Random things about the trip to New Orleans:
Went to Caf’ Du Monde and tried to do the Sbux thing. ‘I’ll have a mocha with a shot of vanilla.’ But no mocha. No vanilla. You want coffee? They have Caf’ Au Lait. That’s it. You want mocha? Stir in a chocolate bar you buy up the street. However, they do have beignets. Beignets’ damn. Damn damn damn. Best Southern Food Ever. Made me even like Caf’ Au Lait.
I realized after getting there that I didn’t have an adequate bag for my camera with zoom and hate to walk around with it around my neck like some durfy tourist. So I went to the French Market in hopes of getting a bag. I ended up scoring a delightful beaded bag with a monkey on it. Not just any monkey. A FANCY monkey. Wearing a hat and a coat and apparently, it looks like it might rain because she is also sporting a sequined umbrella. The thing that sold me was that the lining of the bag is this sort of Burberry-esque plaid and it also has a little special place to hold my cell phone. Love it. It was $50, but I haggled the guy down to $30, but then I was walking through Saks and saw almost identical bags for $300. Woot! Love my monkey bag!
I was going to take pictures of the monkey around New Orleans, but as I got it less than twenty four hours before I went home, the monkey only had time for a Sbux mocha at the mall. Poor little well-dressed monkey.
One of the cabbies was telling me about Caf’ Du Monde and how he took his in-laws there and they just loved it. This somehow gelled into him asking me how old I was. ‘Thirty One’ I replied and he, at fifty-two, confirmed that this is a good age for women, and that they are only truly becoming a woman then. I agreed with him and said that I’m feeling more comfortable with myself. But he didn’t mean that way, he meant the fortune cookie kind of way’. In Bed. And then he launched into a litany of reasons why men are stupid if they go for skinny chicks because they look like little boys and how they are just following what the fashion magazines tell them, and the fashion designers are all gay men, so why should the world value the opinion of men who aren’t even sleeping with women? Smart men, he opined, liked to be with women who had ‘some meat to them’ and his opinion was that if he liked a woman, then he wanted to sleep with them and he didn’t want a woman with corners. And I could only just sit there and nod, torn between telling him that he was preaching to the choir or covering my ears and going ‘la la la la la’. In the end, he dropped me off wherever it was and said ‘No charge, you’re my first fare of the day and you’re cute.’ And I gave him a $5 tip anyway, which was more than the original fare and said ‘Thank you.’ And even though I think I had just gotten hit upon by a Hindu cabbie old enough to be my father, my hips could help but unleash with a wiggle as I walked away.
I absolutely love sharks. Sharks rock my world. So I made sure to stop at the New Orleans aquarium to see their acclaimed shark exhibit and let me tell you, it was Feh Nominal. Not only do they have a huge wall of aquarium where there are no fewer than five ginormous full fledged man eaters (not those pansy assed nurse sharks as in the Chicago Aquarium), but you can also pet a shark. Sure, it’s a baby, but it’s the coolest thing ever. And its belly feels like a puppy’s belly, all sort of squishy and delicate, but also fat and hungry. And you can stand there at the aquarium wall and the big guys turn and come right at you at eye level and you can look into their crazy orthodontics and their soulless eyes and feel the hair on the back of your head stand up. It was absolutely thrilling. Sharks rock.
Not only are the beignets in New Orleans to die for, but the rest of the food was also exquisite. During our stay, I had in no particular order: red beans and rice, oysters on the half shell (eleven of them, because Esteban decided he didn’t like them, but I love them very much so no complaints from Madame!), double chocolate bread pudding, grilled red fish, steak and eggs, lobster bisque, tenderloin au poivre, poached eggs with asparagus, grilled tomatoes, and biscuits, veal chantalle, crawfish, bananas foster, and things I’ve undoubtedly forgotten. It all reminds me how bland everything is in the Midwest. I hate bland. Damn, now I’m hungry, thinking about all of that food. Yup’ Operation Hottie was definitely on hiatus.
Unfortunately through some huge oversight, Esteban and I only have one picture of ourselves in New Orleans (unless you count the blurry one of me on the Bourbon Street web cam). And this is it. Sad. Very sad.
Oh, and I added pictures to this entry.
Dear Marti Noxon,
I came back from my trip to watch the new episode of Buffy that my TiVo (Ricky Fitts is his name) had so faithfully recorded and found that suddenly, Xander, Willow and Buffy all seem to have developed ESP. I think I speak for every Buffy viewer over the age of fourteen with my concerned query of ‘The Fuck?!?’ Apparently you are partaking of the same hallucinagenics they are on over at ‘Angel’ when they had Cordelia sleep with Connor. Because that could happen.
Oh, and if you make Giles the Evil Dead, I will hate you forever.
Sincerely,
Weetabix
PS. Seriously. For. Ever.
