N’awlins: Chapter Eleven

As our Delta plane was flying us over New Orleans in preparation for landing, I realised what had been so shocking about New York: the fact that there hadn’t been anything shocking about it!

I mean…where were the crazy dressers, the flamboyant Queens, the inspiring influencers, the uninhibited madonnas, the beligerant anarchists, the Spider Men, the Michael Jackson lookalikes, the freaks, the zombies, the aliens, the cast from Brooklyn Nine Nine, the Liam Neesons and Bruce Willises, the serial killers, the ITs, the terrorists, the…ok, maybe I’ve gone a little bit too far, but…you get my point.

To rephrase: in London, on any given day and, by all means, at any given time, I get to see – in an hour – as many funky, eccentric, ridiculously dressed, jar-dropping gorgeous, “the things I would do to this guy”, “Oh my God it’s Michael Caine”, hobo looking, homo looking amount of individuals as New York, in all it’s undoutable glory has shown me in a week (and this is me being indulgent)!

But aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal that was about to change in New Orleans, where we’d suffer enough shocks to last us for a loong, loooooooong time…

And the thing that stroke us the most would be the unbareable heat mixed with very a high level of humidity. Still much better than the terrifying cold we’d suffered in New York.

 

Second, the dangerousness and unpredictability of the Big Easy, which is said to have the third highest criminality rate in the USA. I remember that just on our first night there, as we went out for a walk around the neighborhood, an afro-american gentleman around the age of thirty to sixty five (you can never tell for sure when it come to these people…) spotted us and uttered as he was approaching: “Hey, brother, could you spare a dollar? I just got out of jail and I’m broke.”

Oh and another funny story, when the bus driver asked us where we needed to be dropped off, we told him the name of the boulevard and he responded “Good luck, guys, get home safe!” and gave us a compassionate, “May the Lord be with you” tap on the shoulder as as the other commuters were looking at us with resigned, puppy eyes.

 

 

Or….need I mention that in our neghbourhood, just a few blocks away from our home, a simple, obvious message (some would say “a joke”) would emerge victorious, yet rethorical from the middle of an electricity wooden pillar, as a constant reminder of the right path to be taken in case of confusion: “Thou shalt not kill”?

And the out in the open voodoo and occult practices that New Orleans has been so (in)famous for through hundreds of years?

What about the ever depraved Bourbon Street, a modern day Babylon or the mad and homeless true patriots, the Vietnam veterans living in tents, underneath highway pillars with nothing to eat or any clean water to drink and have perhaps even forgotten their own name (and they might even remain unidentifiable for lack of documents), but are proud to always be seen next to a USA flag?

 

Or the fact that everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) would obsessively throw me lingering looks and compliment me on the look I put together that day, only enriched – I hope – by that fabulous Giorgio Armani purple vest? I mean…I know it was cool, but was it THAT cool?

Third: let’s never forget that this is a Hurricane Katrina survivors territory, a strange, expensive but poor, bohemian, historical, magical, Vama Veche like place that has been recovering from a great tragedy: massive loss, entire neighbourhoods vanishing under the water, death, uncomparable trauma. Some of the inhabitants have never covered their losses and most of them probably never will.

 

Four (and probably the most important): without an ID, the doormen wouldn’t let me enter the bars they were watching. And I never took my passport with me, for fear of getting drunk, losing my mind and…dangerously misplacing it. So, during that week I probably saw the inside of a bar…once or twice – which was not at all a problem by the way, as my better half always carried his. Besides, who needed to get inside any bar, when all the most interesting things happened outside anyway?

Five: do you know what the “beignets” are? After travelling to New Orleans, mothers, sisters, wives and mistresses around the world go home carrying what they think is a priceless trasure: a small piece of paper in the inside pocket of their purse – the recipe  for the “beignet”. The “beignets” are square shaped sweets made out of deep-fried-until-brown puffy dough.

The rest of the world can become addicted all they want, but they couldn’t full us. The best chefs in the world could not under any circumstances compete with any romanian housewife because the latter would actually make the best “beignets”. She would just be confused about the name, as she’d think she’s making “gogoși”, or ”scovergi” (if they come out a little bit crunchier) It’s in our blood. In Romania, the beignets are the equivalent of donuts, but much much better! Oh and they’re also considered to be the poor people’s dessert because, well, they’re extremely cheap to make. All you need is flour, water, (egg), (milk), (vanilla), oil, (love).

 

 

 

Six: was all but a dream or was I really gazing somewhere, in the distance, across the Mississippi River, where my once favourite Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn characters have come to life?

There are many things to be told about New Orleans (and they will be, no doubt about it) but I will gloriously end this chapter with the most shocking thing of all which is at number seven: I had the shock (and privilege) of meeting Louie Prima’s daughter, taking a few photos together and hearing her sing some of father’s (and one of my all time favourite jazz singers) evergreens. And I’d never been that emotional in my life.

Green Eyed Kisses,