Day 4: Mardi Gras

We woke up this morning to a large parade going on outside the hotel. As we walked along the street we were interrupted by another small parade of a bunch of old guys dressed in white and musicians giving out gold beads. Apparently they were called the “Half-fast Walking Club” whose name was toned down from the original “Half-Assed Walking Club” name.

Next we crossed the street to see the “Zulu” parade. Everyone on the floats was dressed up in African garb and was wearing facepaint and throwing coconuts, feathery spears, and beads into the crowd. Katie had been eyeing these plushie roses for a while, and managed to grab one luckily. The big colours for this parade were black and gold.

One of the funniest things was watching beads and bags of beads being thrown at people that weren’t paying attention. You hear, “Thwack!” and “Ohhhhh” as the crowd sympathizes with someone who just got a bag of beads in the head. Some of those prizes get thrown pretty hard!

After more beads, it was lunch time, and time to compare a gumbo with a jambalaya. They are actually similar it seems. They both had rice, sausage, chicken, etc, but the jambalaya seemed to be way more tomato-y while the gumbo had a more green pepper-ish tinge to it and was saltier. Both were great.

We wandered out in time to see “Rex” the king of Carnival just in time. This was the main parade for the week.

During the afternoon and evening we traveled more down Bourbon Street, which at this time was wall to wall people. It was hard to get anywhere. We spent a lot of time at Pat O’Brien’s in their heated courtyard drinking hurricanes and met some new people including a green power ranger and a giant chicken. We had more tasty jambalaya and drinks.

We watched some girl get taken off by the police for flashing a balcony. I guess if you are going to do that sort of thing, don’t do it 10 feet in front of a group of like 7 policemen, haha. We also saw a guy nail a girl in the face at point blank with a Frisbee. He was very sorry, but the policemen made him take a time out. As extra punishment, the policeman encouraged others to take his picture and put it on facebook.

At O’Brien’s later, the green power ranger offered to let Stew try it on, but Stew’s glasses fell off and we searched for about 10 minutes for them. They were a bit scratched and stomped on by the time we found them, but still wearable. Poor Stew! The power ranger guy was really sorry.

It turns out Katie is a really good crowd navigator. She could push through any crowd and was moving at least twice the speed everyone else trying to navigate the crowd was moving at.

At midnight, everyone was ushered off Bourbon Street by the police. (this happens every year apparently). The police were in formation a few minutes earlier and then when the clock struck midnight they started marching and shouted that Mardi Gras was over. The streets emptied immediately. Crazy!

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!

Day 2: Valentines, Sunday

We woke up at 9 today and went to our special executive floor breakfast. Yum! They had tasty breakfast burritos for us and lots of fruit and pastries. Now it was time for us to check out those parades. As we read a pamphlet, we quickly learned that there were a tonne of parades in the next few days, each with a different sort of theme and flavour.

We wandered up St. Charles St. for a while and found a tasty “shrimp on a stick” for lunch at a carnival food booth.We settled next to a fire hydrant and got to see the “Krewe of Mid City” parade. As floats became visible, you could see all kinds of things flying out over the sides of the floats, like beads, cups, and other pretty random swag. Everyone was jumping up and down and cheering a lot, hoping to catch some of the beads and other neat stuff. At first we didn’t have a lot of beads, but quickly we caught more and more until by the end of the parade, we were totally covered with them. We also caught some neat cups and crazy masks. There were a lot of music, dancers, and marching bands in this parade.

After the parade, it was time to enjoy snacks and drinks at the executive lounge in the hotel. They had lots of hors d’oeuvres for us to eat.

Now it was time to check out Bourbon Street. This street was absolutely crazy! People were everywhere having a good time. The thing to watch out for was people dropping beads on your head from the balconies above. People were trying to mooch beads off of the people on the balconies. Some guys were hilarious and using fishing rods to fish for people, and baiting them with beads.

All around, there were bars and pubs. They even had takeout drinks! You were allowed to take your drinks onto the street as long as they were not in glass containers. We went to a neat bar called “Pat O’Brien’s” where we tried a crazy drink called the “Hurricane”. It was very red, and strong, but also very tasty and refreshing.

Now it was dinnertime, so we headed into a restaurant on Bourbon Street, where we both tried a different form of Jambalaya. We tried the regular rice Jambalaya and also Jambalaya pasta. Mmmm! So good! Next time we make it, we need to make ours more saucy. The Jambalaya was a spicy tomato based dish with sausage, chicken, peppers and onions.

It was time to call it a night, so we retreated to our hotel.

Day 1 Saturday

Hello everyone and welcome to Stewart and Katie’s New Orleans 2010 blog.

Today we packed up and set off at about noon to drive to Burlington, Vermont where we would be catching a plane for New Orleans via Washington. It was interesting seeing the different types of land as we passed the St. Lawrence. Quebec was looking quite a bit like southern Ontario. As we crossed the border, we made the transition from old run-down buildings, roads, and houses (Quebec) to super nice looking buildings, and much better roads (Vermont). Also the scenery changed to be nice rolling hills and lots of evergreens.

When we hit Burlington, we grabbed a bite to eat at what looked like a local diner, called “Al's French Frys” or something like that. They were speedy and had extremely tasty fries and chilidogs.

After that we parked the car and started the unnecessarily long waiting process that is needed for air travel. We had elected to get there fairly early because we weren't sure how long the border crossing would take and we ended up waiting about 5 hours. Through security, Katie was searched due to the ridiculous amount of coins in her purse. Apparently there were so many, that they figured she could hide a gun or toenail clipper or something like that in there. After flying through Washington Dulles, we headed on a new plane to New Orleans.

When we landed the flight attendant welcomed us to the “who dat nation” having something to do with the Saints winning the Superbowl. We got there about 1 am, and waited and waited for our suitcase, but they never loaded it on the carousel. There had to be at least 15 people waiting in the lost luggage line with us, and there was only one guy to deal with each person, one at a time, in about 15 minute increments. We kept joking about the agents “secret stash” of luggage that he had in the room behind him. After waiting about an hour with grumpy people, we went to see the guy, and voila! He somehow had our bag with his super secret luggage stash. We were lucky, and had no clue why it was there.

Finally, we got out of that airport, and asked the taxi driver some questions along the way. He explained to us that “who dat” is part of the Saint’s cheer “Who dat say we gonna beat those Saints. Who dat! Who dat!” and that everyone is still celebrating after the Superbowl.

We rolled downtown to the Astor Crowne Plaza, on the corner of Canal and Bourbon St. Navigating the streets was tough though because Canal St. was a major parade route, and they had just finished a parade that night. We waded through piles of beads and the crazy leftover people, made it to the hotel and conked out in our cool skylight suite.

Celebration Dinner.

Last night we celebrated the completion of our project. I'll be here for another week to ensure that everything cleans up nicely.

We went to an interesting place called Andres Carnederes (http://www.andrescarnederes.com). It is a Colombian steakhouse and was a significant amount of fun. We started off eating a ton of appetizers and beer.

This place had 5 floors, with live jazz and people in festive costumes would come around and throw confetti on your tables and play saxophone accompanied by cymbals. It was a fun place.

In North America there seem to be a large number of girls who don't like beer. South America is no exception, but they have a trick. If you add 3 parts beer to 1 part club soda, then the bitterness is removed from the beer and it becomes a girly drink. I tried it and it isn't too bad.

I had a strip-loin steak and it was a little charred on the outside as all meat seems to be in Colombia. After many many beers and glasses of wine, it was midnight and we had just about had enough. Our project manager paid for the night and then it was time for bed.

Plaza de Bolivar

I went for a walk today down Caprerra 7 and found Plaza de Bolivar. It is a massive plaza with a ton of pigeons, Bogota Cathedral, the national parliament building, city hall, and the supreme court. It was pretty cool. Here are some photos.
This one is the mayor's houseThis is the parliament building.

Here is the Catherdal.This one is the Supreme court building. Cool eh?

Sorry this post wasn't that exciting, I'll find something better for the next one.

The wallet

So far, we've been quite lucky in Colombia. I was under the impression that this was a dangerous place run by drug cartels and you wouldn't be able to walk around at night. However, in the 4 weeks that I've been here, I haven't had a moment when I didn't feel safe. People here are really friendly.

However, (there is always a however) one of the guys finally met up with fate. As he was getting out of the taxi on his way home from the bar on Saturday night, he noticed that his wallet was missing from his front pocket and that the pocket was partially turned inside out. It had been stolen!

They called the police and the taxi driver went back to that bar. The taxi driver pointed to the police, a group of ruffians who had been standing outside of the bar all night. The police patted them down and guess what they found? The wallet! The taxi driver, returned the wallet to the hotel and it was recovered. We figured that it was a 1:1,000,000 chance that the wallet was going to be recovered and it looks like we beat the odds!

Anyways, I am going to continue carrying only one credit card and an expired driver's license as long as I am here just in case the same thing happens to me.