into each rainstorm some really good food must fall

Hi again! Another day, more bad weather forecasts. The fog is back this morning. Some of the ferries have been docked and the roads are full of cars crawling with little visibility. It is expected to get worse as the rain will return this afternoon with torrential downpours again tomorrow. This is starting to screw up our plans. We planned to head over to the French Quarter today with a 3 day trolley pass but if the rain is supposed to be as bad as the forecast, we probably won’t go tomorrow. I guess we could buy a one day pass and then see what happens the rest of the week.

There is supposed to be a great D-day museum down the street that we could do tomorrow if we don’t leave the district but time will tell. Breakfast will be first and we will decide as we eat.

The news here is interesting. It is pretty much all weather related and Saints related. The sports report here was nearly 10 minutes long and involved nothing but the Saints. Highlights, interviews and commentary. They are really excited about the Saints but if you look back over their history it is pretty much like being in New England before we got our first Superbowl….Yawn. They don’t even mention any other sports here, just football.

Of course, the tour books were wrong. There is now a 5 day trolley pass as well as a 3 day pass. The one day pass still exists but you have to buy that one on the trolley. I took the planning out of the equation by buying the 5 day pass. Now we can use it whenever we want even if we just want to wander off for coffee.

Early morning and we are off to the French Quarter. It is fun to wander around when the only people there are cleaning and prepping for the new day. The rain held off for quite a while. We took the trolley over to Canal Street (there are 3 trolley lines; St Charles Ave, Canal Street and Riverfront). The turnaround for the Charles Ave Trolley is right across Canal Street from Bourbon Street. We walked down Bourbon and found a couple of places open offering bargain breakfasts. There were also a few bars open but they were pretty much empty. We zigzagged through the quarter and ended up down by the Mississippi at Café du Monde. This is a must visit place in the quarter and home of the beignets and strong New Orleans coffee with chicory. Both the coffee and the beignets lived up to expectations. The beignet is a French doughnut. It is rectangular and fried bit of pastry, 3 to a dish and positively smothered in powdered sugar.

It is said you can tell everyone who has been to Café du Monde by the powdered sugar residue on their clothing. I was more the rule than the exception. They were delicious and I look forward to future visits while we are here. During our visit, some musicians started to arrive on the sidewalk (right next to our table). They played a mixture of jazz and gospel music and were quite good. It was funny because the first 2 to arrive were the singer/trumpet player and the trombone. After they started playing a guitar showed up and just worked in followed shortly by a base drum/cymbal. Later on a large horn (bigger than a French horn and smaller than a tuba) came and worked in. The singer had a couple of CDs that he hawked between songs. They were quite good and the donations backed that up.

While we were allowing Mother Nature to wash the sugar off our sweat shirts, we wandered through the shops along the street and into the French Market. The shops were interesting (in one they were making pralines, the broken pieces provided as samples were delicious) and had the usual line of souvenirs although they were New Orleans things). Cookbooks are big here because this is really a center for food. There is a much larger local cuisine difference here than just about anywhere I have been.

We were trying to figure out which part of the quarter to hit next when the skies opened up. We sought refuge in the Cathedral of St. Louis. We had planned to go there in the evening for a Christmas concert but this gave us a chance to look it over without the crowds. It is billed as the oldest continuously operating Catholic Church in the country. It doesn’t look it. It looks brand new and shiny and bright. It must have been through a recent major renovation as it was beautiful. When the weather cleared up a bit, we wandered into the heart of the quarter and found the Gumbo Shop where we had lunch.

The gumbo was dark brown, thick and really flavorful. I had the crab and shrimp and Cheryl had the andouie and chicken. Check another food off the list of New Orleans favorites. We checked out a bunch of shops. Saints fever has run rampant down here. Just about every store sells Saint’s souvenirs and every marquis says GO SAINTS. It brings back memories of our first Super Bowl. These people love their team (and have never had much else to cheer for since the Battle of New Orleans…and I’m not even sure about that).

It started to rain harder and we figured that if we were going to head to the Quarter that evening, we should head back to the condo for a bit of a rest. We are still figuring out the trolleys. We had a couple of hours rest and a nap and just before 5 we headed back to the quarter for the concert. The trolley ride was fine until we got to Canal St. At that point, we saw police cars with their lights going across the trolley tracks down the street (in the direction we needed to go of course). We waited for about 10 minutes and nothing changed so we headed down a side street.

We arrived at the Cathedral and heard the choir singing. I thought they must have moved up the concert or something but we went in and found some seats. It seems that they were just doing a sound check and we were a half hour early. Eventually the concert started. The boys were wonderful. They sang a mixture of songs with some religious songs and the rest Christmas songs. They also have a really big organ in the church. There were 3 songs that were played on that organ. Now, these songs were meant to showcase the organ and the player so they were technically difficult and not particularly melodious. There was a little girl in the row ahead of us that was totally bored every time the organ played.

When the show ended, we left the church into a torrential downpour. One woman trying to hurry through the rain, fell over the 2 steps leading down from the church to the courtyard. These steps are small but they are there and if you don’t realize they are there you can take a pretty bad tumble. Another person fell right after her in the same place.

We scurried up the street and worked our way back to Bourbon St. The rain picked up force as we moved and by the time we got to Bourbon, you could hardly see where you were going. We had thought about going to the Preservation Hall for some Jazz but they closed (I assume because of the weather as they had a band scheduled). We watched some really bad Karaoke at the Cat’s Meow, ducked into a jazz club that hadn’t started to avoid drowning and finally found refuge in a pizza parlor. The pizza was exceptional (sorry La Festa) but the dry place was much more important. After a while, the rain lightened up (just a little) and we made a dash for the trolley. Of course, the trolley wasn’t near and we hid in the entry way to a Lady Footlocker. Eventually, the trolley showed.

Meanwhile, we met a young (compared to us) woman who was here on vacation. We talked to her and had a great time (while freezing because we were soaked). We compared notes on where we had been and were we each thought the best places were. She was from Austin, TX so we talked about that too. We enjoyed Austin a lot when we were there. As it worked out, she was staying in the same condo we were, on the same floor just 2 rooms down. Small world?

We dried out, had a drink and settled in for a quiet night. We opened the curtains and watched Mother Nature’s fireworks show. The lightening was wild and went on all night (we didn’t watch it all night). The thunder woke us a couple of times but we slept well. This morning, we wandered down to the next block and had breakfast at the Trolley Stop Café before heading back into the city. The rain continued to be heavy but we didn’t want to give in. We decided to go to the IMAX Theater and see what was playing. The trolleys worked out well and we didn’t have to stand around in the rain….at least until the end. When we arrived at the end of Canal st., the rain was really heavy. We got off and headed quickly to the IMAX Theater. They had 4 films rotating throughout the day. They were all educational type films (one of which we had already seen) and they wanted $24 each to get in (for a 45 minute film?). I think their concentration was to get you to buy combination tickets where the more events you buy, the cheaper each item was (the IMAX film was $24 but if you bought a zoo ticket, an Insectariums ticket and an aquarium ticket, the combined cost was only $32 each.

We left and headed across the street to Riverwalk, a mall along the Mississippi River. By the time we got in the door, we were totally soaked, even worse than the night before. We wandered around the mall for a couple of hours until the rain let up. We had coffee and watched the traffic on the river; barges, ships, tugs and ferries.

We then headed back out and caught the trolley along the riverfront. We got off down at the French Market and headed for the Central Grocery, famed for the muffuleta sandwich another of the foods on the New Orleans list. The sandwich is huge, made on a loaf of bread shaped like an extremely large hamburger roll a good 10 inches or more across. There is little choice (other than take it or leave it). You can buy a whole sandwich or a half sandwich and if you buy the whole one, you can have it cut in half or quarters. None-the-less it has an olive salad complete with pickled cauliflower, carrots and other veggies along with the resolute, salami, mortadella and cheese. We bought a whole cut into quarters and commenced to demolish the entire sandwich. We wandered around Decatur St and caught the Canal Street trolley. We rode the trolley all the way to the other end. We wanted to see more of the city. It was a nice ride but there was nothing special until the end when we were surrounded by cemeteries.

New Orleans has pretty unique cemeteries. All of the graves are above ground. Some people are buried in mausoleums and others are buried in graves that are built up from the ground.

Once back at the condo, we rested (I took a nap again) and when I woke, we were late starting out for the evening’s Christmas Concert. We got there in time. The concert tonight was by the Franklin Street Baptist Church. They brought a Men’s Chorus of 35 members and a mass chorus of 40 members along with a 4 piece band (drums, guitar, bass and keyboards). The men’s chorus was on first. They had an amazingly strong voice and sang 2 songs. Then it appeared that they went off the program as the director went over to the band and talked to them before returning and moving people around. He scavenged microphones from the group that was set up to capture the singing and handed them to individuals. I am sure he had the sound guy scurrying as it took a while for the hand helds to come up loud enough for individuals. They sang 2 songs in this configuration that were his own arrangements as they included pieces from several Christmas and religious songs intricately woven together to be outstanding. Their last song brought tears to your eyes it was so good. They got a standing ovation even before the song was over.

The massed choir had a tough job to overcome the men’s choir but they did. Their last song was the kind of song that you think of when you think of this kind of music. The chorus sang the song and a soloist belted out main and counter melodies in the vein of Aretha Franklin. This entire show was spectacular and moving. The audience was on their feet clapping along with the music and you could feel that great stone basilica moving to the beat. They finished the evening with both choirs singing and including the audience in the song. The woman announcing sang the solo with it and the audience sang with enthusiasm. With more than 60 people in the combined choir, the sound was big and strong…maybe even too big. It was a great evening and very different from the boy’s choir of the night before with their 21 much smaller voices.

I did wonder at one point, how big a church congregation do you have to have to have 2 choirs of such size. There were also many people from the Franklin Street Baptist Church in the audience. How big???

Afterwards, we wandered the quarter. We checked out several clubs with music and settled on a club with a blues band playing. We went in and paid $19 for 2 drinks (always higher when a band is playing) only to have the band pick up their stuff as soon as our drinks were delivered. It was still early and this band was a warm up of sorts, probably playing only for tips just to get seen. I though they were pretty good but didn’t hear too much by them.

The waitress said the main band would be setting up and starting to play early because the first band left early. There were only 3 people in the audience and that included Cheryl and I.

As soon as the band started to set up, people started to wander in and by the time they started playing, there were about 25 people there. With the weather and the fact that the quarter doesn’t get rolling too early, that wasn’t bad.

This band was a blues band too. They were good but people joined in and played a couple of songs and rotated out. There were always 4 or 5 people on stage but they varied as time went on. I have never seen that before. Interesting.

We left after a while and sought out something to eat. We settled on the Acme Oyster House. This was a busy place when most of the restaurants in the quarter were empty. Earlier, we passed by the place, there was a line out on the sidewalk waiting to get in. This was the only line at a restaurant we saw the whole time we were here (so far). I had red about the place in my tour book. It is reputed to have good food at a reasonable price.

We were taken into a back room and placed at a long table. There were several of these long tables with 2 or 3 groups at each table kind of like Durgin Park in Boston. We looked at the food in the room and perused the menu deciding to split a plate of char grilled oysters and split a crawfish po boy. In memory of my year in Norfolk VA, I ordered a single oyster shooter (a shot glass with a raw oyster filled with vodka and hot sauce. I always said I was a social raw oyster eater and would only eat them when the people around me decided to order them in a group. I have had them a few times lately on my own but I wanted to try this. It was quite good. I have even gotten so I can chew them a couple of times. Cheryl watched saying that to her raw oysters are a spectator sport.

The char grilled oysters were great. I watched Paula Deen make these at her brother’s (Bubba) restaurant and have always wanted to try them. Definitely worth waiting for. They put the oyster on a half shell directly on the bbq grill. They cover it with butter and wait for the butter to get bubbly before they add grated Romano cheese and let that get bubbly as well. They serve it with rounds of French bread to soak up the butter.

As we were winding down from that treat, they brought us our po boy. They even cut it in half and served it on separate plates. They fried crawfish tails just covered the entire plate. There was no way you could get them all in the sandwich so once you finished the sandwich, you had a half plate of tails to eat by their lonesomes. Best meal we have had since we got here.

We walked out of the quarter and caught our trolley back to the condo. We had a real cowboy driving this one. He was fast and really whipped around the corners. We were back in no-time.

I got up this morning and there was no rain falling. Imagine that? New Orleans without rain…unheard of.

Well, I guess I will close and upload this. Then I think we will hop on the trolley and head for Café du Monde for some more beignets. Can’t stay away from them. We really had to force ourselves to find a real restaurant last night because it was really tempting to just grab a plate of the little French treats (especially since Café du Monde is right across the park from St. Louis Cathedral). My patience has now run out and beignets are definitely on the horizon.

I am truly sorry about this continued talk about the wonderful food here but that is one of the things that New Orleans is all about. Food that is totally different from anywhere else we have been. I wish we could send all of you a plate of beignets and a cup of the strong chicory coffee or a plate of those marvelous grilles oysters. But alas, it is like watching Emeril on TV when he says he wishes you could all have smellavision so you could at least smell what he is cookin’. It Ain’t gonna happen. Bon Appetite!