Saint Louis Cemetery

Went down town for a tour of the famous Saint Louis Cemetery, Number One this morning – the oldest and most famous of New Orlean's Catholic cemeteries. There are apparently three Catholic cemeteries in town, and this one primarily has tombs from the 17-18thC but is still very much in use by many local families.

Depending on who is talking there are 'many thousands' or up to '1.2 million' people interred in this tiny cemetery that takes up about two city blocks. Each of the layered crypts holds as many or as few individuals as the family who owns it feels like adding in there. Apparently when another member of the family dies, the remaning family will remove the last coffin who was in there take the (now rather decomposed) remains and put them into a bag and replace them back in the crypt before putting the most recently deceased person's coffin back in. The only way of knowing how many are in each crypt is by looking back through old records held by the archdiocese. The crypts above are some of the oldest in the cemetery and they were three tombs high, however, New Orleans is shrinking and the ground level is rising (with floodwaters etc) so the lower crypts are no longer in use.

There are several well known an important people burried in this cemetery too, though the most famous is probably Marie Laveau, reknown voodoo priestess. Her tomb is a regular place for visitors and attracts all sorts of tributes – beads, lipsticks, bottles of rum and bourbon are not uncommon, but our guide informs us that as recently as two months ago, he looked down and found someone had left her two breast implants! Though god knows why!?! You can see all over her tomb people have been scrawling 'xxx's everywhere… and naturally we asked the meaning/origin of these 'xxx's. Apparently it has absolutely nothing to do with voodoo or local tradition or anything at all. No one knows the origin of these 'xxx's, but it seems people now come here and scratch or write their 'xxx's on the crypt while making a wish for something they desperately want. Which probabaly just increases the upkeep on the tomb and does very little to fulfill people's wishes.

 

Now, you lot know me – I love history! Unfortunately, our tour guide, Glen, was very informative but listening to him was like listening to paint dry… so monotonous, so dry, so I found myself tuning out and just taking some photos of the place.

A strange little chocolate tribute left on another heavily 'xxx' tomb that apparently has no voodoo connections or history but which local visitors have decided to turn into a 'voodoo' plae of tribute.

This enourmous mauseleum was built c.1825-1826, and the first lucky entrant just happened to be the designer (the guide didn't give us his name). It was designed for a large segment of the local Italian community and many hundreds of people were interred here, though they can't say for sure how many. Unfortuantely, no descendants of the people burried here or the local Italian community are prepared to undertake restoration or upkeep costs associated with this tomb and so it is slowly rotting away… rather quickly too as the salty conditions and heat wear the granite and marble in a process called 'sugaring' which leaves the stone looking like it has been at the beach and worn smooth. Many of these tombs have been affected by vandals over the years as well, which is unfortuate but inevitable. Surprisingly this tomb still has all it's ironwork intact, as many of the other tombs have been raided for iron at various points throughout history when scrap was a desirable commodity.

This large tomb belongs to the New Orleans Artillery Battalion and is covered in symbols of victory (wreaths), life snuffed out (quelched torches), and artillery soldiers (the grenades/cannon balls). Again, this tomb has no names or dates on it to inform visitors who is buried here just a number on each plaque that can be cross reference in parish records.

There was two small sections in the back of the cemetery that were rather sparsely populated. One of these large sections was purchased by a wealthy family who were apparently thinking forward to a large family plot, but then interred only two people there (you'd think they'd onsell some of the ground at this point to make some money to put towards the restoration of the rest of the place), and the other section which was put aside for Protestants. Nice of those Catholic folks to leave a small plot available for them. One rather distinguished architech is burried here – it seems he was responsbile for designing many well known and noteable, iconic pieces of American architecture. Will have to keep an eye out for Bejamin Henry Boneval Latrobe when we go to the US Capitol in Washington.

Then there is this, which seems totally out of place in an old cemetery like Saint Louis cemetery…

This pyramid (there are a few pyramids here) belongs to Nicholas Cage, he apparently bought this plot (you can still get space here – it costs around $35,000 for a smallish plost), and he is allegedly going to be buried here when he passes away. At this stage, it is just a large concrete pyramid with the words “Omnia Ab Uno” inscribed on a plaque and no other mention or reference to Nicholas Cage at all. But seeing it is known to be where he is going to be buried, women have taken to leaving big lipstick kisses on the second, currently blank, plaque… go figure.

Tonight… more Mardi Gras parade nonsense! 🙂

 

Mardi Gras in New Orleans!

Thankfully managed a good night sleep last night (thanks to a few Valium), and was quasi compis mentis this morning. Decided to skip breakfast and head down to town in search of a cuppa and get ready for a big day o' parades. Weather looked promising (about 23 and cloudy), and we had ticekts booked for the reserve bleacher seating which turned out to be an awesome plan. Here's a few shots I took of the detrius left over from the previous nights parades…

Lots of people make these bright coloured step ladder seats to put their kids in, the kids can see the parades and the parents get to know exactly where the kids are – win/win if you ask me. These lined nearly the entire 5 miles or so of parade route.

There was three parades on today called, Okeanus, Krewe of Mid-City and Krewe of Thoth. In all honesty these largely ran into each other, so I was having trouble figuring out where one ended and the next one began. A few initial observations… the atmostphere in this place is amazing! Everyone is in a party mood, people are dressed up in crazy purple, gold and green outfits and by half eleven – most people were on the turps. I couldn't get over the open containers… everywere people drinking in the streets and no one being carded (though the drinking age is 21, clearly many of the drinkers weren't), even glass containers were all good.

 

It's hard to describe the atmosphere of the place, everyone from grandpas to babies are dressed up and ready for a huge day. It feels like New Years Eve, Christmas, Big Day Out, the Ekka and Disneyland all rolled into one! It's absolutely crazy… everyone is beyond excited and you can see if in their faces and feel it in the air.

At first, it felt really odd to be jumping up and down and screaming at the people on the floats to throw you some beads – it feels a bit like begging – but after a while, everyone is jumping and waving for beads, and you're swapping with your neighbours to help everyone get a good collection. Sometimes the beads are coming at the crowd so thick and fast that you end up dishing around under the bleachers to try to collect some of the ones that got away (Mr K said if felt like he was 'dumpster diving' down there… so many empty beer cans etc, so I left him to it), and sometime the guys on the floats are throwing entire bags of beads all in one go. Some of the floats were incredible you could see that a lot of time, effort and no doubt money goes into preparing them. They are pretty creative and range from holiday themed and hunting themes to some themes I just couldn't make out! 🙂 Every now and again an un-manned fload would come past and we could throw some of the broken beads back which was fun.

In between all the floats was what surely is every single marching band known to man. Seriously? Louisianna, how many marching bands can you have? There were marching bands for the local elementary schools and local high schools… and all I could think was, who is paying for all their spandexed sparkly uniforms and funny hats? That shit must cost a fortune. Felt like every kid and his dog was in a marching band today. And it's such a long slog – approximate 5 and a bit miles – by about 4pm, you could see even the poor kids in the bands were totally over it by the time they reached the centre of things where we were at Lafayette Square.

 

We had a break from parading just in the nick of time, left about ten minutes before the last floats went by and found a nice restaurant on St Charles to have a quick bite to eat before the night parades were due to start. Great plan! Stumbled onto some awesome catfish served with slaw and potato salad (literally the BEST potato salad I have ever tried) and BBQ pulled pork sandwiche… full of win on the tasty nosh front.

 

After that we went back for the Bacchus Parade which this year had a theme of hunting. I took heaps of photos of this with my proper camera, so I'll have to update those later. Saw Hugh Lawrie, who is the King of this year's Bacchus Parade, make a toast and say a few nice things. Then he chucked some beads and the night time parade rolled on… and on… and on! So many marching bands, this time from the US Marines, the US navy, the US Coast Guard, and every university in the state (and possibly from out of the state too!). This parade had the coolest floats – there were big whales, shrimps, bears, you name it. There was a two story tall King Kong and a T-Rex and all sorts of cool stuff. So much fun. Soooo many more beads. We had offloaded all the morning beads into a bag because them things get pretty hot and heavy around your neck after a while, but after about half an hour at Bacchus, we were weighed down again! They had huge double decker floats with about 20 guys on them just hurling out beads for hours… I can't figure out where the hell they were storing all those beads on the floats. There was just beads hanging from every light fixure, hook and post on them.

After nearly 10 hours of parades, we were both shattered. We had met some lovely people, a local named Mary who spent the morning with us explaining what all the parades were and which band was from where… and telling us who was on the floats and what groups they represented. We also found ourselves in Commonwealth Corner during the Bacchus Parade, surrounded by two poms, a Canadian, a Welsh guy and ourselves… all we needed was some Aussies (can't believe I came all this way and had to endure a conversation about the cricket!). Have to say, we have had an absolute blast. Found ourselves weighed down with even more beads! Final haul from just the parades today, looked something like this (there's no way we can take all this home!):

The way back was a little special. Late at night, drunk people everywhere and not a cab to be found and no buses or trolley cars running up and down St Charles. Decided we were going to have to walk… and I could not get over the mess. We walked about a mile and a half (thankfully New Orleans is largely very flat and well laid out for tourist who are likely to get themeslves lost) through what looked like the biggest dump you've ever seen. I could not believe the amount of rubbish in the streets – empty cans, broken bottles, plastic bags (from the beads), food trash, litter, broken cups and crap… and beads. Broken beads, smashed beads, beads the floats had run over, just littering the ground. I estimate about half of what gets thrown off the floats ends up in the trash looking at how much crap was laying around the ground.

 

In Transit

All packed up and ready to go. Head to airport stupidly early, nothing like killing two hours waiting round for international flights. Got sniffed, as per usual. I think in their efforts to avoid stereotyping the people they choose for ‘random’ checks, they’re going the other way and choosing people who definitely don’t match the stereotype… ironically this kind of means that they’re just stereotyping a different group of people. In this case short blonde Caucasian chicks, to get their quotas up. All good, hadn’t been messing around in the safe.

Loving the Qantas club, it is really quite civilised, though I lament the awful food on offer – pathetic little pastry things masquerading as croissants, muffins that are too sweet for words and some type of flat cheese (Grommit!) that has no right being in an executive business type lounge.

Our flight was packed, and I mean packed. Not a spare seat anywhere. We had chosen the seats towards the back of the 747 which are in pairs rather than in triples. It is good to not be disturbing some stranger every time you want to get up and wander about, but alas I didn’t count on the people in front of us having their reading lights on for most of the flight and repeatedly putting their seats back and forward. So, no rest for the wicked, yet again.

Other than that, the long haul flight is what the long haul flight is. Crammed and painful, and so much bad news for my back. An hour in, and I want to stab myself with a fork in the forehead. :/

Food was a little on the dodgy side too. Of the three choices for dinner, only two were available and of course it was the healthy choice option that was gone. At some point when people were just getting ready to go to sleep they came around with some pizza subs annoying everyone and again a couple of hours later with cheese and crackers… blah blah blah. Let us try and sleep and plane food sucks.

Arrival at LAX was as painful as being at LAX can be. The line up for customs was not too long, though the officious little people in their blue vests always seem to send you to the longest queues. The NSA border dude was actually cool for a change, was asking us about our holiday, advised us to look for a haunted swamp tour in New Orleans and making small talk… a huge cry from my first entry to the US back in ’98 which came with a “You do know you can’t stay on a holiday visa, right? You have to go home again when your visa is up.” To which, a very young, extremely over tired borys, inadvisably replied “I’m from Australia, why the hell would I want to stay here?” Oddly, that didn’t go down too well at the time. But I’m much nicer to the customs people now, especially while that Pakistani visa is still in my passport…

At LAX atm in the American Airlines Admiral’s Club lounge, and wouldn’t you believe it… you have to pay for your food here. I’m wondering what you get for your membership here, seeing there is not much in the way of snackage available and they give you a voucher for one free drink. Meh. Next stop Dallas.

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‘Hello, this is your Captain, Jim Wonderful speaking…’ Captain Wonderful! No shit, there we were. Made me think of my brother in law – he’s the sort of guy who would go round wearing a name like Captain Wonderful. We had an uneventful flight with Captain Wonderful, though I still don’t understand why the inflight service on American Airlines don’t take cash, but are happy to let you put a $3.49 purchase on Visa… completely opposite of home with a lot of places with minimum card purchase amounts (well, mostly petrol stations, but you know).

Dallas airport is HUGE. I swear it’s like friggin’ Heathrow huge. We went on the monorail from where we arrived at Terminal D, and made our way around to Terminal A which was where our next flight was scheduled to leave from. Was about to get ourselves all settled in the Admiral’s Club but thought we should check out our boarding time (oddly not on AA boarding passes), only to discover we had a gate change and needed to be in Terminal C. Tripit would have told us this of course, but we had our phones’ cellular data turned off until we get some SIM cards. Back on the monorail and over to Terminal C… great little rail system, you can tell no one ever expects it to go as fast as it does – the voice over tells everyone to hold on, which no one does, and then see them all promptly grab for something as soon as it starts to move! 🙂 Get to Terminal C, jump on some free wifi, get immediately informed by Tripit that we have a gate change. Ain’t technology grand.

Next flight New Orleans! Settling in on the plane and get told the ‘first office is flying and he’s in training’… not sure we needed to know that (totally shouldn’t have watched all those air disaster movies before we left). All was well though,we took off fine and probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all but for the fact we were told he was on his L’s – as we reached elevation instead of levelling off, he started to point us back down, which was kinda interesting there for a moment. Other than that, another uneventful flight and we got into New Orleans around 6pm.

Found ourselves an Uzbekistani cab driver who was very happy to chat with us about New Orleans… seem surprised that we knew where Uzbekistan was and even more surprised that I’d been to places like Turkey and Pakistan (‘at my age’ – apparently only really old people have travelled that much… God bless his cotton socks, just what a girl wants to hear after 24+ hours in transit!). Went past the Superdome as we came into New Orleans, unbeknownst to us, it was in full swing as one of the parades was just finishing in there and there was 30,000 all in there partying – we saw them on the idiotbox once we got settled, most of them looked high as kites,

We have airbnb accommodation booked here, it was the only way to stay even remotely near town without having to BYO lube. So far, our hosts Steve and his husband, Ron, have been extremely welcoming. Both Steve and Ron have the week off, and are massage therapists (I nearly cried), so I am sure we are going to see them around quite a bit. They have a lovely appointed home, very stylishly decorated and we have a bedroom and bathroom to ourselves and free run of the kitchen, living room etc. They’ve given us a run down on all the local cafes, restaurants, bars and clubs and hints on places to go – which will no doubt have all have the ‘Fabulous, Darling!’ stamp of approval. I’m looking forward to a fun week of Mardi Gras… but first, some sleep!