The Big Easy

Huey Lewis and the News
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New Orleans, The Big Easy, The Crescent City, so absolutely bloody stunning they had to name it three times. Just the funkiest most vibrant place we've seen.  We've managed to blag a 4 star hotel right on Bourbon street in the French quarter for $54 (Thank god for hotwire.Com)  The french quarter is really magnificent, wonderful colonial french/spanish architecture,wraught iron balconies dripping ivies and trailing flowers, the sticky heat and ever present music which, like Austin is just everywhere.

Bourbon Street
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Bourbon Street can be a handful these days it seems.  We have girly bars, rock bars, men prettier than women bars,jazz bars, funk bars, soul bars, cacophonous, brash, bright and flashy you just have to love it.

We trek through the quarter past Napoleons, a house prepared for the Boney to live in after the locals sprung him from Elba, we bumped him off with poison wallpaper first!Now it's a restaurant and we scoff Shrimp and muffeletta a sandwich of chopped olives Italian cold meats and cheeses...........fantastic!

Oh yeah!!
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Down to the Cafe Du Mond for Beignets (french do nuts) and frozen coffee with live jazz then onto the mississippi and Jackson square, belly up to the bar at the brewery bar for bourbon and oysters $6 a dozen!! (Look, we didn't eat it all in one day, I've "compressed" to scan better {That's his story and he's sticking to it})

A trip round the city takes in the famous cemetaries and the levee to see where the break occured that flooded the city.  It looks so small to have caused such damage, you cans still see the water marks on buildings, along with the armies marks detailing casualties, search dates, deaths etc  It's chilling to see it all and appaling to see some rebuilding homes at ground level instead of lifted onm high pads of concrete.

Night out
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We have a huge thunder storm here which nearly washes out a free Huey Lewis and the News show which is really very good.  The bar bands are spectacularly good at what they do and we see an old blues singer deliver a song about Katrina which lifts every hair on every neck and leaves no one sitting and hardly a dry eye in the house.  In a tiny bar a band of piano guitar drums and trombone busk requests, in another a black guy does a soul review with a faultless band, and it's all free folks!at a mexican place we have mariachi, in a cuban there's the whole buena vista thing going on......what's not to love?

Cheers!!
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New Orleans has very relaxed liscencing and it's legal to drink in the street, "Big Ass beers are sold in every measure up to 1/2 a gallon!! so the wholoe of Bourbon street is one mile and a half long party at street level while at 1st and second floor balconies revellers shout encouragement and fling mardi gras pearl strings it's just great...really great.

Street cars are so cheap they may as well be cheap and we explore the whole place.  One day standing in the stupifying heat we spot an old lady fall on the sidewalk, the Americans do that American thing and step over her, we do the British thing and miss the street car we've waited 4o minutes for in 105 degree heat and 78 percent humidity and go help.  We manhandle her into a pharmacy where the staff spring into apathy.  They even make us pay for the bandages!

The Bourbon house here sells around 50 types along with fresh oysters, I'd love to say we tried em all but there's so much to do!! Let me however reccomend Hancocks if you ever get the chance.

Out in the Graden district is where the real money lives, Katrina don't seem to have harmed 'em too much round these here parts! Beautiful beautiful homes though.  Brad and Anj have one, so does Nick Cage.  theres a beer and Po Boy (French stick sarnies) joint called Cooters here that sells more than 150 beers....even Skull splitter, our friend pams' favourite.

However long you have to stay in New Orleans I doubt it will ever be enough, get here if you possibly can, we promise you'll fall in love with the place.