New Orleans (Pt 7)

Last day in New Orleans... After checking out, we left our bags with the doorman and headed to Petunia's for one last New Orleans brunch. While waiting for a table, Keith called to say that he had just gotten his orders - he was leaving that night. Great organization and advanced notice on the part of the Army, huh? Anyway, we finally got a table and ordered a St. Marie's crepe (spinach, chicken, and cheese) and a St. Louis (eggs benedict with crabmeat). The crepe was pretty good, encrusted with melted cheddar cheese on all sides. It got a bit overwhelming near the end, but it was still great. And, the bits of crab and hollandaise sauce I did have were pretty good. I think, however, that I definitely liked the pain perdu much more. Anyway, after brunch, we went to get our luggage and then trekked to the 39 Tulane bus stop for the bus. The bus driver told us that he'd let us know where the stop we wanted would be, but, honestly, announcing it as you're opening the door for that stop is just insufficient, especially for passengers with luggage. Anyway, we had to walk back to the actual intersection for the bus, and then we had to walk really fast across the street to just barely catch the bus. Sitting on the bus to the airport was a bit disheartening for me though. However, much the French Quarter seemed to be recovering from the effects of Katrina, the poorer parts of town and outside of town still seemed in need of more attention. I don't know if that was how it was before the hurricane, but, in any case, the poor in that area still seem worse off than the poor in California. Maybe I've just been further removed from the poorer areas of SF than before. Anyway, we got to the airport and ended up flying standby on an earlier flight to Houston. During the layover, we also are watching the Sugar Bowl, as we're waiting for our flight to Sacramento.

Overall, it was a great trip, I had tons of fun, and, for better or worse, I didn't get a damned thing done in terms of research, work, or school.

*Sigh* back to reality...

New Orleans (Pt 6)

Hey! it's our last full day! Shouldn't we be out hunting for delicious food?!?! Well, the answer to that would be yes... we decided on a full day of snacking at various places.

We started off at Napoleon's House with a Pimm's cup each and a shared half muffaletta. The muffaletta was basically cheese, ham, pastrami, and remoulade, which consisted of several types of olives, pickles, and peppers. It was served warm, so the taste of olives wasn't as bad as having something like kalamata olives cold. The Pimm's was very good, possibly even better than the first time we had one. We also saw the creepy guy from yesterday there, but we managed to avoid him since he was at the bar, and we got a table...

After that, we wandered around the Bourbon St. area some more and then landed ourselves at Funky 544, where they were handing out free shots of something made of tequila - it was yellow, I think. There, we also got hurricanes, which were made of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum instead of regular white rum or 151. It was definitely sweeter and "spicier" than the ones we had from Lafitte's and Pat O'Brien's. After that drink, we decided to go get some postcards, one of which we would use as a note-card for everything we were planning to eat or drink that day.

With a Café du Monde postcard in hand, we headed to the Two Sisters for a boudin sausage on a bun, which was definitely a good snack for the time being. After some more wandering, we decided that that one sausage between the both of us was not enough of a snack, so we headed to Acme's Oyster House, whose line was much longer than on our first night there... We ordered the same things we got the first night, a pitcher of Abita amber and a dozen fresh oysters. We also added to that by sharing a large crawfish etouffée, which is a stew of crawfish and other ingredients on top of rice. Boy will I miss fresh, cheap crawfish when I get back to California.

Anyway, we finished our food and brought what was left of our drinks back onto Bourbon. Again, in a repeat of the first night, we headed to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, where Jaime got a Voodoo (a grape-flavored slushy alcoholic concoction), and I got another hurricane. We sat and listened to the pianist, who I tipped with a dollar bill folded into a crane, play and sing some songs... We decided to leave after a while, but on the way out, we got sidetracked by the gas-burning "wood" stove that we could sit next to. It was definitely colder that day, all day, than on previous days, so the fire was quite welcome. In any case, I don't think it would have mattered all that much because once we were outside it was definitely cold again and no amount of time in front of the fire prior would have helped...

New Orleans (Pt 5)

Welcome 2007!! We were being lazy and got up fairly late, especially considering that we had to check out before noon from the Intercontinental. We packed up and then headed over to Le Pavillon, "the Belle of New Orleans," where we would stay our last two nights. After getting our corner room at the end of the hallway (CSI reference #1: "murder central"), we headed to the French Quarter to get some food. The Italian Market was closed so our original plan to get muffelettas was dashed. We then decided to go to Johnny's Po Boys, which we knew was across from Nola, but since we temporarily forgot where that was, we wandered around a fair bit first. I then realized that I had taken a business card, and it was still in my wallet. We got the most delicious crawfish and shrimp po boys! The fries were pretty good too, but the po boys were excellent. They were "dressed" with lettuce and tomato, and the bread was toasted, adding a really good crunch to the already satisfying texture of the deep fried seafood. We bumped into an LSU couple, the wife apparently used to be a cheerleader for LSU (yay her...), and she chatted until her husband got there with their food.

After stuffing ourselves silly with the yummy po boyishness, we headed down St. Charles for our walk to the Garden District. It was maybe about an hour's walk along that street before we hit the Columns Hotel, which is another historic hotel, this one with a bar. We ordered some Bloody Marys and sat there to watch part of the USC-Michigan game (USC later went on to completely pulverize Michigan) and chat with the people there. The bartender, Theresa, was really cool; she was going back to Tulane this month for a graduate degree in graphics design. The bartender that was leaving as we first got there seemed pretty nice too. (She's especially cool because she watches CSI, leading us to CSI Reference #2: apparently, one of the customers that left as we came in was Marg Helgenberger, who plays Catherine on the original series.) All of the staff was really friendly with the customers and especially friendly with each other. On the other hand, there was a kind of creepy, sleazy older man that kept talking to us about where he lived, picking up women, and other things that we all felt was rather disturbing. But, as Theresa said, people in New Orleans wear their freak on their sleeve. So, I suppose at least you don't have to worry if the nice guy you're talking to is actually a closet pervert.

After several hours, we decided that it was time to head back to the Frenchmen street area for some dinner. We got to Adolfo's, where we got some escargot as appetizers. There's something about melted butter and garlic that just makes my mouth so happy. After the appetizer came the first course of angel hair pasta with a marinara sauce. My entree was pounded veal (I know! I had veal for the first time... apparently food > ethical issues) covered with their Ocean sauce, which I think was cream, seafood broth, a bit of tomato, and some kind of white wine. One veal cutlet was covered with the sauce and shrimp and crawfish. The other cutlet was covered with crab meat and capers. J got a flounder fillet stuffed with various seafood, including shrimp and crawfish. (It was a very shrimpy and crawfishy day, not that I minded in the least.) We both got some house wines with the meal as well, pinot grigio and a cabernet sauvignon, which were fairly decent.

 After dinner, we strolled around some more... We eventually got back to the hotel, which serves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hot chocolate, and other snacks and beverages from 10 to 11pm. We grabbed some hot chocolate and milk and I also got an apple and then headed back to the room. We were definitely tired from walking, but not sleepy yet, so we watched the very exciting end of the Fiesta Bowl. (Boise State, undefeated but in a mid-major conference, defeated Oklahoma in overtime after dominating them pretty much the whole game. Oklahoma, despite a decent comeback from 18 points down, couldn't stop a beautiful lateral play that BSU pulled off in the last 7 seconds for a touchdown to tie for the overtime. BSU then went for a double-fake two-point conversion instead of a field goal after their touchdown in overtime to seal their win. Beautiful!) After the game, we just went to bed. Good night!

New Orleans (Pt 4)

I woke up this morning, and the sky is blue! This makes me and my camera very happy! We strolled over to a highly pink-ified restaurant called Petunia's. The wait was fairly long, although we learned later, when we got a table, that someone had tipped over a couple trays of food earlier and had to start over. One of the servers also wasn't at work because he had apparently hit a truck with his bike on the way to work. Needless to say, service, however great, was spread a bit thin. Anyway, once we finally sat down, we ordered some pain perdu, a New Orleans style French toast, and a Cajun breakfast, which consisted of Andouille sausage, boudin (a pork and rice sausage), grits, eggs, and rye toast. The grits... were really well-done, not too salty, and overall very well-prepared. The pain perdu was amazingly good - the toast, made from slices of sweet French bread, was perfectly crusted and slightly spiced... They also put the right amount of sugar on it, which is to say not too much.

After that, we headed to Pat O'Brien's for their original Hurricane, which was actually much sweeter than the one we got from Lafitte's. This was most likely because the one from Pat O'Brien's didn't quite have enough alcohol in it to cancel out a bit of that sweetness. Just to confirm, we walked over to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop to get a Hurricane from there - for comparison's sake... We then headed back to the hotel and then tried to figure out what we'd do for the late afternoon and evening. I think while there, I managed to pass out for an hour; I think it was just from being so tired from all the walking I had done in the past few days.

Once it hit early evening though, we headed out to hunt for dinner because we wanted to avoid the hunger/lack-of-food fiasco/dilemna of the night before. We wandered around the French Quarter for a while and found that most places were already hopping with New Year's Eve revelers. Ending up on Decatur (as usual, by now), we stepped into Coop's, which had gotten really good reviews online. Coop's was primarily a bar, but it also served some good grub. We ordered the house specials, the seafood gumbo and supreme jambalaya. The gumbo was delicious, despite the fact that I normally do not like okra. It had tons of seafood in it, including crab claws, shrimp, and crawfish. The jambalaya, deliciously spicy, was filled with sausage, rabbit meat, shrimp, crab meat and crawfish. We also bumped into a local couple there at the bar, and we chatted for a while about the places to go and to eat in New Orleans and what things there are to do for NYE. They highly recommended a Creole-Italian restaurant called Adolfo's, which was on Frenchmen St, so after dinner, we headed over there to check out the place and see if it would be open New Year's Day.

While in the area, we picked up a couple of Abita ales and cups from a liquor store and drank those while wandering around, looking for the perfect masque. I ended up trying to many on, mostly for fun really, that my face was quite glittered by the end of the masque-hunt, when we decided to walk along Bourbon to see what was going on for NYE. Bourbon was very, very crowded - think Castro Halloween party but less costumes and much more drunk people. We wandered around, watching raucous drunken folk flashing their parts and vying for beads thrown by equally drunk people on the balconies. The countdown was rather sudden though, since we were on the street, and we only managed to hear the seconds before the new year in central time. After the slightly anticlimactic countdown, we ambled our way back to the hotel, where we just went to bed because we were both really exhausted.