New Orleans Adventure: Day 3, Paranormal Mondays...

Ahhhh, another decadent morning. My mom had signed us up for the New Orleans School of Cooking where we learned how to cook red beans & rice, corn bread, and pecan pie from a pretty famous chef referred to as Big Kevin (Kevin Belton, the "human taxidermist"). I was skeptic but I learned a lot of very helpful recipes and tips, as well as was extremely entertained by Kevin and his stories. It was part cooking school part comedy! He spoke with me after the class was over and gave me some very encouraging words about moving to New Orleans and to contact him if I felt compelled to. What a nice man!

It drizzled all day today, which kept the heat at bay. I had nothing else planned so I decided to go somewhere I always wanted to visit, the Ursuline Convent. Not only has the convent been a huge presence in New Orleans history, but it's a scene of one of my dad's stories of his first ghostly encounters. It was ages ago when he was staying at the hotel across the street and one night couldn't sleep so decided to go out on the balcony in the early morning. While there he saw the shutters on the top floor completely open and the lights on. Curious, he visited the convent the next day and asked if there was a cleaning crew and that they must have been working very very early. He was informed the shutters have not been opened for years and are nailed shut! The entire upstairs area is off limits. Spooky? He's been a benefactor to the convent since in hopes to one day get a personal tour of the top level.
It only cost me $3 to take a tour of the main floor. It was extremely peaceful there. I had the pleasure of hearing a boys choir as I walked through the old rooms of the convent, learning its history.
(Photo Above-Left: Looking into a spooky mirror at the Ursuline Convent. Above-Right: the courtyard of the Convent)

Mom and I decided to take the St. Charles streetcar out to the Columns Hotel for happy hour. Having not been on a streetcar in years, I was thrilled! With a $1.25 flat fare and a wonderful cool breeze coming in the open windows, we made our way to the Garden District and were dropped off right outside the hotel.


The Columns Hotel lounge gives me goose bumps... it looks of something straight out of the early 1900s with dark mahogany furniture, antique chandeliers, crimson velvet wall paper, and the very faint smell of cigar / perfume / booze that must have soaked into the floors and upholstery over hundreds of years. As a child this was the hotel we stayed at often... I have so many memories there. In fact, I would credit my curiosity of architecture and design to my time spent here. It was also where dad, Hayley, and I had many paranormal encounters staying on the top floor which was haunted. The place is so actively haunted that one of the employees there keeps a log of strange and unusual events guests complain about or tell the staff about. She read some to my dad and me one afternoon. I was a believer!
Mom got a little decadent that evening, ordering crab cakes, mushroom stuffed crabs, and drinks. I decided I wanted to walk through the Garden District, like Michael from Anne Rice's The Witching Hour loved to do. I walked for about an hour, constantly amazed by the beautiful architecture and yearning as I always did to lose myself in one of these Victorian mansions.... or at least be able to see inside. There was a storm on the horizon and the sky was a dark bluish grey and so I headed back to the Columns Hotel, where I discovered my mom had had five drinks since I was gone. We played cards in the parlor briefly and finally left for the streetcar.

(Views from the Garden District)

We decided to head to the French Quarter and have a nice little last-night in Pirate's Alley Absinthe House, where I imbibed a few absinthes. Mom decided to go back to the hotel early, and that's when I went on a straaaaange little adventure.

Being quite inebriated on Absinthe, I walked the Quarter and ran into this quaint little bar with some amazing live music and some serious swing dancers. I sat at the back and met a nice couple from California who I danced with briefly (been a while since I did the ol' Charleston). At one point I needed to use the little lady's room so I went to what I thought was the restrooms, these two huge doors at the back of the bar.
This is where it got weird. Really... weird. I entered into what seemed like a very dark but vast area with one light in the very back of the place. I heard a man in a very angry and theatrical voice yell to me "Who goes there!?! What are you doing back here?" I replied that I was looking for the bathroom. "You are not allowed back here! Leave now!!" It scared me quite a bit, this man who was barely illuminated in the far area of the bar. I told the couple I met about this and they joined me to investigate. We discovered there was a gigantic theater in the back and the lights were on now, very dimly lit. Not a soul in there. I discovered later that One Eyed Jacks (the bar) used to be Maxwell's Jazz Cabaret, a speak-easy back in the 1920s. The front area where we were used to be a vet clinic while in the back was a huge bar / theater. From researching I learned there supposedly are a couple of very distinct entities that haunt the place, one including a gangster who used to be prominent and do business in, guess where, the back cabaret area. OooooooOOOOOOooooOOOOoooo. Perhaps it was the absinthe hallucinations, perhaps it was someone cleaning and not wanting to be disturbed, or perhaps I encounter a gangster ghost....
Talk about a paranormal day.

The next morning we had to do one touristic thing before we headed to the airport - Cafe Du Monde. Sitting outside scarfing down our beignets and listening to a guitarist play some sweet Beatles tunes, we talked about how wonderfully the French Quarter is doing and how it seemed to be getting better every day. I look forward to another visit to the city soon!

Videos:
I Interview Mom at the Columns Hotel


Mom Surprises me with an interviews at the Columns Hotel


Happy Hour is Over... but Mom is on Fire


Swing Dancers at One Eyed Jacks

Dancers & Music at One Eyed Jacks

New Orleans Adventure: Day 2, Decadent Sundays...

I woke up with an eager tummy. Weeks ago I had made reservations for us at Commander's Palace so we hailed a taxi to the Garden District around 1pm. We got there a bit too early so we decided to wander the little garden outside, mom with a Bloody Mary in hand and me with my camera. We were able to get into my favorite room, the Garden Room, that overlooks the garden and one gets a sense of being in a treehouse. The food was nothing less than amazing and perfect, as it always was. We came on a day they had a live swing band and when I asked them to play some Django Reinhart they were ecstatic to get to play something besides the commonly requested songs.


Play me some Django, please?

Brunch for me consisted of a mimosa, Commanders Palace baby spinach salad, pecan crusted gulf fish and some pecan pie to go (beautifully wrapped up like a swan!). Mom had a shrimp remoulade, flounder, and a peaches desert along with a generous amount of booze. Commanders Palace treated us well, as they always do.

View from the waiting area in Commander's Palace.


Feeling way too full, we headed back to the French Quarter to walk some of it off when we were hit hard by a rain storm, causing us to take shelter in a souvenir shop for quite some time. I absolutely love it when it rains here, the streets shine like rugged hems and the sounds of rain drops echo through the narrow streets. I visited the St Louis Cathedral and bought a votive candle to make a prayer for a certain person, popped in the Absinthe Museum, and spent the rest of the afternoon walking in the residential area of the French Quarter. I have an affinity to shot-gun style houses and vivid colors... and the French Quarter was FULL of such architecture.

I met up with mom that evening and we took a few peaceful spins around the Carousel Bar again. Motown faintly played as we sat watching the very scarce crowd. For a change of scene we went to the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon because I was curious to compare it to the Pirate Alley's. Being that it was on Bourbon, it was loud and expensive. The bartender poured a stiff absinthe though, and I thought for a second I was hallucinating when I saw a horse come into the bar. It was a police officer on horseback. We learned "Cherry", the horse, loved the bar olives (like my mom, haha). I barely got a picture before she rared back out.


I ended my Sunday by heading to the Pirate Alley Absinthe House where I met a young couple from Savannah interested in starting up a paranormal investigation company in New Orleans and we talked a bit about our good / bad experiences with the tours there currently. I decided to call it a night when some crazy guy came in and started ranting about punk music. It had been a long day and I had a long trek back.

New Orleans Adventure: Day 1, Easy in the Big Easy...

Perhaps out of guilt from the night before, mom and I woke up and headed to the gym (and in much agony) before heading back to the Quarter to eat at pretty much the first decent-looking restaurant in town, Pierre Maspero's for crab cakes and barbeque shrimp. Num nums!

We then headed to the French Market, browsing the beautiful art near Jackson Square. One artist was selling skeleton art, my first purchase of the day. The last several times I visited New Orleans I was very upset by the death of the French Market, but today I was thrilled to see a produce section up and running - small, but it was there! Also the Market had expanded with vendors to the entire designated area, something I hadn't seen since Hurricane Katrina. Mom and I bought a dress and a skirt from one of my favorite vendors, an old black man who chain smokes and has the most beautiful selection of sun dresses. We had never talked but today he talked to my mother and me for quite some time. As if he were a psychic, he started telling me that with my beautiful face, good heart, and stubborn personality, I should go into public health. He then proceeded into boasting about his knowledge of history until a customer thankfully pulled him away and we escaped. So strange...

Art outside Jackson Square


We then went to my mother's favorite art gallery in a building near the end of the Market while I explored another street in a heated haze, lured into any shop that had a good air conditioning. On Ursuline near the furthest end of the Quarter, we wondered past the Beauregard Keys House (which I've always been strangely attracted to), and to Royal where we treaded all the way up to the other side, stopping at a cute little place called Royal Blend Coffee House for some coffee and a marbled chocolate loaf. The place had a nice little patio and, best of all, an uncrowded and well air-conditioned room.

Mom consuming some coffee at the Royal Coffee Shop

The evening was relaxing. Mom decided to head to the casino and I for a solo walk through the French Quarter. It's amazing the group of characters you'll see on any given night. I love the street performers. There are those who are very charming and great entertainers despite the amount of talent they really have. There are those who are totally in their own world with only a hat out for money as recognition of the people walking by. There are always occasions going on in the city... such as a church group, a wedding, the obvious Bachelor Party group with beer and 'grenades' in hand by noon. There are the employees who slip right out the front door, who can finally ignore the tourists and shout to their friends across the way about plans later that evening. There are the slowly dwindling goth scene and a slowly rising bohemian scene with people dressed in century-attire 'costumes', drawing the attention of the passerby.
Then there is the tourist... the tourist who can taint the backdrop of the beautiful city with fanny-packs and visors. The tourist who keeps the city ALIVE with business and curiosity. I am a tourist, though not so obvious.

The evening was very relaxing. We met up with my cousin at Pat O'Briens and tried fried Alligator and secretly her and her friend some of our Hurricane. Melody decided to have her fortune read next door at Marie Laveau's Voodoo Shop. She told us later that evening the tarot card reader was spot. on. Apparently Melody should have a future in the paranormal. ;-)

New Orleans Adventure: Night 1, the old haunts...

We arrived in New Orleans on a Friday night and little did we know we were in the bee-hive of a large congregation of youth volunteers. Driving up Canal Street we watched as thousands of tweens poured out of the Super Dome, anxiety rising due to the fact that our taxi driver must weave through them to get to our destination. We were later informed there were around 37,000 Lutheran kids there for the weekend to help build up the city (and to our surprise my cousin was there as well!).
We dropped off the bags and decided to trek to the French Quarter. Being that we were on the downtown edge of Canal Street, it was quite the walk and we were going to have to get used to it.

Nothing can express the delight I got on the way into the Quarter that night. While passing the Monteleone Hotel, I saw what resembled carousel lights. A former boss of mine told me to visit the 'Carousel Bar' the past several times I went there and I finally found it! Mom and I went in and sat at carousel, letting it circle about one and a half times and listening to a lonely lounge singer at the back. Beside me was a young man reading a Faulkner book who I talked briefly to. He was so convincing about the read that I decided to pursue Light In August as one of the 'hunts' I had during this trip. I always seem to have hunts in New Orleans (remembering a romantic getaway in which we were dying to see the movie Interview With the Vampire in which my beaux explored the entire French Quarter and finally found a copy for us to watch).

The Carousel Bar

We proceeded to the Boondock Saints Bar (named after the fact that it's owned by the city police and that they play the movie Boondock Saints on replay on one of the televisions), one of my favorite bars due to the lack of crowds and the nice wait staff then went to the Pirates Alley Absinthe House, a tacky-named place that attracts the eclectic locals and savvy travelers alike. I had my bohemian-style absinthe with a lit sugar cube and mom had a few mimosas.
While we were on a roll we might as well visit every damned bar in the French Quarter, because mom felt it a good idea to stay out a bit longer. We went to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop where just nights before I had a dream where I was behind the little piano table singing a slow version of Love Is A Battlefield by Pat Benetar. Strangely enough that night a lady was playing piano at the bar and I kindly requested the song, sparing her the details about the dream. She played another song but it was by Pat Benetar!

Me enjoying an Absinthe at the Pirate's Alley Absinthe Bar

Now this first night was not intended to be the 'crazy' night but some how we continued to stay out. I had acquired a left-behind toy gator at the bar and talked with a man holding a large cross on Bourbon Street. I apparently danced an entire block with another young man from Houma before he had to return to his late night shift at the A&P.
Greetings New Orleans, it's great to be back!

Videos:
Drunken Conversations on the Carousel