is sort of an ally between the spy boy and the chief to tell the chief if anyone was coming around the corner). There are colors symbolizing each rank—yellow for Chief, etc.
On Mardi Gras, all the tribes show up at the Backstreet Museum and get ready. They don their outfits, start the music and prepare to parade around the town. It all sounds like so much fun. It’s such a neat tradition between families—with stations passed down through the generations. The costumes themselves take a full year to create and are incredibly detailed. They begin with canvas covered cardboard and can create any shape they want: from an eagle to a castle to a peacock. Each costume is beaded and feathered in an intricate manner that takes years to master. The artists create brilliant scenes for the costumes on panels. We could only take four pictures in each room, for whatever reason—check out the pics below. The second room was about Jazz Funerals—this display was not as comprehensive as the first and actually seemed more like a memorial to famous New Orleans heroes.
When we were finished at the museum, Anita showed us to the door and wished us a nice stay in New Orleans. Next we discovered a few more museums in the French Quarter—the Voodoo Museum and the N.O. Historical Something or Other. The latter was pretty disappointing—only a few pieces from a private collection. The Voodoo Museum was scary but interesting.
We ran into a few characters in New Orleans—one of my favorites was Doc Lewis. He is a trombone player who sits on stoops and yells out at people “Whaddya wanna hear? Anything you like. Jazz? Funk? Whaddya want?”I don’t know how we started talking to him, but he asked us if we knew who he was. Shocked that we didn’t know, he told us he was James Brown’s band leader. I checked his references—I found a lot of info about other people who know him from the street in New Orleans. So who knows; he’s been doing this for eleven years and has a few missing teeth, but he was certainly fun. He invited me to sit down next to him and help him play. He guided my hand and we played some goofy tune. He promised us these would be the best pictures on our camera. I cracked up at him, but guess what? I LOVE this picture—I think it’s awesome.
We then split jambalaya at Desire Oyster House in our hotel. We had walked around for 4 straight hours at this point and needed a bit of a break. So, we took a dip in the hotel pool, which was really relaxing. I also took a nap on a chaise lounge. After gathering a bit of strength, we set off to find some afternoon tea and have another stroll around town. We had pralines and iced English Breakfast at Royal Tea House. I was corrected on my pronunciation of “pray-leens”—“it’s praw-leens”. I made the excuse that I was from Los Angeles and the guy said: “NO really?” very sarcastically. Loved that ☺
UGH!
Here’s a disappointing tale. Teddy wanted to take a stroll on the boardwalk by the river. It was going to be a nice, relaxing tour and maybe we would catch the trolley on the way to the Garden District, which is actually quite a punishing hike on a humid day. The very moment we reached the top of the stairs up to the boardwalk, a friendly street person approached us. Everyone in New Orleans had been so honest and sweet and friendly, that we chatted right back. He spoke a pretty gibberishy and mumbled English, but we basically got the gist that he was trying to make a bet with us.
Since this incident, we’ve been told how gullible we are—how this is such a classic con. We shook his hand—I thought this was to say nice to meet you, but we were entering into a bet: “I bet you I can tell you where you got yo shoes—the street, the city, the state, the country”. We thought we would have a little fun and were kind of walking and talking to him, almost trying to get away. So we said, alright tell us. We thought it was kind of funny when he said, “I tell you where you gotchyo shoes; you gottem on yo feet, the street you gottem on is Decatur Road, the city is New Orleans, the state is Louisiana and the country is the USA”. Ok ok, cute, now can we leave? NO. The guy leans over onto Teddy’s canvas and rubber New Balance running shoes, pulls out a bottle of antibacterial gel filled with a mysterious non-antibacterial gel liquid and squirts it on Teddy’s shoes. The second he did this, I knew we had run into a scam—just like the window washers on the street. Then he starts taking a rag to the shoes, and I’m like… okay, I’ll give him a couple bucks and we’ll be on with our day.
Teddy says: “Okay how much for this” and the guy goes: “Five on the line, five on the shine. Five on the line, five on the shine”. HUH? And I think—okay, I’ll give him five bucks, whatever. Then, onto the second foot, he starts mumbling to himself “Ten on the line, ten on the shine”. I’m thinking, there’s no way I’m giving this guy ten dollars. Then when he’s finished with his useless “shining” of the tips of Teddy’s rubber shoes, he says “Twenty—ten on the line, ten on the shine”.
I say: “WHAT? You just said it was five on the line five on the shine!”
I couldn’t believe he would expect us to pay twenty dollars for this crap. I said to him, “We actually got scammed here and we are not paying that”. I was actually afraid he would come after us if we didn’t pay anything. When he demanded ten, we told him we would give it to him, but that we weren’t happy—at all. He says: “Hey, I gotta make a living too”.
We felt really defeated. We had escaped our would-be robbery in Monument Valley and maybe we were getting just a bit of our deserved “clueless tourist” comeuppance. I felt a strange combination of irritation and sadness when a few moments later, a homeless person asked us for change. I was irritated because I had just lost ten bucks to a scam. The stronger emotions were sadness and disappointment—this guy was begging for just a few cents and another guy just walked away with an unfair deal.
(Teddy time) After staring at a stationary streetcar for 10 minutes, we gave up on the idea of the Garden District and walked back to the hotel. We freshened up for dinner and tried once again to eat at Napoleon House. True to the French history of our location, the restaurant itself had gone on vacation for the hottest part of summer. We researched and walked to two more restaurants. Both of these were on vacation too. Give me a break. We were disappointed and hungry, but worse, there were some extremely ominous storm clouds rolling in.
Hippies and Gypsies!
“It’s gon rain!” “Here it comes! Get inside y’all!” Warnings flew at us from locals as we walked to another restaurant. The sky darkened and a sudden wind blasted us. We tried one more restaurant, Sylvains, which had room at the bar. We realized how lucky we were that the other restaurants were on vacation. This place had only been open for 9 months. It was wonderful. We had a very bartender/waiter who chatted with us throughout the meal. There was a very friendly atmosphere, we sat between two sets of locals. Erica shared her fried eggplant with one local, there was much merry making to be had.
Doofus!
Doofus #2
Meanwhile. The storm had broken in a full on southern style thunder fest. The rain was the hardest that Erica had ever observed. It was so heavy it looked fake, like a movie set. After dinner, the rain stopped, but we saw some incredible lightning on the walk home. One bolt was the biggest I had ever seen. It went from one end of the sky all the way across the sphere of the sky, forking multiple times. I put my arms in the air and screamed “WOW!” like and idiot. It was a most dramatic end to our visit.
See the rain fall... hey yeahhhh
