New Orleans!

We took a bus trip into the south last week and spent several days in the crescent city of New Orleans. On the way we made a stop in Memphis, Tennessee and had lunch on Beal Street, one of the hereditary homes of the blues. Food seems to be one of the great gifts and passions of the south. New Orleans probably has more well known eating establishments per capita than most any city of its size on earth. You can get Cajun or Creole food on practically any street in the French Quarter and they all claim to be world famous.

When we arrived in town we immediately headed for our favorite new Orleans establishment--the Court of Two Sisters. The Sisters are long gone as the place claims to have been established in 1835 but there are rumors that food has been served there for as long as three hundred years or more. Situated on Royal street with a second entrance on the famous Bourbon street where they have a sandwich shop that serves the best muffalatoes in town, the place has a jazz buffet that is second to none anywhere that we know of. For the grand price of twenty nine dollars one gets the best food and the best service that we have seen anywhere. In the classic southern tradition everything is white linen and there are black waiters and attendants all over the place. One offered to take our plate and was absolutely delighted when we picked it up and gave it to him. Our white waitress was in constant attendance and offered a variety of drinks and fruit juices to serve our needs. The water glass was never empty and an empty plate did not remain on our table for very long. The buffet was over eighty items and you could partake of dishes from roast duck to just about any kind of Creole food you could think of and many that you had never heard of before in your life. Bananas Foster was one desert feature that my buddy had never tasted before in his life. At the sisters establishment, they don’t care if you stay for hours enjoying their music and the slower pace of southern life that exists there just blocks away from the bustle of a modern American city, be it southern or not.

One of the highlights of our trip was a visit to one of New Orleans many above ground cemeteries. Since the water table of the city is just below the surface, everyone is buried above ground in reusable mausoleum type constructions that a family buys once and then uses as long as the blood line runs. Used vaults are sold to the less fortune and then repaired to continue their life with a new round of arrivals. The only problem seems to be that they often run out of space on the front of the structure to list who all has been interred there. Our step on guide informed us that it takes about a year for the wooden caskets to decay their inhabitants down to nothing but bone at which time they are pushed to the rear and down a shaft to make room for the next arrival. She made the joke that this is known in New Orleans parlance as “getting the shaft� as the bones pile up and further decline at the bottom of the pit behind the regular burial slot. We had always heard about New Orleans cemeteries but had been warned by those who had been never to go into one outside of a group because of the crime that often occurs there. On this beautiful day, there were no criminals in sight and the place seemed as safe and secure as anywhere else. We have no information on how many deceased criminals might reside in the graveyard!

Another highlight of our tour was the Mississippi river in all of its glory. There is a river walk along the waterway and we partook of its benches and walkways to spend some time just gazing at the passing scene. One afternoon we took a two hour river cruise aboard the steamboat Natchez and were reminded that it is one of the only true steam powered craft still plying the Mississippi river. This was the ninth craft to bear the name Natchez and one of its predecessors lost a nineteenth century boat race up the Mississippi to St. Louis to a boat named appropriately The Robert E. Lee. As we took this cruise we were reminded of new Orleans history as we passed by the battleground where over two thousand British and only thirteen Americans lost their lives in the famous battle of New Orleans which occurred in early 1815. Not far from there a modern navy ship called the Cape Kennedy lies at anchor awaiting the day when it might be needed to ferry military supplies to some future battle site as yet unknown. It is interesting to note that the port of New Orleans does not charge large ocean going craft a port fee when they drop anchor in New Orleans and there were many there the day that we took our trip.

One of the more pleasant diversions we experienced in New Orleans was the town square located on the south central part of the French Quarter. New Orleans was one of those early professionally laid out cities similar in some respects to Washington D.C. and the square is a large areas specifically designed where people could gather and enjoy a part of the day. We gathered there a few times ourselves to hear the street jazz players who were constantly there with their trumpets and tubas and every ready cans to secure what tips the audience might provide for them. Down on one end of this areas stood a man that we simply called the aluminum man who played his boom box as he did various pantomimes in hopes of getting a few shekels of his own. A member of our party opined that she thought he might have been there for many years because she thought she remembered him from as long as twelve years before. The fellow had painted himself up in aluminum colored paint and wore a suit that was similarly done which reminded us of the actress who ended up painted in gold from the movie Gold finger. New Orleans is a city full of statues of all kinds, some newer and many quite old commemorating on thing or another. Along the river walk is a small park commemorating the holocaust constructed with funds donated by a Jewish person who wants us all to never forget.

There is a darker side to New Orleans these days and it is the constant references to what happened to the city after Hurricane Katrina hit a number of years ago. On our tour our guide constantly showed us how high the water got on some of the more famous structures in town and we passed repeatedly by the Superdome where so many gathered during that time when they had no where else to go. The Superdome is now known as the Mercedes Benz Superdome and there are many pictures advertising their product on the sides of the structure. Close by is an aquarium/Imax structure next door to a casino that served a very nice buffet.

It is interesting to note that bus tours of the lower Ninth Ward where so much suffering took place during Katrina are not allowed by city ordinance but we thought we got a look at the area anyway as we passed by on one of the freeways. What we saw was, even from a distance, not a pleasant thing to behold. The structures there were barely subsistence and there was all sorts of graffiti and other writing on many of them and the area seemed quite dreary and dark. When president Eisenhower began the interstate highway system in this nation back in the fifties he was not aware until close to the end of his term what it would do to so many urban neighborhoods when it split them apart by going right through the middle of them. New Orleans is no exception to that rule and we were told that some of the close knit nature of the city was cast asunder by what had been done. But it was nothing compared to what George W. Bush did when he flew over the city after three days of further vacation after the storm struck, not seeming to care about the suffering that was going on below him from evidence provided by the aloof picture of him staring out of a window of his plane at the scene below. Bush provided much money to strengthen the levy system around the city in the years afterward but even his repeated visits to New Orleans did not change the perception that had been set by the release of that one damning photo. We remember during the election of 1992 when George H.W. Bush was on the ground early the next morning after a hurricane struck south Florida and how it was characterized as playing politics to be at the scene of a disaster so soon after it had occurred.

New Orleans today is a city cast into a panorama of the past mixed with the moderninity of the future. It is proud of its past but one can see countless people working their electronic devices as they communicate with their neighbors and the entire world. There are old street cars run by electric cables overhead and carriages drawn by patient mules who trod their load of visitors around the French Quarter mixed in with a legion of taxis with their fares uniformly pasted on the side of their doors. And, the strangest thing of all was that we only saw one Wendy’s and NO McDonalds anywhere on the scene. And when we got back home, the next day we discovered that McDonalds had abandoned their dollar menu while we were gone. But, that might be a discussion for another time and place. We didn’t go to New Orleans to eat at McDonalds anyway!!!!!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe