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Monday, November 21

New Orleans Part 1

What a trip.  Mr. Lina has now moved pictures to an accessible place (his work laptop not being conducive to picture sharing but very good for backing up the pictures while we were away) so I can post about the trip.  I should have planned my packing around things I made, but alas, it's mostly RTW.

Mr. Lina has wanted to visit New Orleans for ages.  He did all the planning and researching for this, he had a full page of paper full of places to go, food to eat, hours they were open, notes about them (ie.  cemeteries less likely to be mugged), I was quite impressed.  It made it very easy to figure out what we were going to do for the day and string it together based on geography.  Quite a few places are closed on Mondays, limited or no hours on Sundays so some places could wait for Sunday and some couldn't. 

First stop was food.  We needed a late lunch after the flight and went to Mother's.  Mr. Lina had the Debris Po'Boy on the reco of our airport shuttle driver, I ordered fried fish (edit:  fried shrimp, I really did read this multiple times, I did not order fish) with rice & beans and turnip greens, but I got fried fish.  Whatever, no hives and it tasted fantastic.




Mother's pepper infused vinegar
 
 That evening we went to Bourbon Street.  Found it a bit like Niagara Falls, lots of neon, kinda tacky, total tourist trap, kinda feels like there is a con going on but you're okay with that because you chose to go.  3 for 1 drinks prior to 8pm are pretty common, I was hammered before 7:30. 
Busking to Atomic Dog
Bourbon St & Lucky Dog


Those boys there are busking  just at Bourbon & Canal St and you can hear them a block away, brass travels.  The amusing part was that they were playing Parliament, Atomic Dog.  Bet most people wouldn't recognize that, but Mr. Lina pegged it.

After 3 for 1 pours and a rum & coke that looked like iced tea, we did a little walking around and ended up at Cafe du Monde for cafe au lait and beignet.  There were maybe 15 tables being used, pretty quiet.  Next morning, it looked like this.



Busy, but we didn't have to wait for a table, people were leaving at about the same rate they were arriving.  I was so glad we got our beignets on Wed/Thurs because Saturday morning it was a mad house with the line up around the outside of the building.



Have cafe, will travel.  We walked around the boardwalk, this is me in front of the steamboat Natchez.  We had dinner there that night.  Nice Dixieland jazz, good food, exceptionally accommodating to my allergies, they made catfish up just for me because I couldn't eat the buffet version. 


Then to the aquarium.  I was looking forward to this.  I love sharks, they freak me out but I'm just fascinated.



SHARKS!

He's coming to get me!




Aquarium tunnel, no sharks, just fish & rays.

Budgie making a break for it in my purse



Off we go for more sights..  We took the ferry across to Algiers and stopped in for lunch.  The guide book said the Dry Dock had great po'boys, but I can't say I was overly impressed, good, but the beer was better.  And this sign. 



It's getting to be my bedtime and before I'm charged for whining, I think I'll leave it at that.

4 comments:

  1. I like that sign. :)

    It looks like you had a great time, it was a pleasure to read your post. I haven't been to Nola since before Katrina...

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  2. I think a version of that sign will end up in my house at some point.

    It was a godo time, more pictures to come...

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  3. I NEED that sign. Sadly, the people most likely to whine at my house rarely have $5. Maybe I should make it 5 cents?

    The food sounds SO GOOD. I missed po' boys when I went -- how? why? I have no idea -- but ate gumbo and a lot of Creole cuisine. Delicious! Did not even know there was an aquarium in New Orleans, but I have walked through a similar tunnel at other aquariums. Yay, shark tunnel! I always feel a bit weird about the glass, though....like, how strong is that glass? What if it breaks? ACK, freak out time.....

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  4. Hmm, the whining sign will not be a revenue generating opportunity if the whiners are generally broke. Perhaps chores will be issued for whining?

    I'll have another post when I get a minute. There is more food to come. We didn't take many pictures of food, but one place we figured people wouldn't believe us if we didn't.

    I wanted to find out about the shark with the bent back and googled it after we returned. It seems there was a behind the scenes tour in 2002 that got to walk over the tank and the walk way collapsed. No one was hurt, but THAT would be pretty freaky. http://lubbockonline.com/stories/080902/nat_0809020051.shtml

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your comments, I love to have a two way conversation. I seem to be getting a lot of spam from anonymous users and am turning off the ability to comment that way. I really would like to hear from you so if you do want to add your two cents without an OpenId, email me at seraphinalina at gmail dot com.