Buzzing on a Bike

Sunday, June 05, 2016
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
I woke early and had a nice breakfast in the hotel. I was the only one who knew how to work the pancake machine, because I had used one in Ireland before, so there you go. The breakfast area in the hotel is an open room behind the lobby, and it has a balcony from the floor above looking down into it, as well as a little fountain. It was cute. Once again, I think reusable cutlery and plates might be a tad more environmentally friendly than throwaway plastic, but the food was fine, and I wasn't that hungry for the rest of the day.

I had plans, as you may remember, and today's plans were to go on a bike tour of the city in the morning, with an option of a second bike tour to a different part of the city in the afternoon, or else a tram out there . The bike place was right beside my hotel, conveniently, so I headed out there as soon as I was finished. And then the bloody place wasn't open until 9:15. Grrr. 

I used my time to wander out to the riverside and look at the steamboats and casino and all that jazz. It was very quiet and very hot. There's a Mardi Gras museum out there too, or a centre or a warehouse or some sort of storage place where they take money off visitors. I didn't go to it, but I passed a few well-placed advertisements in the form of jesters and the like. 

I have been reading more about Mardi Gras and the traditions around it, but I definitely still don't get it. I think the rich whites used to belong to 'krewes' that would each have a giant float in the parade. And you couldn't ask to be in the krewes, you had to be invited. And then the poor blacks had Black Indian tribes, because they figured there was Native American blood in them, and they dressed in amazing feathered costumes. Getting masked was usually a day for getting revenge, and it ended in bloodshed mostly, but this guy called Tootie came along and worked his whole life to turn it around to being about the pride and prettiness of the costumes. And now there's a statue of him in Congo Square, and random Irish girls admire his tenacity.

The Mardi Gras beads and trinkets are thrown into the crowds by the krewes in the colours of that krewe, but Mardi Gras colours are usual purple, green and gold . And you can just buy beads in any tourist gimmick shop, or catch them from bikini girls on balconies in Bourbon Street. I bought three pairs in the end, all in purple, green and gold, with alligators, saxophones and eyemasks on them. Now you know why I have them.

I headed back to the bike place and they were open! And the first damn tour had already left. WAHT. I got my times mixed up and I thought the first tour left a half an hour later than it actually did. So, being so flexible and well planned, I swapped around my ideas, booked the afternoon tour there and then, and headed off to see the Garden District by myself.

Like many cities, there are different areas in NOLA with different heritages. You'll probably be familiar with the Lower 9th Ward, a poor, low-lying area that suffered greatly during Katrina. The Garden District is like the entire opposite of that. It is all the posh, massive houses, old oak trees, universities and little to no flooding . The tram goes down through the centre of it, and if you hop off almost anywhere and wander, you'll get fantastic photos and either a sunburn or rain drench. 

I thought I'd take the tram, because I had had the foresight to buy a 3 day Jazzy Pass, that got me on all buses and trams in the city. I'll ruin the surprise now and say I'd have been better off with a 1 day pass, because I have a mortal fear of buses and I didn't use it again. The tram scared me off too. IT NEVER CAME. I waited with some obvious tourists until enough homeless people were shuffling around that I felt I'd be more comfortable walking to the next stop. Still no tram. Next stop. Under an underpass. Across a roundabout - an actual honest to goodness roundabout! - down along the tracks. Another stop. OH MY GOD. I thought it would never come. Then. Guess what? Three came at once. WHAT A SURPRISE. One was full, one was closed and we got onto the third.

It was actually lovely and relaxing. The wooden benches flip over if you want to make a group of four, but most people were happy to lean out the windows and photograph all the amazing houses. They were gorgeous. I think a lot of them were hotels and stuff, but I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to live in one (although the upkeep must be ridiculous). A lot of passengers jumped out at Washington, but I decided to keep going out to Audubon Park, then turn around and head back to the bike place .

Audubon Park is in the south of the city, which is Uptown, either because it's posh, or it's upriver. I have a very hard time wrapping my head around the ups and downs here, because right is down and south is up, and Canal Street is a divider but it only goes halfway across. And then, NOLA is also called Crescent City, because it's situated in a bend of the Mississippi River, a crescent shape, which makes all these ups and downs ever more indecipherable, because upriver is down and downriver is north. 

So Audubon Park is very very big, and it has a zoo, and Loyola University is across the road. Loyola is not just the name of a residential area in Galway City, it turns out. It's a surname, so I'm going to make an only mildly-informed leap and guess it's Frenchish? And they moved to Canada? And the French-Canadians took over New Orleans? As well as many other places... and the name stayed? Perhaps. Tulane ("2-lane") University is also right behind Loyola, in case you didn't want to be right beside the park or anything . I have no idea of the origin of that name, but it's there too. Lane.

I took some pictures of the spanish moss on the oak trees in Audubon, and then decided I didn't want to walk around a park or a university at ALL, and got back on the tram in case it decided not to operate again and strand me out here. Along the way I had burst of rebellion and hopped out at Washington instead. I knew the house that was filmed as the outside of the nursing home in Benjamin Button was down there, and I wanted to see it. Loved that film. I also passed Lafayette Cemetary No. 1, which I should have visited, it turns out. It looks like the oldest and most interesting New Orleans graveyard. I also passed Commanders Palace Restaurant, another venerable NOLA institution. Then I went into a little bookshop where I couldn't validate buying a book to fit in my tiny suitcase, and wolfed down half a gross sandwich in a nearby cafe.

I had to go back to the tram then in case it didn't come (Sunday seems to be an entirely different timetable to real life here), and it rained while we were waiting on the tracks. I was prepared better than last night though, and whipped out my "mac in a sac" to stay dry. The tram came and I was back just in time to run into my hotel to drop the sandwich, grab a bottle of water and go back out to meet the bike group next door.

There were only four of us cycling together: me, a couple from Florida and a girl from Northern Ireland . Our guide was a dry-witted NOLA local. It was a great day, I really enjoyed it.

Our bikes were super comfortable, even though they had no hand brakes - you had to reverse pedal, which took me and NI girl a while to get used to. I was the only one who had opted to wear a helmet, but since my back surgery I don't have complete confidence in my abilities to control a bike, so I preferred to be safe. I had nearly had a runaway bike collapse back in Dublin on my sister's gorgeous new bike, so I was a bit nervous.

It was all fine. We had to relearn to cycle on the wrong side of the road, which is the right, which is wrong, and down to Uptown and all that sort of thing. Just do the opposite of anything you intrinsically know and you'll probably be okay.

We rode out to the river side of Jackson Square first, and happened to hear the steamboat Natchez PLAYING MUSIC. Like, a little old woman sits up on the top of it and plays a keyboard which makes the steam play MUSIC. It's so funny. It was that way because back in the day, all the competing steamboats had to differentiate themselves to passengers and potential passengers and who wouldn't go on a musical steamboat?! It's called a calliope.

Then we looked at the cathedral and learned about the Spanish and the French building some buildings and that sort of stuff . I've kind of forgotten it now, but I'm reading a really good book called The Accidental City which starts back even further than those buildings, and I still haven't reached a part where anyone has actually managed to build on the current site of NOLA, so I'll let you know more when I do.

We went through a piece of the French Quarter and stopped by the Old US Mint, where I realised I was sunburning slowly but surely, and had forgotten my tiny suncream. :( Then it was out through Marigny and Bywater, admiring a bazillion beautiful and unique houses along the way. We even saw some that still had the FEMA Katrina markings on them. These are the US versions of Search And Rescue marking systems, and look like an X with numbers and letters around it. On the left was the name of SAR group, the top was the date and time they entered, the right was any hazards present, and the bottom quarter showed the number of live and/or dead victims inside.

The houses themselves were small and close together, but all followed a pattern of one and a half floors,roof pitch, number of windows and shutters, interior linked rooms and then apparently ANY colours you liked! Which I love. There are Creole Cottages, Creole Townhouses, Shotgun Shacks and then more modern bungalows.You could have taken pictures of them all, but what would I do with that except pine over the beauty.

Speaking of that, Bansky, the elusive English graffiti artist, came to NOLA in 2008 and did about 14 pieces all over the city . Apparently only 3 remain, and one of these is Umbrella Girl between Marigny/7th Ward/Treme. We stopped and had a look at her plexiglass-covered self. It's terrible that so many people have tried to damage or steal it since, and that so many of the others are gone. This one shows a girl under an umbrella, but it's raining inside the umbrella. As someone said, it's said to depict the assumption that something is going to protect you from the water. Like an umbrella. Or a levee.

We carried on to St. Louis Cemetery No. 3. I don't know if it's the third St. Louis cemetery, or the third NOLA cemetery. Either way, it carries on the tradition of above-ground burial tombs. This one was newer, cleaner and more well-spaced than the one I happened upon in the Garden District, and thus, not as interesting to me. I was also very obviously sunburning, extra-burning due to the reflection off the white marble. The Florida girl gave me some of her suncream, unasked, because she felt so sorry for me. I got a little exfoliation with Miami sand with that cream too.

Anyway, the above-ground burial is partly because the ground is so watery that underground burial isn't great in Louisiana, but not necessarily because the bodies floated up and took a little trip around the city around every time there was a flood. It was also partly just a continuation of the Spanish and other European settler burial traditions .

At a burial, the coffin is put into the tomb and sealed in for at least a year and a day. After that it can be left, or taken out and consolidated into a smaller bundle and pushed into the back of the tomb if another burial is needed. It's all interesting but quite obvious stuff. What really interested me is JAZZ FUNERALS. Dudes, that's what I want. Funeral bands play mournful jazz on the way to the grave, pallbearers sometimes have a dance to do with the coffin, and then after the burial, the music becomes upbeat and they give an Irish wake a run for its money. And everyone dresses up fancy. THAT. That is brilliant.

Next we cycled up to City Park, which is another huge park that extends up to Lake Pontchartrain (which is in the north, but not on the river, so I can't tell if it's uptown or downtown) and we saw some PROPER oaks with spanish moss. Eat your heart out, Audubon Park. This is such a bayou, deep south, old American picture, it was something I was dying to see. Spanish Moss is that drooping stuff you see clinging to oak trees in the deep south. It's actually not a moss, and until very recently, I thought it was a lichen, but it turns out it's actually an angiosperm! A flowering plant. Like me, it likes warm climates. Unlike me, it also likes humidity. It was named 'Spanish Moss', because it looks like the long, triangular beards of the conquistadors. And it has been used for lots of things by humans, including stuffing mattresses and car seats! Car seats!

We rolled around the park, passed a wedding photoshoot with cute little parasols (great idea ...) and a mini-train that brings kids and people around the park. We also passed some floods and lamposts within the floods that just make the best photos. Then we stopped off at Morning Call cafe, which has the best beignets in the city.

So I have watched and sung along with Disney's Princess and the Frog multiple times. It's great. The soundtrack is an earworm. Listen to it. But Tiana, the eponymous Princess, bakes beignets, and the best I could come up with before getting to New Orleans was "they're kind of like donuts". I beg to differ.

THEY ARE LIKE HEAVEN.

There's a 24 hour cafe called Café Du Monde near the French Quarter, and every tourist has to go there for beignets. Morning Call in City Park is less well known, but also open 24 hours and also serving beignets. It is said that Morning Call was doing beignets long before Café Du Monde ever got its nose in, and is therefore better, but I was equally pleased with both, and will be straight back to the nearest one whenever I go back to NOLA.

Beignet apparently means "bump" in French (It's also pronounced 'ben-yay', like you're very happy to see Ben). They can be made with lots of things, like potato, but why would you bother when it already TASTES SO GOOD. It's "a pastry made from deep-fried choux pastry" and then smothered in icing sugar . Beignets have to be eaten fresh, and the beignet mix you can buy in NOLA is verrrry dense, which is why I didn't buy any to bring home. Also I didn't want to destroy a great memory by making a rubbish one. Have them with coffee and you are just SET. WONDERFUL. They always come in threes, which looks like too much to the non-American at first (and probably is, for somebody dour enough to count calories when they could just enjoy themselves) BUT IN THE END IT'S NOT. You need all three for YOURSELF and not to share with anyone else, EVER.

We cycled back through Treme (another district, pronounced 'trem-ay', like you're sort of happy you trembled). This is the area the TV series was named after. I watched one episode of season 4 on the plane over, and the pilot and second episode when I got home. It's a very good show, only 4 seasons, less than 10 episodes per season, if you want to binge it. But it's quite intense. It starts 36 months after Katrina, and the characters are artists, restaurateurs, musicians and ordinary New Orleanians going about rebuilding their lives and their city after the hurricane. However, the soundtrack is WONDERFUL. This blog is named after a song from it. Listen to it. It's on Spotify.

We cycled through Louis Armstrong Square, where a large drum circle was pounding out a rhythm. Back in the bad old days, NOLA actually had a (slightly) more open attitude to blacks in a time of slavery . Free black people were an integral part of the economy, and a few boss men had the foresight that it was economically advantageous not to preclude them from everything. They didn't want them doing wacky voodoo drumming in the middle of the French Quarter, but hey, just outside the gate was not the same place, so that was fine. This became known as Congo Square, and again, I am not the best historian of this history that has zero connection to me, so I stand to be corrected at any time. It's still Congo Square, but it's now part of Louis Armstrong Park. Louis was born in NOLA, just in case you were wondering why he keeps popping up. Also, he was a bit unclear on whether he was "Lewie" or "Lewis" in pronunciation, so he has that in common with his city.

Actually, he doesn't. In New Orleans, it's pronounced 'Noo Orlins'. It's only people who aren't from there, or didn't actually know, that pronounced it 'New Orleeeens', or anything else. I found myself saying Noo Orlins over there, and back in Ireland people say "What?" and understand when you say 'New Orleeeens' the second time . So there. I never met anyone fussy about it, but I feel like I care now. And I'll say the Orlins one as often as possible.

That was pretty much it for our bike tour. We weren't in any rush back, which was nice, and I think our guide enjoyed himself too. He met and chatted with a lot of people who knew him, or recognised his tour bikes and wanted to point out different things to us (one of these was a modern Lourdes grotto thing in Treme). One lady sold us some homemade pralines (with and without rum), which reminded me so much of lovely Nashville Goo-Goos that I got hungry for them too. Pralines are not what you're thinking of, unless you're thinking of this, so I recommend you try some if you get the opportunity.

After we had hung up my helmet and left our bikes back at the shop, I walked the NI girl to a nearby CVS to get mosquito bite cream. I love browsing the drug stores in the US. Everything has a cure. I'm a Walgreens girl myself. I was spoiled a bit by them in Chicago last year though. That's where the company was founded and I think they're probably nicest there. But I digress. I managed to avoid buying too much, and everything that I bought was totally fine at all customs, which is all that matters. I did not, in the end, buy the large print Bible wordsearch book.

I had a bit of a rest after all the excitement, and when I was refreshed, went out for a stroll around the still-closed French Quarter shops . Due to having so much else to see, I had missed them for two days now. Fortunately, there were plenty of restaurants and bars still open. I went into an open air one that had musicians playing, including some diners that just happened to have their saxophones and clarinets and trumpets with them... I had some DELICIOUS fried gator (yes, alligator... mouth is watering again) and enjoyed the music until it was time for another walk.

On my way back, Cafe Du Monde was open, so I bought a mug and sat down for some beignets. I had given the rest of my yucky sandwich to a homeless veteran on the street, but now I was a bit peckish myself so I was able to compare two sets of beignets in a day.

Result: They are all delicious.

Conclusion: Always eat beignets.

 

Comments

Una
2016-07-31

I'd like to try some beignets!!

2025-02-13

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