NOLA is my friend

I hate Hurricane Katrina. It not only ruined the physical NOLA but it also crapped on the cultural NOLA. One of my favorite cities. I've been there twice, January 2002 and June/July 2004.
Just for the heck of it I thought I'd blog just a bit about it. Here's a synopsis of the trip that I took to NOLA in January 02 with Luke and Aimee: Eat, Drink, Eat, Drink, Eat, Drink, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Shop for trinkets, Eat Drink, Eat Drink, Shop some more, and Sleep. That's about it. And we met Poppy and ate a fabulous dinner at Marisol, and stayed up drinking practically all night. And, oh, the seduction of Bourbon Street. On that trip, we stayed one block from Bourbon. We really wanted to stay in the French Quarter because we knew we'd love it there, and we did, but next time? No way. In fact, next trip Aimee and I stayed on St. Charles - not nearly as distracting.

One advantage I thought I would have when I went the second time was that I wouldn't have to buy beads or souveniers. WRONG. I am a huge sucker for the sparklies. I even bought extra luggage in the French Market in order to get all my crap home - both times.

And what about the hotel? Let me tell you about the hotel we stayed at on our first trip. It's called the Rue Royal Inn, right on Royal Street. It's the most crazy-assed building you ever saw, I found out later that it was actually two old buildings connected into one. In order to get to our room we had to go up or down 7 staircases. Sounds wrong. doesn't it? But we had to go through the courtyard, up one staircase, up another, along a landing, down a short staircase, up another staircase, down another, and up two more. We'd get up and out by 10 or 11 in the morning, shop, eat and drink all day, and come in at 10 or 11. Luke and Aimee sometimes went out late but not me - NO WAY was I going back down and then back up those crazy staircases to get back to the room. Once I was in for the night they were on their own. (Although we did find a shortcut later. THANK GOD.)

The most memorable thing about nola is the music. There is music everywhere; I'd never heard or seen anything like it. Especially in Jackson Square and anywhere along Bourbon. It was the coolest thing in the world to have music everywhere you went. The city is alive with music and people, and the smell of the city itself just exacerbates that aliveness. The smell hits you as soon as you leave the plane, and at first I wasn't sure I'd be able to stay there it smelled so bad. In fact, Aimee and I looked at each other and peewed our noses at the sametime. The smell is a living thing. It's also a dead thing. It's a mixture of decay, mud, industry, mold, and more decay. I guess it's just the smell of the old city kind of rotting from within and mixed with the living essence of the Mississippi River. All I know is that after the first hour or so I got used to it, in fact, when we got to our room, we opened the windows and never closed them again for five days. Which is a joke in itself, because one of the windows in the living room was broken out and open to the city. Never did figure out why they hadn't fixed it, but when we told the hotel clerk, he acted like he had never heard it was broken, so who knows? After a short time, the smell just blended in with the experience, and we seldom noticed it again, just at times when it wafted in extra strong for some reason. This was also the first time I'd ever seen slate roofs. The house across the way, visible from the bathroom, was getting a new roof during our stay. The guys were just over on the roof scraping the slates off with some kind of tool and letting them hit the ground. I was like, hey, I want one of those! They're pretty cool. I did end up picking a painted one up from an artist in Jackson Square. Still have it, it's pretty cool.