Transamerica 2007: Down Louisiana

It’s taken a day to get my head around New Orleans. Once you accept that when people on the street say “hello” it might just be a friendly hello, rather than a precursor to mugging, stress levels reduce.

We woke up early and walked down to the Mississippi River. It was cold and shrouded in thick fog so we wandered the French Quarter to get our bearings. The “tourist” bit of New Orleans is very compact and was largely undamaged by the hurricane, yet the effects of Katrina remain everywhere with lower prices and a vastly reduced workforce. We had a chat with a lady in the cathedral here who told us that the lack of damage to the French Quarter, and the dollars that it can bring in, at least gives the city a chance at recovery. Everyone’s very pleased that a corporate conference of 25,000 is taking place here at the moment.

After that we found our way to a jazz recital, which wasn’t too bad, and enjoyed a New Orleans lunch of jambalaya, gumbo, red beans and rice. We came back to the hotel via the New Orleans Voodoo Museum, whose attempts at portraying voodoo as a religion of profound spirituality are undermined by various shrunken heads, an albino python and a skeleton wearing sunglasses. Voodoo appeared when West African tribes mixed missionary Catholicism with their native religion, so captions next to statues say things like “Ogou, god of lightning and thunder, also known as St. John the Baptist”. The whole thing was extremely pleasing from a religious tat point of view.

It’s 4.45pm now, and things are starting to hot up for the evening. I’ve found two places that offer free wi-fi access. One’s a coffee shop, the other’s a cocktail bar. We’ll see which one we end up in...