Feels like Home to me

I have no idea how to describe New Orleans. We recided in the French quarter. Its filled with tourist. On Bourbon street these tourists are drunk and hysteric and the whole thing feels like an Ibiza-like money trap. But as soon as you're off Bourbon Street, it dawns on you, that you have found the most wonderful place. Its all the little corners and nooks. And all the charm, insanity and soul.

After getting our usual hotel reservation chaos figured out and dumping our bags, we ventured into the French Quarter... after the horrifying walk down Bourbon Street we came into a more relaxed part of the Quarter and started to get the feel of the place... and then we found Coops. Coops is a bar with a very nice kitchen and a steady crowd of local customers. We soon felt quite at home.

New Orleans seems to be the home of a constant simmering party. And people there are laid back and consume a lot of alcohol... after a while we started to refer to the natives as Creoholics. One of these, a young man named Dave, greeted us the first night we walked into Coops with a loud shout of: "Who are you??!! What are you doing in my bar???!! Come over here!!!" He turned out to be one of the excellent cooks of the place and a sweet and brilliant guy. The next night I went to a local concert with him and I must say I grew quite attached to Dave during our stay in the City of Sin.

New Orleans seemed to me; relaxed, a little run down, beautiful and insane. I somehow felt very right there. It's the one place we've been so far, that made me think: "I could belong here." When I needed to relax in the daytime, I went to the Pirate Bar to drink icetea and read in my book. Pirate Bar lies in Pirate Alley which runs along the oldest catholic church in the states. The bar is decorated with sculls and little ships and had banana palms outside the open doors.

Now New Orleans was a great pirate city in the old days and one of the great city heroes is a pirate called Lafayette... Now having a spectacular outlaw as a city mascot somehow fits right in with the anarchist mood of the place. And when slowing down and relaxing for a bit in the hangover-hours, you look around and see the beads from mardigras hanging here and there in empty and quiet alleys.

We actually didn't see a lot of the city, since we ended up drinking at Coops most of the time. The second night where I went to the concert with Dave, Ivan hit the town with a mallet. He apparently partied his big heart out and turned up at the hotel at noon the next day, wearing mardigras beads draped over his hoodie and a rather blurry but happy look. It seems, if you're drunk enough, and know the right spots, Bourbon street can be a fun place anyway. I hope he'll write a little piece about that!

Now the day leading up to this night had a few surprises... People, both men and women, started pouring through the street in red dresses carrying beverages and running.



It turned out that it was an anual event... drinkers with a running problem. The trick is to put a red dress on and run from bar to bar and get hammered... no more reason for it than that. So during the evening, there was a steady flow of red dressed happy people pouring into Coops while we sat there getting happily drunk. Which we did indeed.

But we did get to see a little more than the bar... we went to the garden district! Very lovely old houses and trees and a very nice diner! Strolling around this neighboorhood, just made us try to think of possible career opportunities in New Orleans even harder.

We were completely charmed by the city and therefore decided to spend one more day than planned. But on our precious last day, Ivan got sick and had to lay around the hotel all day. Dave agreed to entertain me, while Ivan recovered, so he brought me to a park in the Garden district. It was lovely, and it had the greatest oldest oak I have ever seen.


I loved New Orleans and I find it very hard to fully explain why. Its the old man playing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" on a harmonica on a streetcorner at night. And another old guy sitting, painting a picture under a highway bridge on the way out of town. And the little jazz band playing an empty club sunday night, giving it all they had even though Ivan and I were the only people in the bar. The morning we had to leave I felt completely crappy and depressed... it was a sad thing to leave New Orleans behind and leaving behind Dave was probably a large part of my emotional hangover as well.