NOLA is NEATO

Georgia and I just came back from a trip to New Orleans to celebrate my birthday. We had a wonderful time and I felt like we owed you all a play by play of our three whirlwind days in the Big Easy. They call it that because life is easy down there in that sweaty, sultry wonderland. I guess. No one really was able to explain it to us. We didn’t care, actually.

We like our cities the way Georgia likes her men. Easy.

“Why New Orleans?”  I might hear you all asking, if I had some sort of super hearing… like Aquaman.

Well, lets see what the possibilities are.

The architecture?

Yeah right. We went for the architecture.

Nope. Don’t care about architecture. “Ooh look! That house has a porch. That house has three windows in front and….wait for it….that house over there has FOUR!!!”

We probably don’t know enough about it to be aficionados….but we’re pretty sure when it comes to roofs, floors and porches…all buildings are pretty universal.

I think I just pissed off Georgia’s uncle Barry, the architect. There goes Thanksgiving.

Was it the music? 
Excellent guess. We ARE, in many ways, musicians, so you would think we went there for the crazy sounds of Bourbon Street.

Nope. We are from Nashville. Walking down a crowded street listening to bands in bar windows playing 38 Special is nothing new to us. Now, we did stop and listen to some bands playing in the streets that had tubas in them. That’s kind of cool. There are no tubas in 38 Special so we had to stop and listen. 

Let’s cut to the chase.
It was for the food.

Georgia and I decided we were going to sample the cuisine sensibly and with an eye on our diet and our health at all times. There is a way to enjoy the local food and not go overboard and come home with extra pounds and a stomach full of regret. So that’s what we tried to do.

Wait…I just reread that last paragraph and I would like to correct a few typing errors.

We ate everything. We ate ALL of everything. If we could chase it and take it down…we ate it. We ate an entire mounted policeman. Cop. Horse. Taser. We picked our teeth with his baton. We ate all the oysters that were in the city limits and then we ordered in three dozen from Mississippi.

Beignets. Do you know what beignets are? They’re friggin’ DONUTS, Dude!!! They come four to a plate but they don’t have any limits on how many plates you can stack at your table at one sitting. To the ceiling. Twelve beignets and a diet coke and you are buzzing for six hours. We timed it. Georgia ended up so hopped up on sugar that she chased a tuba player down Royal street and made him cry.

We lied to every restaurant and told them it was my actual birthday just so they would keep bringing us free stuff. Eating stuff!! A pile of cotton candy the size of Andre the Giant’s head. With a candle stuck to it. A lit candle!! One waiter trips and it’s all over! And….hold on. I buried the lead.

Under the cotton candy was a piece of cake.
Now if the architecture had a cotton candy roof and, inside the house, there was cake? 
Ich bin ein Architect.

Sure, we had to get those seat belt extenders for the flight home. Sure, I’ve got this weird tingling in my extremities now. Sure, we spent six hundred dollars on a new cotton candy machine. 

But someone should have warned us.

NOLA is NEATO!!!!

– Gary