Day 3: Lundi Gras

Drip drip… Bang bang! Cracklecracklecrackle. It was raining on the skylight at 3 am. And it was noisy! It sounded like the whole building was wrenching itself apart. The worst part was the constant dripping… straight on top of the bed and us! We had noisy, leaky windows.

After a restless night, we woke up and had breakfast. Then we promptly changed rooms into a normal room.

It was now time to do a little daytime Bourbon Street exploring. People were out and about but not nearly as many as at night. We went through a bunch of different gift shops and saw a weird voodoo store. The voodoo place had a lot of superstitious things like lucky charms and voodoo dolls.

Lunch time! It was time to try a local sandwich variety called the “Po Boy” which must be short for poor boy. It is a long sandwich on a bun, with meat, tomatoes, lettuce, and pickles. Stewart tried his with alligator sausage, while Katie had catfish. Both were extremely tasty.

We got to watch bits of the Olympics in the afternoon, and got to see clips of Bilodeau winning the men’s moguls in Vancouver. Very exciting!

In the evening we bundled up to go see the “Proteus” parade. The theme seemed to be some sort of under the sea theme with lots of seahorses. Again came the floats with beads and toys flying out of them. The colours of this parade were red and silver. Stew managed to grab a stuffed animal seahorse with Proteus written on it. Very cute. We also caught some special beads with seahorses on them.

We tried some more interesting cuisine for dinner, including a bowl of gumbo, and a fried oyster Po Boy sandwich. Those fried oysters are rich!

After more wanderings in the French Quarter, we were left with a super grumpy Katie because of all of the crowds. Katie isn't a fan of massive crowds. People were everywhere and bumping into each other, beads were flying at your head, and combining that with the horrible sleep the previous night, Katie was getting irritable.

We then went to the Tropical Isle hut, were everyone was perked up. We drank these crazy tropical refreshing drinks that were called “Hand Grenades”, a drink which is marketed as the strongest drink in New Orleans. They were in tall plastic glasses with a diabolical looking smiley face on them, and garnished with a plastic grenade. They definitely sound more intimidating than they taste.

Bed time!