N'Awlins

New Orleans: lush, languorous, lazy city of the south.

This city is so steeped in it's own unique culture that I don't even know where to begin.


Overheard in the local diner:

Waitress: How y'all doin?
Customer: Ah cayn't complain, ain't nobody gonna he'p me.

The same waitress asked us for our order by saying "lay it on me, honey".


This morning we took a really cool street-car downtown to the French Quarter. It was all old-fashioned, with wooden seats and jangling noises, and every now and again it would stop running and the driver would get up with some big tools in hand, walk casually either to the back of the car or outside, fix something, and get back on and go again. This happened at least once every time we rode the street car.

We passed through the Garden District on the street car, and saw some beautiful houses. I also noticed that many of the trees lining the road had Mardi Gras beads in them!




We wandered around the French Quarter for a while and then stopped for iced coffees and "beignets" at an outdoor cafe. (Beignets are sugary pastries unique to New Orleans as far as I know. We think they are French in origin.)


Anyway, a really cool street jazz trio was playing outside the cafe. We must have sat there for an hour listening to them - they sounded EXACTLY like you'd expect New Orleans street jazz to sound like, and it was good!


As we made our way to the street car stop late in the afternoon, it started to rain. It wasn't that bad - we're used to cold, bitter Victoria rain but this was warm and fairly harmless rain. The street car finally came and we and our paper bag of things we'd bought were a bit soggy, but it was all good. The rain stopped and started a few times on our journey, but as we reached our stop the skies OPENED UP. I mean, it poured and then some. We climbed off the car and RAN for where we'd parked our truck - it was only a minute or so away. Mark shielded our paper bag of goodies against his body but it quickly started to disintegrate. We dodged traffic in the torrential downpour, shrieking and laughing and running, and finally the truck was in sight! We sprinted across a road and I stepped in a large but (I thought) shallow puddle, and I was immediately up past my ankles in water. I couldn't stop though; traffic was coming. In went the other foot and my sneakers became a soggy mess; water gushing into my socks. At least it was warm water. We got to the truck and threw ourselves in, laughing and dripping, and started to drive back to the campground. Of course, not five minutes later the rain stopped and the sun came out. How very predictable. Ha ha, weather, you got us good, didn't you. You win this round, weather.

The previous day, on our way in to New Orleans, the highway on the outskirts of the city kind of turned into a really really long bridge over swamps and bayous. The trees didn't seem to mind, they just grew out of the water instead of on land. It was strange to see, and I wondered if they were happier in the water or not.


New Orleans is probably my favourite American city at this point. There's no one reason; it's just a cool city. I want to write all about how cool it is but I'm kind of stymied! I can't put into words what it is about this place.


For any music lovers out there, Mark would like you to take note of this schedule of upcoming acts at the House of Blues:


HOUSTON

This is about all we saw of Houston, Texas:


AUSTIN

I wanted to add a tiny bit more about Austin, Texas. It's a strange city, but in a good way. Very eclectic. We played tourist and read the plaque by this statue in downtown Austin. I guess there were once some political folks from another city who were stealing government archives from Austin because they didn't believe Austin was secure enough to house them. So this lady shoots a cannon off at them. The archives stayed.


While downtown we noticed a large herd of nerds on Segway scooters. I can't say I've ever seen that before.