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French Quarter Fest
This is where you will find us today and what a beautiful day it is.
Had written a lot about 5 minutes ago and lost it all. So this is going to be short as I have things to do, places to go. Hurricanes to drink. HA! Hurricanes are wonderful but they have a tendency to make my eyes cross. So I think I will stick to something a little more benign like margaritas!
Cafe du Monde has turned into our favorite 5PM place. Big breakfast around 11 or so, then coffee and biegnets at 5 and then dinner around 8 or 9. Thanks for the suggestion Linkmeister--it was going to be either Commanders tonight (Kate’s suggestion) or Antoine’s--but now I think we are going to play it by ear, maybe go into one of the little places along the French Market since we will be in that area all day. Need to do a little shopping today too as we leave early tomorrow morning.
We are at the Hilton Riverside and our room is right on the riverside. What a wonderful view to wake up to each day - this river is one busy place.
SO NOLA has lived up to my expectations, have thoroughly enjoyed it. Would I come back again? Probably not. I wish I had come here 20 years ago when it would have been perfectly normal to drink and party 24/7. Now not so much. Restrooms are skanky though and that really is annoying Cuts down on the drinking part though!! Some are fine, some are horrible and more than a few have been disgusting. Oh well adds to the experience though.
Gotta run, have a great day, I should be back to posting my usual nonsense by Sunday or Monday, I think,
OH, one more note.........there is a Republican leadership conference here at the same hotel we are staying at. They all came in yesterday. Never seen so much red in one place in my life. Someone who operates one of the tour company said to me, you are not part of that Republican group are you? I said, lord no. She said good, cause we are never happy when they are around, they are the tightest, the stingiest, the most unpleasant group. I said they are Republicans, what do you expect? She goes, well if Michael Steele had not spent all that money in bondage clubs, maybe they would have a little more to spread around in tips and things. I laughed.
That discussion led into one about the fact that racism is alive and thriving here in this country....there was more but I do not have time for it all now. Suffice to say it was a good conversation, an interesting one!!
Ciao’
For a bunch of uptight family values no-fun crotchety stingy people, the Republicans surely do pick the hottest, liveliest spots in the country for their conventions. Why is that, do you suppose? ;)
Rather than giving their tourism dollars over to temptation, sin, and vice, I should think they’d be happier in a nice hotel in a nice safe moral Bible-belt location overlooking cornfields. Somewhere in the heartland where all the good people live and the sidewalks roll up at 5pm.
I heard on NPR yesterday that they were descending on New Orleans and wondered if you’d run into any of them. Lucky you.
I wonder how many of those Republicans wandered out to the Ninth Ward to check out their former leader’s handiwork in “restructuring” New Orleans. The term “vanishingly small” comes to mind when pondering that probability.
Unless, of course, there’s a lesbian bondage club there.
That made coffee come squirting out my nose. LOL. Well, the ninth ward has squicky people living there so I don’t imagine the Goopers would go there even with a five star (??) bondage club. Besides, they can get pretty close to that on Bourbon Street without having to mingle much.
I know it’s too much to expect that they might have chosen another place for their conference after being so vocal about not wasting money rebuilding New Orleans. They really are relentlessly blind to their own hypocrisy.
I understand Newt was in NO. Ick. A friend of mine asked me the other day why I thought Newt had maintained his “respectability” after cheating on his cancer stricken wife (including serving papers on her while she was in hospital) while Edwards is pretty much toast without hope of reviving a shred of his former glory (not that I think he should...). It all comes down to IOIYAR. Still, someone needs to be able to adequately explain why they repeatedly prove the IOIYAR thing, followed by the DETAIIYAD corollary. It’s bizarre for a God-fearin’ sin-hatin’ party.
Kate: Gee, I wondered about that myself--Kansas would be a much better choice. Could not possibly be that old double standard at work now, could it?
Yes, we ran into them....repeatedly. As I think I mentioned some of the people who work in the area were doing some major grumbling and commented about how tight they all are and stingy and picky and rude and I could go on and on. I agree, they would not go out to the 9th ward under any circumstances cause then they would be faced with what happened and Bourbon Street was just a trolley ride or a fairly short walk away. I really wanted to hang out on Bourbon St with my camera but a wiser person prevailed!! ;)
But they sure did take over the casino, drinking and smoking and god knows what else. Imagine that......
We got back late on Thursday so decided to have dinner at Drago’s which is in the Hilton. Well, the place was a sea of red. We were surrounded and out numbered. The table next to us was all women and the haggling over the bill made me want to pay for their dinners - no wait, soup for some, salad for some and appetizers for others - no dinners although they took up a lot of space and time - but we could not help hearing them nickle and dime each other, I think they even argued over the tip. The whole place was like that and the waiters and waitresses were working their butts off for probably little or no reward.