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.

The Hike to Rainbow Falls!

The whole reason for putting up with Gatlinburg and the rather hostile and frightening Hill billies was to go trek around a little in the Great Smokey Mountains national park. And so we did. I had found a few trails in the guidebook, that were not to long and listed as: Easy. Our guidebook ranges hikes as either Easy, Moderate or Difficult. The people who wrote about the national parks sound like pretty sturdy types, who knows their wildlife! Ivan and I are not sturdy and generally not well suited for the Wild, so we decided to keep on the Easy or at most the Moderate routes. But, plans can go awry. Especially when I am responsible for navigation. Naturally, we took a wrong turn and got on the wrong track.


We had walked quite far before we realised, that we were not in fact on our way to Grotto falls, but had endeavoured on a Difficult Hike to the Rainbow Falls. We met a nice couple from Indiana, who provided us with this information. They almost walked into us, since we'd stopped very abruptly, staring transfixedtly at a giant Snake on the path in front of us.

We didn't know what kind of snake it was, and the only kinds described in the guidebook could either cause a horrific, slow and painful death or a horrific, slightly faster and painful death. So we didn't want to irritate the thing. With the support of our brave new Indiana friends we edged around it and got on our way.

After walking up the mountain for a few hours it also became clear that we had not brought enough water... at all! We had about one third of a little waterbottle left and one apple. As Ivan was loosing a lot more water than me, we ended up deciding that Ivan would walk back down to the Car and our Waterreserves, and I was to finish the trek up the mountain by myself. (I had gotten stubborn and willful and highly irresponsible at this point which tend to affect my judgement and good sense). So on I went.

I ate the apple and hiked along deciding to save the water for the return trip. It was a very long, very arduous hike up to the mountain. When I finally got to the waterfall I was really quite proud of myself. I met the Indiana couple again there, and had a nice chat.

After climbing up the waterfall I soaked my molested feat for a while and looked at yet another adorable squirrel that was hopping from stone to stone.


I drank a little of the water, dipped my headscarf in the cold waterfall and started what I intended to be the trek back down to Ivan, the Car and the abundance of Water. But here my faulty navigation instincts took over again. I crossed the bridge (which I should not have done)

and went in the completely wrong direction... further up the mountain. It took me about 20 minutes to realize something wasn't right. It dawned on me, that I had at no point gone past a creepy-looking cave on my way up, and that it somehow didn't fit that I was still moving uphill. So with a nasty feeling of impending doom and images of being found by rangers after 4 days and having been largely eaten by Bears, I started to back-track. Luckily I found my way back to the waterfall and proceded down. The sun was getting low in the sky and even though I was in pain and rather exhausted it was a very nice walk.

I hurried along, since I had the feeling that Ivan might be getting a little worried back at the parking lot. As he of course had excellent reason to be, since I should never really be allowed to venture into Nature by myself. When I finally got to the parking lot I found out, that he had indeed bravely started back up the mountain with water to rescue me. He had thought better of it though and gone back to the car. Now on my way down, I had been thinking a little about Bear. This was Bear territory after all, and I was all alone and probably highly edible. But I kept my courage up, singing a happy little hiking song, only faltering once when I encountered the Snake again.
When I arived at the parking lot, Ivan came towards me and stretched out a hand to signal that I had better stand perfectly still. After a moment he waved me the rest of the way down and explained that a large Bear had run around the parking lot just a moment before, been peppersprayed in the face by a mindless Hill billie and gone rampaging angrily into the forest in my general direction.
...*

Here I would like to insert a link to the Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet, who reports about recent Bear attacks in the Great Smokies:
http://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/samfund/article1043709.ece

Well even though I only barely avoided a savage Bear attack It was a great day! We figured out that we had walked at least 12 miles... thats a lot for city-siblings!

'God bless you'... oh really?

I am a nice guy. At least that my general intention in life.

However I have a recurring predicament when I travel to the US. Let me give an example:

A crew of teenagers from North Carolina have been spending the weekend in New Orleans helping to restore and revive the neighbourhoods devastated by the hurricane Katrina. I meet these generous young people at a restaurant, where a person utters the following, properly well meaning, words "Thank god you're here"

WHAT THE HELL! These kids spend a weekend in a city far away from home helping complete strangers out of the humanity of their hearts, and this moron attributes their labour and self-sacrifice to some random deity.

I can't think of a greater insult to these kids, why the hell wouldn't he thank them directly?

Sure I see the transference of gratitude thru a third, fictitious, party. But this is no different from going "ohh thank the squirrels for being here to help with this trolley", when getting help from at stranger at a metro station. It's utter nonsense!

The same thing get me annoyed when I help somebody in need and people go 'god bless you'. Seriously? What good is that gonna do me.. I detest the inference that I am superstitious and the arrogance in presuming that I partake in the monotheistic in-group mentality.

This is a divisive and arrogant practise, regardless of the well meant intentions. So when I am a nice guy, on my own accord, I'd like my actions to be the focus of gratitude, not some irrelevant mythological creature.