New Orleans gets a lot of hype. It´s deemed one of the best places to party in the US, the best place to get some jazz, the best place to clog your arteries with delicious and distinctive food; it also caught the attention of the world in 2007 with the devastation it suffered because of Hurricane Katrina and the country´s ineptitude in handling the aftermath. New Orleans does encapsulate all of these things, yes; but during my week there I got the feeling, more than with other cities, that New Orleans is all about perspectives. Every perspective is valid in its own way, but no one perspective encompasses what the city really is, not in its entirety. Each is a narrative of experience, of what we as individuals saw or chose to see. There was the Dutch guy in the hostel with a suspiciously Russian accent who spent every night on Bourbon Street and every day recovering under a tree in the courtyard, and my couchsurfing host who didn´t believe in bad neighbourhoods, only overly paranoid people who attracted negative attention. Then there was Chad, who had spent all his life in New Orleans and recently moved to Atlanta. He was back to work at Jazz Fest, but he couldn´t wait to leave New Orleans; he hates the place. He told me about the deep-seated racism that´s getting worse rather than better. The corruption of the police force, the degradation of the schools (New Orleans had only a 40% literacy rate before Katrina), the fearless gangs of young people who have no qualms about killling someone who walks onto the wrong street. "You see all these people here enjoying themselves? Black people, white people...at the end of the festival it´ll all just go back to how it was, they´ll go back to hating each other." It´s a damning view, but it´s his perspective and it´s not wrong.
My perspective was a bit different, though. I´m a bit in love with New Orleans, with the booming personalities and the po´boys and the music. Music has a different status there: it´s as ubiquitous and essential as the food. The people there have suffered, and it dates to well before Katrina, though her name still hangs over the city and frequently slides into conversations. I was sharing lunch with a lady from Baton Rouge who was also volunteering at Jazz Fest my first day in New Orleans, listening to her stories of 20 people staying in her house for months after the storm because they had nowhere to go, and the tales of water rising faster than the people scrambling up the stairs to their attics, when the waitress caught a snatch of it. "Are you talking about Katrina?" "Yeah." "Yeah..." And that mutual, slightly pained, almost reverent pause before the stories continued. But life goes on, because it must, and to me, it seemed the music is a catharsis for all that hardship. On street corners, at the Jazz Fest, in dive bars, in front of coffee shops, people poured out music, damn good music.
But on to less serious things. My first few days in Nawlins was spent toing and froing to the Jazz Fest, where I jammily managed to get a volunteer position. My expertise now extend to children´s canvas painting assistant, Assess Tent sitting, and Recycling Centre standing. But even better than gaining this CV-worthy skillset, I got to see Mumford and Sons, Tom Jones, The Decemberists, Low Anthem, bits of jazz and bluegrass, and on and on. So not a bad endeavour at all in the end.
The hostel I stayed in for the first four nights was delapidated but clean, and more importantly full of interesting folk happy to swap tales over a beer or five. One man, who´s currently moonlighting as the maintenance guy, used to work on a pleasure boat that was right next to Deepwater Horizon when it exploded last year. He´s currently waiting for his $450k cheque from BP to come in and quite looking forward to it. Among others, there was also an 85 year old Swiss man who´d lived most of his life on the Amazon carrying tourists to and fro, and a doctor from Brazil who played violin, but only with a backup track and speakers - he held regular nightly concerts by the barbecue.
The final three days I stayed with a Couchsurfing host and became travel buddies with another Couchsurfer who was staying there. Together we were able to tick crossing the Mississippi, seeing City Park and its associated bayou, and getting in some proper dive bar jazz off our lists. The dive bar in question was called Bullet´s Sports Bar, and for all you Treme fans out there, yes it was the Bullet´s featured in the first season with Kermit Ruffins.
I finished out my last night in New Orleans with a good old cheesy ghost history tour. Not one to shirk cultural responsibility completely, I picked a tour that leaned heavily on the history side, and it provided a (mostly) factual look of the weird, twisted past of the French Quarter, with a bit of flair thrown in ford good measure. Our tour guide had a colonial Indian accent that suited his flowing garb and feathered trilby, and his penchant for cackling at the end of each harrowing vignette served its unnerving purpose. Among the bits of insight gleaned from the tour (which, by the way, I would recommend to anyone visiting: Haunted History Tours) were that all the buildings in the French Quarter bar three are actually in Spanish colonial style due to the entire area and all its wooden buildings burning down twice in the space of six years, the inhabitants are descended pretty much exclusively from convicts and prostitutes shipped over from France (the first time the convicts asked the king for women he sent them over nuns), and Johnny Depp has recently bought a very haunted house from Nicholas Cage which seems to bring a curse on all its owners which he intends to turn into a museum in the next year.
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| Nom nom nom...Later ´gators. |
Next stop, Quito. Photo albums are temproarily suspended until I figure out a place in South America that doesn´t take 5 hours to upload a single picture.
Update: More photos of New Orleans can be viewed here.
Haha, I had to look at the bigger picture to see what was in the gator's mouth...mini tabasco bottles. Great pictures. Good luck in Quito; hope to hear from you soon. Miss you already.
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