Awesomer trip: NEW ORLEANS (part 1)

David & I are currently in New Orleans!  We've both been here before years ago, and are glad to be back!  David is in boring work training, so I will blog about the trip so far.  When we arrived on Thursday, a very cheerful iconic character welcomed us in his airport:

 Cheerful but scary...
And THEN David & I ate at this awesome restaurant called K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, which was really awesome:

Amazing garlic bread, shrimp po boy, slaw, sweet potato fries, and jambalaya lasagna.  Seriously, eat here.


And THEN we rode the St. Charles trolley car to the Garden District where all the fancy mansions are.  And also a cemetery, apparently
 

Through the gates, you'll see CRYPTS.  All the graves were above ground in these crazy family grave vault things with way too many names for the amount of space they take up.  The cemetery looks like a little town with crumbly paths destroyed by tree roots (David tripped and almost fell probably 4 times that day and I yelled at him a lot) and little grave houses really close to one another.  Some are really neat in that they have dates from the 1800s to 2000s and everyone in the family in between.

We also went to the Mid City area of New Orleans, which involved taking a trolley car from one of these awesome stations on Canal street:

I was enamored with the STARS.  I wish our bus stops looked like this in NY!  What did we do in Mid-City?  Make heart-shaped shadows of course!

No, actually we had really amazing gelato at Angelo Brocato's:

Seriously, very excellent stuff. And they had awesome black & white old-school family pictures on the walls.  From there, we went to City Park.  It was a Very Long Walk.  But not as long as the walk I'll tell you about in a little bit.  The art museum is in City Park.  Here are some other scenes from there:

Now having slept for about 4 hours the night before since we had a 6:50am flight, and having walked in probably 90+ degree weather for hours, we were TIRED.  So we rode back to the hotel & jumped into the refreshing but not even cold swimming pool for a couple hours where I splashed around like a drowning person looking like an idiot, which was very relaxing.

And THEN, David & I went on a Very Long Walk by accident.  VERY LONG.  At night.  In the dark.  Through creepy semi-deserted neighborhood.  We weren't lost.  It's just that we wanted to go see a show in this bar, and on the apparently zoomed out Google map, it looked really close to walk to.  So we walked and walked and walked.  And then David whips out his GPS and says something to the effect of "hmmm...this place is still 2 miles away."  And I'm like o_O because the streets are getting emptier and emptier, with more and more boarded up decrepit looking ones, and we already walked several miles during the day and it was too late to turn back and we had 40 minutes of walking left to do.  As you can see, we are full of WIN.  So we walked past rows of shotgun houses and some of this:

And some of this:

And some overgrown empty lots, angry-sounding dogs, railroad tracks, factory buildings, dilapidated houses with "Building unsafe, do not enter" spray painted onto them.

The silent Blair Witch Project version of our walk looked like this:

But you know what?  It was all worth it!  Because FINALLY, we made it to Vaughan's Lounge, where we listened to Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers play some really awesome stuff.

As a venue, Vaughan's was pretty chill...very random worn-in looking place packed with people and sporting this awesome sign:

 And Kermit & the band were awesome.  We went to Preservation Hall a different night, but honestly, I liked this band better because they were just jamming and having a great time and it was just a lot of fun to listen to them in an over-packed stuffy hot hole in the wall with a ton of other people who are also totally into the music.  Listen to their version of Ain't Misbehaving:

Anyways, we had a fantastic time listening to some great music.  And you know what?  Kermit even brought giant vats of yummy red beans & rice for everyone at the bar!

I tried to picture that happening in NY but couldn't somehow.  That was just so unbelievably unpretentious and cool.

In conclusion, we did a TON of stuff on day 1 in NOLA, including way more walking that we've done in a long time.  New Orleans is seriously one of my favorite places in the States.  I think I'll leave you all with a lovely picture of our feet at the end of the day: