venta

I flew out of Auckland, and two planes later, landed in New Orleans.

I had a wonderful introduction to New Orleans. I hopped in a taxi, which was driven by a grey-haired black guy named Gabriel Ambrose, Sr. He had a deep voice, and spoke with a wonderful slow, Southern drawl. On the drive he pointed out a few sights, and warned me about the dangers of being in NO by myself - recommending that if, at any stage, I found myself lost I should immediately approach a police car, if there was one, or failing that get in a taxi, or aim for the nearest hotel. He gave me the impression that he wasn't trying to scare me, just genuinely concerned that I should be OK while visiting. He also told me his recipe for gumbo, and recommended where I should go to eat good gumbo while staying in the French Quarter. He delivered me efficiently to my hotel, carried in my cases, and wished me a happy holiday; I was predisposed to like the place before ever I really arrived.

Then I realised with dismay that I'd forgotten to bring with me

kauket's directions to the bar I was supposed to be meeting her in. The concierge at my hotel had never heard of Mythique, and we couldn't find it in the phone book. The prospect of scouring the local papers among the club listings didn't appeal, either. (Not to mention not knowing quite what to look under. The concierge had asked me if it was a gay club - I didn't think so, as I imagined

kauket might have mentioned it. Well, what sort of a club was it, she asked. A goth club, I hazarded. What, she demanded to know, did that mean? Were there "witches and so on" there? At this stage I was slightly jetlagged, more than a little worried, and really not feeling up to delivering a concise "What Is Goth" lecture. I wriggled out of the question and solved my address problems by phoning

mr_flay, whom I knew had visited the club in September. All kudos to the man for telling me "1135 Decatur" with his trademark unflappable sang-froid, as if confused Brits ring him from the States with unexpected queries every day. Maybe they do.)

As it happened, she found me while I was ambling round Decatur Street, and dragged me off to a bar, for a really nice evening. For a start, the bar she'd adopted as her local is wonderful. Mythique looks like a 20's Opium den, complete with piled cushions and Chinese lamps. It appears to fill up in about equal measure with goths and geeks, and is one of the most friendly bars I've ever been in. It shows films occasionally, serves cocktails, has a resident PS2 and a free terminal, plays interesting music and seems to have a solid core of regulars. I liked it immensely - my only complaint is that the beer's rubbish, but that's more a US-grumble than a specific grumble :) .

The following morning was a disappointment in a couple of ways - in particular, everywhere appeared tacky in the extreme. Now,

kauket had warned me about this, but somehow the reality hadn't quite sunk in. Everywhere seemed to be playing overamplified music, and striving to sell atrocious plastic tat slightly faster than the next shop down. The bars weren't the slightly scruffy, half dive/half sophisticated places of my imagination, they were garishly neon filled places, which looked like the Jazz answer to Yates's. Worst of all, there appeared to be no buskers. At all. Here I was in the city than invented jazz, and there was not a musician to be seen.

However. By mid-afternoon, I'd realised this wasn't entirely true, and was feeling a lot happier. The French Quarter is basically about 6 blocks by 13. Two of the roads which run the long side of the rectangle (Bourbon Street and Decatur Street) are basically the tacky, commercialised face of the Quarter, and as such are more or less best avoided. The rest of the place, however, it's really a very pleasant place. Lots of quite quiet streets, with their trademark painted houses and wrought iron balconies, which hide small cafés, bars and quirky shops. 6x13 blocks is small - but it still gives you over 80 streets to wander around, and over the course of five days there I perpetually found "new" things on streets I was convinced I'd walked down before. And the buskers? What was I thinking... it was Monday morning! By the time afternoon rolled up to teatime, you could hardly move without kicking a jazz band or a blues duo.

People I met kept saying to me had I done this, had I done that. Had I been out to the Plantations, had I been on a Swamp Tour? The answer to all of them was no. I went to NO with the intention of chilling out for a few days. So I did.

I have a fairly inexhaustible interest in just wandering about, looking at things. So enormous amounts of time were spent just ambling about the streets, enjoying the very non-English architecture, and occasionally falling into a café for coffee and beignets. I pottered into museums. I looked at churches. I hopped on a street car to travel out to the Garden District and have a look about. The nearest I came to organisation was going to a Cajun cooking class... people who ate my last attempt at cooking gumbo: be warned! I can now (with luck) do it properly :)

Actually, the churches were kind of strange. I went into the St. Louis cathedral, and to the church of Our Lady of Guadeloupe - which has the international shrine to good old St Jude in it. OLoG also contains the only known statue of St. Expedite, who allegedly was accidentally created following a misunderstanding involving an anonymous saint's statue, contained in a crate labelled "Expedite!". Both churches are Catholic, and in both there was a constant stream of people coming in for the purpose of praying. Now, I am aware that that's the general purpose of a church. But I've simply never seen anywhere that busy before. Young people, old people, people who appeared to be halfway through there shopping - they came in, did whatever it is you do with a stoup of holy water, genuflected, and said their prayers. Some stayed barely minutes, others indefinitely. I liked it, actually - seems much more fitting than the atmosphere in, say, St Paul's on an average day where anyone doing anything to peculiar as praying is looked at rather askance.

Outside the cathedral, Jackson Square seems to have a resident jazz band. It appears to consist of two guitars, a washboard and a string bass, and... anyone else who felt like turning up that day. I saw them most days, and the line up never seemed to be the same twice. There were up to 6 brass players, usually, though they never all played at once - usually people seemed to be playing if they weren't having a fag, bottling the audience, wandering off for a chat, or having a bit of a sing. They were fantastic, and I spent a few hours, sitting on the steps in the sunshine, listening to them.

Although I never saw quite as many buskers again as there were on the Monday afternoon, there were still always a few. People playing saxophone, clarinet or trumpet to canned backing, blues guitar-harp duos, and impromptu bands. Once I saw a guy just standing on a street corner, singing unaccompanied... he knew a truly impressive number of verses of Amazing Grace (which is a song I loathe). My one disappointment is that I hear no live Cajun music... several of the Decatur tat shops were playing tapes of Cajun, but no one seemed to be playing it. I hope this isn't usual...

I did find myself having unexpected trouble with accents - apparently this shouldn't have been unexpected :) Sadly, although I asked people to repeat things, you can only do that so many times and often I ended up nodding, smiling, and hoping for the best. It seemed to work. Then there were unexpected words. At one point, in part of the Louisiana State Museum, the security guard appeared to be recommending that I went up to the third floor and looked for the docent. I nodded and left, terrified. What kind of bizarre creature might a docent be? Would it bite? Leap out at me from behind furniture? Nothing seemed obvious, and I looked round by the house by myself. Sometime later, a couple addressed the rather nice, middle aged tour guide I'd found (who was showing me round the house again) - "Are you the docent?". She admitted she was. I'm still not 100% sure what all that was about.

I was also surprised by the NO habit (and apparently it's other areas of the US too) of people randomly speaking to you as you walk down the street. Someone just passing might ask how your day is going, or how you are. I like it - again, it makes the place seem friendly. On the other hand, the people who offer horse drawn rides need a good poke in the eye - what part of "No I don't want a buggy ride" don't they understand?

Despite numerous dire prognostications from guidebooks, I only twice got asked for money by people on the street (which is better than your average week in Oxford, for starters). One guy stopped me to talk in Jackson Square, and was sufficiently pleasant and interesting that he got his money for a hotdog (at least he didn't make up an elaborate story - he said he'd only just got out of jail for being drunk and disorderly the previous night). We chatted for a while about music, and music theory, and the cathedral... He sang me a song, and told me that he'd been at school with the Neville brothers (I wonder if everyone in NO says this, like everyone in Liverpool went to school with Lennon). And gave me his string of Mardi Gras beads in return for the money. A truly courteous begging experience, though I don't imagine for a moment that it's representative :)

Oh, and food. There's enormous amounts of it, and it's all great. I'm seafood biased, admittedly, but even so... And I got to eat alligator.

My main problem while in NO was what to do with my evenings; everyone had muttered heavy warnings not to go out by myself. This is the one time I wished I wasn't travelling alone, as so much of the French Quarter seems to revolve around sitting in bars, and that's not something I was really up to doing by myself. Similarly, with the big jazz clubs I was wary of being there on my own - guess I'll just have to go back with people. Thanks are due to

voratus, who, despite not really knowing me, kindly came out after a long day at work and bought me drinks, and generally provided someone to sit in a bar with.

My last evening in NO I splashed out and took myself to one of the old-school Creole restaurants. Not to their very upper-crust dining room, but to their Jazz Bar, where they keep a tame jazz trio in the corner. The food was lovely, but the evening was made for me before I even got there. Having seen all the things in the Mardi Gras exhibition, I was kind of regretting that I wasn't going to see anything of the carnival. However, walking along the road to the restaurant, I could hear drums, and see sirens in the distance. On closer examination, it turned out to be a walking parade, though I have no idea whose. It was headed by a smartly purple-uniformed marching band, complete with four or five people playing sit-and-ride sousaphones (surely the world's most comedy instrument). A long column of people wearing fancy dress, beads, and carrying drinks snaked along behind them, but the very best was at the end. A five piece band brought up the rear, and walking just in front of them was their bandleader, with whistle, shiny patent leather shoes and a parasol, dancing along in time to the music. I wished I'd had my camera with me, as the dancer, set against the Bourbon St lights seemed to personify one of the nicer aspects of Mardi Gras.

By the time I came out the restaurant again, Bourbon Street was jammed with people, throwing beads off balconies, staggering around with Hurricanes in their hands. Live music was spilling out of the clubs, deafeningly loud, and the man in the Drinks To Go booth was competing with his megaphone, yelling "It's not Mardi Gras if you haven't got a drink in your hand" at the crowd (who seemed to have worked that out). And even then, the place had a certain gutter-glitter glamour to it. I think I'd like to see the big Mardi Gras parades some day.

I'm not sure that NO is really representative of America - certainly bits of it didn't seem to fit with my ideas at all. But I did encounter my first Great American Problem there: post boxes. I had my postcards, written and (eventually, after some further ado) stamped. I walked round a whole day, and failed to identify a post box. Eventually, I asked someone. And I'm sorry, America, but they're not post boxes. They're rubbish bins. Sort it out.

Oh, and second G.A.P: all the money looks the same. 'Nuff said.