So, where were we? Ah, yes…halfway through the weekend’s nocturnal adventures. I left you yesterday having brought you to the point that I joined the photography group for dinner on Saturday night. From there I met up with my friend and we deployed a different course of attack for that night’s partying. Instead of going straight into Bourbon Street, we headed for one of the nicer hotels in the Central Business District, the Waldorf, and to their cocktail lounge where we sampled a few of their concoctions. We moved onto another hotel to try champagne cocktails after that. I welcomed a slightly more sedate beginning as my system was running on empty in a major fashion and this made it possible for me to then be able to hit Bourbon Street with some energy left.
We made our way into the French Quarter quite late and found an open air bar with a jazz quartet playing. They were excellent with the singer, in particular, evoking memories of Louis Armstrong as he sang some of that artist’s most well known pieces. Once the band finished we left this bar and decided to walk to Frenchman Street, which is quite a way away from Bourbon. However, halfway down we came across a bar called Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop which is not bedecked in neon and has a slightly less hysterical ambience to it than the bars and clubs near the top end of Bourbon Street. Lafitte’s has history. It is one of the oldest buildings in New Orleans, dating from around 1772, and is thought to be the oldest, continually occupied, bar in the USA. It is also considered to have quite a few ghosts propping up the bar. We didn’t see any of the latter but it was a great place to sit in and drink and chat while good music played.
We ditched the plan to continue to Frenchman and turned back into the busy part of Bourbon Street where we went into a final club where rap and hip hop played and people were dancing and generally having a pretty good time all round. From there we found somewhere to have breakfast and stayed there for a long while since it was too late for me to be able to make any use of the remaining time to get some sleep – let’s face it, at this point, having woken up on Friday morning and not having slept a wink since then, just crawling into bed for one hour and having to get up to go join the photography group would have just resulted in my waking up feeling rather unwell. It was just better to keep going. So, fuelled by pancakes and very sweet tea, we chatted in the diner till half six and then I was walked back to my apartment so I could regroup before heading out.
I did join the course group for my second breakfast of the day at half eight and we went on a morning’s outing to shoot some photos. My post tomorrow will be all about the course, so don’t think you’ll miss out on that.
Now, my time with my new friend was not just about debauchery, I’ll have you know. We decided to balance out all the partying with some culture and on Sunday afternoon we went to the Modern Art gallery where there was an incredible photographic exhibition based on the theme of water and how man is using it. The prints were vast and stunning and conversation provoking. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Across the road from the gallery is the Second World War Museum and we headed that way. It is a very large museum with an impressive coverage of all fronts in the war but, especially thorough and well-resourced is the section on the war in the Pacific. From diaries of soldiers, pieces of kit and equipment, posters, newspapers and small cinema areas showing original footage the whole exhibit is engaging and highly informative, to say nothing about very emotive. The enlarged photographs – many of the iconic ones associated with this time – with narrative explaining what they were showing were, at times, heart breaking. 
Perhaps the most striking element of the museum was not inside the building but outside, on the pavements to be precise. Stretches and stretches of pavement slabs were engraved with the names of, and dedications to, the fallen US soldiers, sailors and airmen. There were thousands.
From the museum, and after a rather tall, sweet tea to keep me moving, we began to walk back into the centre. Along the way we came across a large square filled with small tents housing artisans’ arts and craft offerings and a blues band playing in what appeared to be a blues festival. We hung around for a bit and then returned to the Quarter where we had an early dinner in a rather lovely restaurant.
I made short work of getting into bed once I returned to the apartment on Sunday evening. As I lay there, nearly incoherent with exhaustion, I looked back on the weekend and listed my accomplishments: I obviously have an incredible ability to stay awake for extraordinary periods of time and function normally while I do so. 
I have a sweet magnet depicting the iconic image of the US sailor kissing a girl in the midst of the US celebrating the news of the end of the war in the Pacific and I am also the owner of a string of purple, New Orleans beads (go on, work it out) possession of which were on my bucket list and, in an ideal world would have been earned during Mardi Gras but I’m not likely to get to Mardi Gras any time soon because of my work schedule so this made a good alternative. But, best of all, I am glad to say, that I have made a fabulous new friend and I thank him for being my partner in crime over this weekend. We really made a dent in Bourbon Street and the famous New Orleans night life, pot-bellied pigs and Darth Vader included (lol). You know who you are 😉
The good times did, indeed, roll.
E x
Losing Sight of the Margin 