New Orleans, 1/15-16/09

After scoping out St. Louis Cemetery I (the others were a track through the ghetto and not high on our "let's walk to it" list), we navigated our way through a dog parade (complete with those soppy dog owners who dress their dogs up in pink sweaters and such), played with a pit bull puppy, and established ourselves at a hole-in-the-wall bar (I bet you didn't know there were any of those in the French Quarter, did you?) serving crayfish. Only they were out, so we had shrimp at the crayfish price and red beans and rice. We walked around, did some shopping, walked along the river, putzed, and ended up at another seafood-and-beer place for dinner, followed by a stroll along Bourbon Street to take in the shenanigans. We then stepped it up a bit by closing out a jazz bar with wine. One of those dark, seedy, brick-lined bars off a more lonely street, packed full of wine drinkers in slinky, stylish clothes. Our final stop for the night was the Cafe du Monde at about 1 am, experiencing the daytime tourist destination the way Louis and Lestat experienced it, dark and damp and full of smoke and shifty conversation. Locals and the homeless mingled freely, sipping coffee and licking powdered sugar off sticky, dirty fingers, absorbed in one another and hardly taking notice of the only tourists venturing that way so late at night.

The next morning we hopped a ferry to "historic" Algiers, across the river and made up of rows of dockyards and storage containers. We also managed to find some quick and wonderfully messy peel-and-eat crayfish at an eatery we visited yesterday, and we caught a cab to the airport while I picked shellfish entrails from my fingernails. Never could get that pealing right.

Andrew Jackson proudly surveying his very own Square

St. Louis Cathedral

Loved this set of townhouses in the French Quarter...

As an aside, our cab driver to the airport was a fabulous guy from Haiti who looked like he had lived long and hard. He had an almost understandable French-Caribbean accent, and I'm pretty sure he came to New Orleans for the voodoo. :-)