wednesday, september 30th, 2009
headed over to new orleans from washington dc, with a stopover in new york. arrived around dinner time and overheard a hilarious conversation (see here). then got picked up by my couchsurfing host, daryl, and we went rock climbing indoors! it was $10 for like four hours of all-you-can-climb rock climbing. i will admit that it was harder than i initially thought it would be, for sure. i didn’t feel like i was too weak to do it, but the finger dexterity was for sure lacking. but it was somewhere between fun and non-fun, i guess. but yeah, there was a group of people he knew there, and like we got there and i vaguely introduced myself and literally a couple of the people just stared at me. it was kinda fucking weird.
{funny! i’m at this coffee shop in new york’s bushwick neighborhood, and they just started playing this really super epic orchestral music and everyone in the coffee shop is being put on edge, because it was originally this really quiet ambient stuff and now it’s all up in your face, haha. it’s like going through my headphones. funny.}
anyway, went to meet up with daryl’s friends at some coffee shop where they were playing some card game. i’m all for games, but they were quintessential nerds in every sense of the word. like, comic book guy from simpsons style. which is fine. it was funny, though. they were nice enough — well, one of them was. i didn’t care for the other two, really. they were babbling on about nonsense, too, and it wasn’t even funny nonsense, it was just like, “you’re kind of crazy” nonsense, and i happen to like crazy people.
head back after walking around a bit. another couchsurfer chick from france (pictured) was staying there too. daryl definitely had a grudge against her because she is the kind of couchsurfer that kind of stays in a place but doesn’t really wanna hang out with the host, and he’s the complete opposite and pretty much wants to spend tons of time together. that usually isn’t my style, either, but i ended up seeing some pretty cool stuff because of it. but yeah, french couchsurfer chick was funny because she used to work at mcdonald’s in france and she’d been in the states for like, three weeks (or was it three months?) and pretty much ate mcdonald’s EVERY MEAL which is fucking ridiculous, but she said she was doing it to assimilate to american culture, which is even MORE ridiculous.
talked to one of daryl’s roommates for a bit, and she was cool… one of the other roommates had the chillest fucking dog ever! it was like a cat! you could do whatever the hell you wanted to it and it wouldn’t bark or anything. AND it was really cute. jealous, jealous.
thursday, october 1st, 2009
woke up kinda late and went to eat gumbo at this place called coop’s, after dropping off french couchsurfer chick!
daryl! i have to mention that daryl’s house had this message that said basically that you could walk around naked in the space if you wanted to. that being said, he was never naked, and i think it was just so people who wanted to be naked could feel comfortable, but at first i found it kinda weird and later i was like, ah well, probably because he didn’t actually get more naked than underpants.
cool horsehead statue — broken!
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE. in the downtown area.
i love old shit. therefore, i love new orleans. seriously, though, new orleans rules. it’s as foreign country as you’ll get in the united states, i feel like. granted there are some section of the u.s. i haven’t been to yet… but still.
street performer (who gave me a business card — going out of character — and wanted me to send him pics that i took… i still need to do that).
go to the farmer’s market and i snatched myself a harmonica, along with some really cool feathery masks that were only like $2 each or something 
sold by chinese people, of course. they’re always pawning the ridiculous warez.
didn’t even know beads came in so many styles.
who doesn’t want to pull tissue papers out of mr. bean’s ass?
these arent’ the masks i bought, but mine weren’t bad. i noticed after taking these photos that there was a huge sign saying, NO PHOTOS! oops.
need to go to an atm though, and visit an artisan market along the way.
come on, even the grating looks neat.
get driven through a neighborhood called bywater, where some artist has taken it upon himself (i think his name is bob) to name the place “bobwater”. haha. his art and reminders of his art are all over the place. rule.
new orleans = textural old time heaven. i would like to go back, for sure.
went to a store in bobwater and i really fucking wanted this ceramic sculpture. it made me sooo happy. saint with babies for clothes? I LOVE IT! I LOVE IT I LOVE IT I LOVE IT! unfortunately, it was like $30, and i was pretty sure i’d destroy the shit out of it, so i didn’t get to bring it back. but it was soooo awesome. :{
more cool stuff at the heavily mexican-influenced store.
i was kinda in love with this shit… wanted to take home like, all of it.
daryl with mask. this store was a LITTLE too fun.
old school baby stroller of death. doesn’t that look soooo uncomfortable?
best collection of fucking foods, ever!1!
head on over to the lower 9th ward shortly thereafter. these photos below are from a house that has essentially been left unchanged since the hurricane. it’s pretty insane that four years later so much of this shit is still in shambles. the government, i guess, asked people to board up and strip their own houses, but for people who just left and didn’t do it, sometimes no one did it. i think the reasoning is that it’s a bit of a hazard — which i completely believe, because we were in this house for like less than five minutes and i got fucking COVERED with mosquito bites.
not much was moldy other than this particular painting, it seemed.
that on the floor was mud. it was about an inch thick, i wanna say. daryl said his house had like 3-4 inches of mud on the ground. what’s surprising is that the 9th ward got a really low amount of water compared to many other parts of the city… the thing is just that the lower 9th ward was poorer, so there was less chance of people rebuilding than in other parts. like where daryl lived was a bit better off, i guess, so probably like 70% of the houses there were rebuilt (others were like boarded up and left alone). in the lower 9th ward, most of the houses were pretty much still shit or completely stripped and unlivable.
also in the lower 9th ward: new houses brad pitt is building. this one is just hilarious. most of them are modern in design but none of them really looked like this other than this one, haha. some of them were already completed and people were already living in them. the houses were built on super high stilts so that if it flooded again they’d generally be mostly okay. they also had like styrofoam walls and were super light.
fema dog house! how’s that for social commentary!
this is a sign around this gas station we stopped by shortly thereafter. the gas station owner showed a pic which showed how high the water was… it was completely over the top of the gas station. fucking CRAZY.
a whole strip mall full of stores that are like WTF now.
went to lincoln beach shortly thereafter, which is a former beach that isn’t really used now other than by graffiti people, it feels like. this here is what used to be locker rooms — the walls were these pretty brittle tiles, and remnants of those tiles are pretty much everywhere on the ground.
reminds me of the albany bulb in albany, california. i still need to write a blog post about the albany bulb, shit!!!
locker rooms!
that night, met up with dominique who runs blue lace, a music publication thing based in new orleans. wandered around a while. came across this funny headline. went to this “dad” outdoor concert for a bit and then tried to see what other shows were going on but nothing much really.
people are all bout brad pitt for mayor. this was in a local weekly thing.
went onto frenchman street — where there was supposed to be jazz, but there wasn’t this evening. ah, well. bummer. next time. we ate at a restaurant called 13 where they had tater tot nachos — i forget the name but it was a cute name. and it was REALLY delicious. i think they were called tater-tachos?
funny sammich.
a banksy piece, preserved under plexiglass, cuz new orleans has this guy who has been dubbed the gray ghost, and he goes around covering up graffiti everywhere with gray rollers.
we went along the river walk after that, which was alright, same as any.
popcorn that night. see the cob? the popcorn was just an entire dehydrated cob that you put in a paper bag and it all pops. haha. it cost more than a traditional bag of popcorn, but one would think it costs less to make (asides from the organic crappity crap crap).
daryl kinda gave me a guilt trip for wanting to go to bed after all this, but whatever. i was done exploring.
friday, october 2nd, 2009
went to bourbon street in the morning, and got some yummy croissant. it was weird, though, absolutely nothing going on there in the daytime. i didn’t happen to go at nighttime. it’s whatevers. i don’t party anyway. i’m an old lady. was gonna go see “zombieland” with dominique if she went but she ended up not going. ah, well.
also had the most hilarious mocha i’ve ever gotten in my life. i asked for a small and it was literally in one of those teeny tiny styrofoam cups. like, wtf! it was really, really GROSS, too.
