Mardi Gras - 3/4/11

Tricia clicking her heels - Click for pics

Friday morning there was rain, and lots of it. It marked the end of our beautiful weather, and the beginning of the rainy portion of our trip. We got up and put on cute clothes and did our hair, but after two minutes outside our hair was a disaster and we were wrapped up tight in our jackets. So much for trying to look good. Jhon, Tricia, and I danced down the street with our umbrellas singing “Singing in the Rain”. My umbrella kept turning inside our and Jhon’s was broken, but we still had a good time.

The hotel provided free breakfast, so we filled up on eggs, sausage, grits, cereal, French toast, pastries, donuts, bagels, and coffee. Then we skipped off into the cold, windy, rainy morning. Our first stop was the mall on the Riverwalk where we wanted to partake of a wine tasting. The cheery and colorful baristas happily poured us sample after sample of wine. We first tried a blueberry wine, and then a wine made with 5 different fruits including mangos, watermelon, and lime. Tricia’s favorite was the key lime wine, which tastes like a margarita. My favorite was when they mixed the key lime and the raspberry wines, which tasted like a raspberry margarita. We sampled honey mead and orange chocolate and several others as well, and then felt obligated to make a purchase. We all got a Prairie Fire shot, which they had made up that morning, and which consisted of vodka, tomato juice, and tobasco sauce. (I let Tricia finish the last of mine.) Since we bought a shot, the barista gave us all half a glass of wine as a chaser, so Tricia and I got more of our margarita wines. Not bad for $5.

On the way out of the mall we bought some famous New Orleans praline (yummy!) and ate them outside on the Riverwalk, where it had miraculously stopped raining. The baristas had told us of a café that served 25 cent martinis during happy hour from 11 am to 2 pm, and we were determined to find it. After a good deal of wandering around, we finally found Café Adelaide. We all trooped inside, only to learn that we each had to purchase a $15 entrée to earn the martinis. So we all trooped back out again, and headed to Café Du Monde, which is open 24 hours and is famous in New Orleans. Having no chance of getting a table, we ordered Café Au Lait and Binets at the to-go window, and then sat on the curb eating them. Binets are delicious fried dough covered with powdered sugar, and you can buy 3 for around $2.15. Café Au Lait is coffee with milk, which Tricia liked a lot. I found it exactly the same as any other coffee with milk, and added some of the leftover powdered sugar to it. Tricia ate the rest of the powdered sugar. J

Right across the street I spotted a restaurant called Gator-Me-Crazy, and had to go check whether they really served gator. They did! I’m always excited to try new things, and had never had gator before, in spite of growing up in Florida. Tricia and I split a grilled gator kebab, and tried some of Jhon’s fried gator kebab. It was really good! They also sold gator heads, so we took some pictures with them before bundling up again and going back outside.

Next up was the French Market, where I bought a fig pie and we sampled dips and sauces on bread and pretzels. We walked through aisles and aisles of masks, costumes, jewelry, beads, and other kitschy souvenirs. Then we set off in search of an antique weapons store on Royal Street, and spent some time looking at the guns they had on display. Then we wandered into and out of the other antique stores on Royal Street and looked at the expensive furniture and collectibles. No one wanted us to take pictures in the stores. 

At one point as we were walking, a horse drawn carriage passed us and threw beads our way. Which was good, because we’d forgotten to put any on that morning! Emboldened by our beads, we walked to Burbon Street. Although it was only 4 in the afternoon, the street was packed and we didn’t even want to walk down it. The majority of people were not young, as I think the younger attendees were probably still resting up in preparation of staying up until 4 in the morning. We left Burbon Street without turning onto it at all, and decided maybe the college kids had the right idea. We went back to the hotel to put our throbbing feet up until dusk.

Jhon had left to meet up with some friends for a bachelor party, so we had given him the one hotel key so he could get his stuff. We needed to go to his hotel (across the street from ours) to get the key back. When we got there, all the doors were locked except the one off of the parking lot. A security guard at the door asked to see our wrist bands, and then wouldn’t let us in the door due to our wristband-less wrists! We finally talked him into letting us in the lobby where he could see us from the door to wait. It was cold and drizzly outside!!

Having gotten our key, we went to back to our hotel to wait for Doug to get off work and write some on our blog. We were all concerned that the Friday before Mardi Gras would be a zoo at any restaurant in town, but Doug thought our best bet would be Desire. When we got to the restaurant, they took us right away and had several open tables (it was only 5:45, but we were still surprised). When we sat down we saw how they were getting people in and out so fast - they had a special “mardi gras” menu, and were serving everything on paper plates. The silverware was plastic, and we could take the printed cups home with us. Doug assured us that the place was usually much more upscale, but we were fine with it. At first we ordered jambalaya to split, but then when Doug couldn’t find any of his usual favorites on the smaller menu, we decided instead to order the large seafood sample and to forget the jambalaya. I told the waitress this 3 times…..but 5 minutes later, we still got the jambalaya anyway. Oh well. We also had fried clams, crab, fish, jumbo shrimp, baby shrimp, and crawfish. And bread and coleslaw and fries. We tried, but there was no way we were finishing it all!

After dinner we went to watch the parades. This time we went closer to where they start, which meant far less tourists and far more local people (and so far less people in general). It was much calmer without being in a throng of crazy tourists, and we found the parades much more enjoyable. We were standing next to a little boy who was 7 and who chatted with us. (Did you know Mardi Gras is a holiday and the school kids get off Monday and Tuesday?) I told him we had to have the proper stance for bead catching, so we planted our feet shoulder width apart and bent our knees so we would be able to catch. Tricia and I (and the kid) were wearing Mardi Gras masks, which increased our cuteness and helped us get beads thrown our way.

About halfway through the parade, the fried fish we’d eaten for dinner began to work on Doug. He was pale and nauseas, and decided that he should go lie down for an hour so that he could come out with us later. So he took off for his apartment, and we stayed to see if we could catch anything interesting. I waved and smiled at a navy officer on a horse, and he threw me a commemorative coin for the navy. It was one of my cooler prizes. Tricia caught a beer cozy, and we ended up with a couple stacks of plastic cups. We also had necklaces that flashed with a seizure-inducing velocity and several medallions that indicated the year and the parade we were at. Some people on the floats will throw an entire bag of beads, and I started to be good at seeing them coming and not catching them. There’s a point where you actually don’t want 20 of the exact same beads. So I let one bag fall at my feet, and the kid scooped it up. I was glad not to have it, but later found it in the bag I had brought to collect beads. Apparently, the kid’s mom hadn’t wanted 20 of the same bead either, so I ended up with them anyway.

On the way back to the hotel to drop off our loot, we started handing beads out to people to try to get rid of some of them. The first guy I tried to offer beads to just told me ‘no’ and continued on his way. The next guy looked at me like I was crazy for just a second, then smiled and accepted the beads. And then, right in front of the hotel, three women were inexplicably excited to receive beads from us. When we gave them green beads, one of them said, “ooh, can we have a purple one too?” Um, yes! Unfortunately, our beads were all tangled together, or we would have given them all our duplicate strands.

Back in the room, Doug was looking worse. He managed to drag himself out of bed to apologize for feeling so miserable, but wouldn’t be going back out with us. He’d gotten ill after he’d left us, and needed to sleep it off. So we left out beads and went back out to see Burbon Street at night.

We walked on a cross street towards Burbon Street, but when we got up to it, it was so crazy crowded that we turned around and went back the way we’d come. We ended up walking parallel to the street for a while, every now and then crossing back to it and coming to the edges of the throng and then walking away. But since everyone was on Burbon, the cross streets were completely empty. It was boring (and colder) out there, so we finally sucked it up and pressed our way into the masses. Our goal was to find some cheap drinks to make the lack of personal space more bearable, but, supply and demand being what it is, we were having trouble finding anything worth the price. Every time we’d see a sign for reasonably priced drinks, it would turn out to be at a topless bar. I’m not actually that picky, but they wouldn’t let us in because we’re girls! Finally, we found a man who had set up an outdoor bar in the space between two buildings. He had only about 7 drinks available, but had a keg filled with hurricanes that he was using to fill fishbowls and selling for $10, with $5 refills! That was the best deal we were going to find, so we split one! It came with a lanyard so the fishbowl could be worn around one’s neck. Classy. We took turns getting to wear it around our necks.

Very soon after getting our fishbowl, Tricia realized she was going to need a bathroom, but due to some sort of political agenda, there were no port-a-potties this year. Tricia stopped a cop and asked where she should try, and he pointed her to a hotel off the main road where she “might“ have some luck. She darted inside and asked the man behind the counter if he had a public restroom. He answered “No, but it’s the unmarked door there.”

Of course another 5 minutes down the road I had to go too, but I decided a good strategy would be to just charge into a bar like I’d gone out to have a cigarette and was coming back in again. Walk proud, head up, don’t look around, just go straight back. This strategy worked so well that Tricia and I both used it again before the night was over.

It turns out that when you haven’t eaten for about 8 hours, half a fishbowl (even a $10 fishbowl), is enough to make Burbon Street amusing. By this time, there were more costumes and more people wearing less clothes (one woman had found herself a fishnet shirt……and basically nothing else). The police were out in full force working on some semblance of crowd control. Men in the balconies were trying to get women to flash them for beads (when I stuck my tongue out at one, he pulled a single bead off the strand and threw it at me). Some of the balcony throwers were getting a little drunk as well, and were lobbing the beads at people instead of tossing them (Tricia caught one in the head). After finishing our fishbowl, we decided to forgo the $5 refill and head for bed instead.

Just as we laid down in the pull out and turned off the lights, Doug’s phone rang and he had to go downstairs to meet the new couch surfer who would take the floor that night. Her flight had been delayed by several hours, so she was just getting in at 2:30 in the morning. Unfortunately, she had walked to the wrong hotel and had to make her way back to ours, so Tricia and I were fast asleep by the time they actually got back.