"One Night Stand" a New Orleans Travel Page by Jonathan_C

Crescent City, Big Easy, French Quarter, Mardis Gras,
Beignets, gumbo, craw fish for etouffee,
Basin St., Bourbon St., Frenchmen and Jackson Square,
Laissez les bons temps rouler!

You don't have to be from New Orleans to be familiar with the names of local neighborhoods, foods and streets. They are synonymous with a good time in American culture. 'Newallins' -- as I heard the locals pronounce it -- is the ultimate adult Party Town with a 200+ year history of easy living, few inhibitions, free flowing alcohol and wild parties.

You can see the attraction for a family man on a work trip from staid and polite Seattle. I was in the South for five days teaching a class at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and was trapped in a hotel in Slidell, just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Twice I commuted into the French quarter for a nice dinner, only to leave before the fun really started. Realizing what I was missing, I changed hotels to the French Quarter the night before my flight out and went on a mission to experience as much of the character of this town as I possibly could in one very long evening.

Send Photo to a Friend

New Orleans cooking

Sensory Overload

There are cities that will stimulate one or another of your senses with art and architecture for the eyes, music for the ears or good food for the tongue. But I've never visited a city that can overload all your senses within one small neighborhood like the French Quarter in New Orleans can. Sense by sense, there's a surfeit of experiences awaiting you:

sight: Creole architecture, Mississippi sunrise, street performers, Voodoo shops ... You can spend days walking around, trying to take it all in.

sound: Brass bands, jazz, blues, Cajun, Zydeco ... These are just the local styles that await you in the Big Easy.

smell: Cajun cooking, Carribbean air, tropical plants, drunks, that everpresent acrid smell ... A constant barrage of scents will confront your nose.

taste: Antoine's, Arnaud's, Gallatoire's, K-Paul's ... Does any other neighborhood in the western hemisphere offer as many world renound restaurants?

touch: Crowded streets, partner dancing, warm air and cool air-conditioning, sweat ... Your skin will be once again recognized as a pimary sense organ.

energy: Tourists, locals, partiers, lovers, history ... You can definitely sense a higher level of human energy here. Some places are magical because of their natural setting and others because they are imbued with generations of human energy. New Orleans stands out as a shining example of how raw human energy can convert even a fetid swamp into one of the world's most enjoyable destinations.

Send Photo to a Friend

alternative reality

Multiple Realities

The other thing that so impressed me about the French Quarter was the coexistence of alternative realities. Every city has multiple, concurrent realities going on. On any given night there will be rich couples dining in expensive restaurants with champagne while drug addicts and criminals exist in their own, entirely separate world. Typically, these alternative lives play out in different neighborhoods. But in the Vieux Carre you can see and participate in radically different realities that exist only a few feet from eachother.

Take this 7 am picture for example. Fifty feet from me, behind protective walls, lies the interior of Saint Louis Cathedral, seats already occupied with a few earnest supplicants. Or stroll down crowded Bourbon St. in the evening near the Bad Ass Beers and the Topless/Bottomless club and then pass through the tiny portal into the Twin Sisters courtyard where elegant dining is underway. Or just go to Pat O'Brien's for a while. You can wander from the courtyard into the piano bar for very different experiences. Or just stay in one place, have a couple of Hurricanes and wait for realitiy to change around you.

The French Quarter somehow manages to be everything for everyone. How it does this so successfully is a complete mystery to me. I'll just have to keep coming back until I figure it out.