New Orleans

So I arrived in New Orleans a couple days ago by bus. 10 hours on a bus kind of takes it out of you, I think now that I've checked riding on a greyhound off my list I'll never do that again. Though it was kind of a nice way to see the state I was passing through. At least most of the way here was spent sitting on my own.

My hosts, Julie and Larry are really sweet. Yesterday Julie and I went walking up Magazine Street to do a bit of shopping and to have lunch. Afterward she drove me around to get me oriented so I could work out where to catch buses and street cars. It's a bit hard since most of the streets curve around to follow the river, I think I'll be ok though, just have to remember the main streets. She also told me a lot of history to the city itself and the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Luckily their house missed the flooding, but there were a lot of houses and buildings that remained underwater for at least 6 weeks, there's still signs of water damage on some houses even 3 years later. Apparently about 2,000 100year old oak trees were uprooted during the storm too =(
We passed through Canal Street which is known as the Neutral Ground as it separated the French Quarter from the Americans/Irish etc way back when. We also drove around the French Quarter a bit (we're going there for a bit of bar hopping etc on Saturday so I'll get a bit of a taste of the night life). She was telling me that it's mostly set up with stores below and residential above as it was in the old days. Some of the residential places have Spanish courtyards because when the original French Quarter burnt down, the Spanish were in power at the time, so they rebuilt it with Spanish influence too.
We also drove around to look at the old houses. The one I'm staying in at the moment is at least 100 years old, it's really long, apparently called a shotgun house. The houses were built like this because back in the old days (I don't like that term really but I don't know dates so.. =p) people were taxed on how much house was facing the street. Most of the houses around here are amazing. We drove past a few houses that Anne Rice wrote about in her novels too and one that she lived in.

Today I went for a walk around Lafayette Cemetery. This was mentioned in one of Anne Rice's books too, I think Julie said it was Interview with a Vampire? I can never remember. This is one of many cemeteries with above ground tombs. I'm told that people are buried above ground here due to the water table being so unbalanced. If they were buried below ground, eventually the caskets would pop right back up out of the ground. Many of the tombs are family ones, today I saw a few with about 9 people etched onto it! Apparently the older ones were amazing, families having statues made of the deceased, even the poorer families would scrape together the money to do so. They even have society tombs, I saw one that hosted firefighters. These were usually to host for people who didn't have family around or who hadn't a tomb to rest in. I also noticed along the walls of Lafayette there were single memorials too, so I guess if you didn't have a family tomb you could buy a slot in the wall?

After that I caught a street car up to Canal Street and down to the river front. Walked around there for a little while then went into the Aquarium (mostly to avoid the incoming storm). It was pretty cool! I've decided that I enjoy taking photos of the facial expressions of fish cause they're way awesome. Especially Stingray, they always look happy. Too bad my camera battery died halfway through and I missed out on a lot of cool shots, like seahorses and giant white aligators! The exibits were cool, it was laid out as different water habitats. Carribean, Amazon, Mississpi, then had extra bits with Penguins and Otters and Seahorses and Frogs and Jellyfish. The seahorses were sneaky, they had lots of different types. A couple of them took me a while to find due to them being so well camoflaged. One was long and had things on them that looked like leaves so it blended into the plants really well! I had to cheat and look at the display picture to see what I was looking for =(

Didn't do much after the Aquarium. Was still a bit wet so started making my way back to the house and got stopped by these 3 guys who were hanging out on the corner with the cemetery on it. They were like
"excuse me, we were wondering if you could help us out with something"
(/prepare for death scene)
"so we're from (such and such) college and we need to shoot a short film and we were wondering if you could act in this shot for us"
(...uhh)
"see this guy is gonna be passed out drunk over there and all we want you to do it maybe kick him a bit and mug him and then walk off"
(I don't think I look like the mugging type..)
"exactly!"
(Sigh, ok I guess we can give it a go)

So grats to me. I'm now in some random college short film mugging some dude and walking off with his camera and about $10 cash.
wtf.

Ok that's all for today, am being taken out to dinner somewhere famous and exciting and good, and I don't remember what it's called.

xxo

So I'm really bad at this (Round 3).

Ok so this might seem like round 1, but I assure you it's not. After losing 2 posts on the Worldnomad.com travel log thing I decided to try, I have decided to leave worldnomad (WN) to looking after my travel insurance in fear that a third round with them would result in my claiming on the destruction of my laptop.

SO IT MIGHT LOOK LIKE I'M BAD WITH KEEPING PEOPLE UP TO DATE ON THINGS WHEN REALLY I am... but it's not as bad as you think.

So it's been just over 2 weeks away and I feel kinda awful I haven't told any fascinating tales of fascinating things. And although I haven't been doing toooo much of anything exciting enough to tell you about I'll try my best. Throughout the weeks I've been writing notes here and there on Notepad (seeing as WN decided it didn't like drafts and would prefer to lose the whole thing) so lets see what we have.

So what's first? I suppose any of this airport/flying stuff is kind of hit or miss. I found it interesting because it was the first experience (of many I assume) I was to have of this whole flying business. A few highlights I guess! Aside from not sleeping any of the 11 hours of the first flight (how, I have no idea) I found the last few hours amazing to see. While it was still dark, the stars seemed at eye level. I even saw a star fall and burn at it's brightest right before it disintegrated into nothing. Flying into the sun on the horizon was amazing! Especially as below us the pacific ocean was covered in clouds as well. It was almost like I'd imagine flying over Antarctica would be, it was so textured, almost like icebergs and mountains of clouds.The only other neat thing to mention out of my adventures surrounding planes and airports was landing in Dallas Airport. That place is huge! So big it has it's own train system running outside to transport people to all the different terminals. Was completely unmanned too so that was bonus. Everything else was your usual customs lines, airport stuff. Didn't lose anything so yay!

It's been really hot here lately, though last night we had a lightning storm (Actually had another since, was quite impressive). Earlier last week Joey took me to the botanical gardens and I was practically sweating buckets. The gardens were nice, not so many flowers out (most looked like they were dying of thirst) but it had foresty walkways, water features and a giant Koi pond! Well, it was more of a lake with bridges over it.. it was mad, there were so many koi, huge ones too, they went crazy when we started feeding them. KOI BATTLE! Also, with all the squirrels and chipmunks around, I got to make use of the giant lens on my camera! National Geographic imo.(Pics below)

Haven't done much else. Went to The Pink Palace Museum, is a museum with an imax and planetarium attached, though when we got there both extras were closed. Mainly due to us getting lost downtown and driving around in circles for about an hour, which was fun... *cough* heh. Got to see some Ghetto and a bit of the city too at least. The architecture is different out here. Not many tall buildings, if at all. Most of the buildings look like nice big brick houses. Even the apartment I'm staying at, on the outside it looks like a nice 2 story house (amongst more of the same houses), but it separates into 3 apartments I think. The mall is a big outside area with similar buildings, the bigger ones reaching no higher than 2 levels.

But back to the museum! It was fun, had all the usual dinosaurs and fossils and lots of local history as well as all the old tools dentists used etc (ouch!) Even had a display of soldiers amputating a foot that had gangrene with what looked like kitchen knife (not even serrated!) and no drugs? EEP.

Was a neat mini circus, hand crafted by this dude, it was amazing. I think the display said it was about 6,000 hours of work put into it, which I think roughly translates to 3 years full time? Crazy.

So aside from the above, I've pretty much just been hanging out waiting for Bonnaroo (which, unfortunately, since Joey had to work I missed a bit of, but from what I did get it was good! There were sooo many people, the camp site was bigger than the stage areas I think, or at least it seemed to be, maneuvering around the tents was difficult).

It's kinda like being at home almost, except apparently asking if there's an electric kettle in the house is a foreign thing and results in: "wtf would we need an appliance to specifically boil water?" Sigh. So the last few times I felt like hot tea (apparently that's foreign too since they have "sweet tea" which is pretty much just iced tea with sugar) I've had to boil water in a pot on the stove for it... what? Sigh.

Oh, there's this fast food place called Sonic over here, and I can't believe I'm going to talk about it, but it's kinda fun (also, I'm glad there's a Wendy's here, whew.). So anyway, this place is kinda neat, it's like in old American films where you drive up and park next to an ordering box, and people deliver your order to you on roller skates. It's the usual fast food type things, but they're well known for their drink selection. They have all the usual soft drinks/sodas on offer, but you can add any kind of flavours you want from a selection of like, 20 (they also have fruit slushys etc). The other night I had a coconut, pineapple sprite, and it was great! But yeah, you pretty much order and eat from your car. Apparently it's quite popular in the summer since it can get pretty hot out here and many don't like leaving the comfort of their air-conditioned cars... Lazy Americans... heh.

But yes.

Has not been overly exciting, but it's been cool just hanging out a bit. Am in the middle of organising myself for New Orleans so I should hopefully be there in the next little while, probably by the beginning of next week.

I'm really sorry about being super terrible at this whole thing, but I promise I'll get better at it!

Hope everything's going well at home,

Loves and Hearts!

Edit: So I have to work on this photo thing too, it hasn't turned out very well, sorry that it looks so awkward!