New Orleans II, Part 5 - The Holiday Special*

*In honor of a certain princess who passed away recently, I am going to call this post "The Holiday Special." Let's hope it lives up to that name (ahem).

It's been a few weeks since you last heard from me and holidays are the main reason for that. I already told you about Halloween, but that debauchery was followed closely by Thanksgiving, which was in turn followed by another crazy holiday that somehow manages to draw a straight line from the birth of a beloved religious figure to this:

Might as well turn it up to 11.

Anyhow, between those two important holidays I went on a short trip to New York and Pennsylvania, because why not. Let's get to it:

Soon after recovering from all the Halloween shenanigans I had to make a decision: what to do for Thanksgiving? I'd heard from multiple, independent sources (I take a strictly journalistic approach to such matters), that this holiday was kind of a big thing here in the States. Also, I was advised to do my best and con my way into a Thanksgiving family dinner. I managed to do just that: Mike (good friend/former roommate/lovely Lisa's lovely husband/best photographer ever) had invited me to celebrate Thanksgiving with him and his family in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. I found out, however, that airlines are greedy bastards had caught a whiff of that Thanksgiving thing too and charged about three times as much as they usually do for a New Orleans-New York ticket. I decided to postpone that trip and look for an alternative way to spend this year's fourth Thursday in November. And thus, this happened:

Missy, Theresa, Sarah and yours truly looking dapper.

Apparently, people who don't have a lot of family in this city at one point decided to get together and do the next best thing: put on fancy hats, pack a few flasks of cheap liquor, gather at the race tracks and bet on horses with funny names. It was dandy. Mighty Manfred won back the money I'd sunk into Don Quixote (could've seen that one coming), with every desperate gulp my well-tempered whiskey tasted more pristine and I saw at least half a dozen people wearing their potted plants as hats. We rounded off the day by eating our body weight in turkey and I passed out at about 9.30pm. Not sure this was quite the authentic Thanksgiving experience, but I'll definitely take it. What a fantastic holiday.

About a week later I embarked on my postponed trip to see Mike. Brilliant planner that I am, I decided to add a short detour to my trip to PA and visit my favorite aunt in New Paltz, NY. Incompetent executioner of plans that I am, I managed to revisit an old tradition of mine and oversleep on the day of my departure. I wanted to get up at 5am, get a shower, have breakfast and greet Jacob, the Innsbruck student's designated airport driver** with a nice cup of coffee. Well, I woke up around 6.15am, after about thirty minutes of him banging at my door and an hour away from my departure time. "Nothing a whole bunch of deodorant and a Snickers bar or two can't fix," I thought and offered J-Cab™ some extra cash and my first born child by way of an apology. Thankfully, he declined (which is good, as I'm not entirely positive I haven't promised my first born to somebody else before). Some people are just too good for this world.

Anyway, about twelve hours and a brief pit stop in NYC later ...

Hello, my love. I've missed you.

... I arrived at my aunt's doorstep.

Gabriela and me had already planned this trip back in August when she took Maria and me on a hiking trip up to the Mohonk reserve:

Ignore the bear, that's a different story.

Once a year, in early December, the luxury hotel you see in the picture above hosts a "Community Week," and invites locals to spend the day there for free and enjoy some quality time with a good book in front of a fire place, to go for a spin on the ice skating rink, play some pool and gorge themselves on free cookies. Which is ...

... exactly ...

... what ...

... we ...

... did.

Then it was finally time to visit Mike and his family in Dillsburg. I was greeted with open arms and plenty of holiday decoration. The Kimmels definitely know how to properly Christmas:

When has less ever been more?

Which is good, because it feels like New Orleans really only has a rough idea about what this "Christmas" thing actually is that all the kids keep on making such a fuss about. But I get it - it can be difficult to get into a proper mood for Christmas when it's 25 degrees outside (that's Celsius), so it only makes sense to abandon all pretense and go full-on Grinch on this holiest of seasons.

Happy Holidays, everybody!

** I'm still pushing for him to adopt the moniker J-Cab. Folks, you heard it here first.

New Orleans II, Part 4

Can we ignore the orange elephant in the room for just a second? I know, it's not easy, but a lot of good things have happened right around the time America woke up to the sound of the doomsday bell ringing and I'm trying to separate these memories from that bad national hangover. There will be plenty to say in the future, I'd imagine. 

So let's rewind the clock and go back to a time when things were still alright. I had just gotten back from my trip to Vegas and San Francisco ...

Which was awesome, thank you very much!

... and I found myself with about a week and a half of breathing room before a flurry of friends and family were about to descend upon my quiet little apartment on Waldo Drive. On Wednesday before Halloween, Andrea, one of my best friends from high school, and her friend Anita arrived here. That gave them about 24 hours to brace themselves for storm front Alex (aka my cousin) that was rapidly approaching New Orleans. Signs pointed towards an interesting weekend, to say the least. 

Pictured: the promise of an interesting weekend.

Friday: We started off nice and slow with some live music (duh), a drink or two (or three) and delicious gumbo at a place called Roux Carre in Central City. The band was called Joy Clark and Friends and once Joy (nomen est omen, I tell you) found out that she had German speakers in the audience, she surprised us with this little gem:

All it took was a semester abroad in Graz.

This was followed by a selection of New Orleans' finest: more live music, a gory burlesque show ("Make Vampires Great Again!") and a spontaneous but fateful nightcap at the neighboring karaoke bar. The girls had picked a pretty sweet weekend to visit New Orleans!

Saturday: They also seemed to enjoy the following Saturday, which is strange, as they did not spend it with me. While I was busy taking in all the beauty that is Voodoo Fest ...

Including an unforgettable headlining gig by Tool.

... they celebrated girl's night out with Theresa, who devoted a whole blog entry to their adventures. 

Sunday: I woke up at about 5am to the sound of Alex trying to knock our front door off its hinges. I hadn't seen him in a while (Friday morning, actually), so that was a nice surprise. He seemed to be wearing nothing other than (or under) his Deadpool morph suit and all I had heard from him the previous days came from a stray text message that let me know that he'd apparently left his phone at a casino. Naturally, I was quite curious to hear how he was doing. My requests in that regard were only answered by loud snoring though, and by the time we woke up a few hours later his memory wasn't exactly top notch. Looks like his exploits will stay shrouded in mystery until Wikileaks releases the records. Oh well.

None of this stopped any of us from having a great time at the final day of Voodoo Fest. It already started off pretty great with Alex-as-Deadpool cutting off his leg in a crowded bus and then casually striking up conversations with our fellow bus travelers. 

Not that anybody in this town truly raises an eyebrow at this point.

That day, Voodoo Fest ended early, so I finally had the chance to catch some sleep went for "one last drink" to Frenchmen, which started off a nightly Halloween odyssey that began at a Vampire Masquerade Ball and only got weirder and more fascinating from there. 

Monday: Needless to say, I had a great day at work the following morning. Now it was officially Halloween (not sure what we'd been celebrating so far), and that meant: time for our costumes.

I put on my makeup right after taking that picture. 

The South Tyrolean marching band "Chemietuttn" (don't ask, I don't know) got us into the perfect mood for a night that ended a little more Halloween-y.

Never have I been more appropriately dressed for two occasions that were as wildly different as that. 

Tuesday (who are we kidding, this is all still part of Halloween weekend): Again, I had a great and productive day at work. Then I went home and for the first time ever watched Grease. I did this with three girls who sang along throughout the whole movie and I can't even begin to describe how much fun that was. 

Eventually bidding Andrea, Anita and Alex farewell was not an easy thing to do. Luckily, I had the best medicine in the world delivered straight to my doorstep: Ecuadorian princess (look it up, I dare you) and one-time NoLa resident Eileen decided to grace me and this city with her presence once again. However, she and Gladys, a friend of hers, were in the middle of recovering from their trip to Chicago (nothing much going on there), which probably contributed to her getting sick about a day into their New Orleans trip. This meant that we had to take it down a notch, even though that notch still included yet another burlesque show, a haunted house tour and Joy Clark at her usual best. Those were sad hours indeed when she and Gladys finally had to head out on Monday afternoon. I haven't seen the sky here cry so hard over someone leaving ever since yours truly rushed to the airport in June 2011. Girls, I'll miss you!

This concludes my Halloween update. I still have to tell you about my awesome job, our trip to the Whitney plantation and I've got a thing or two to say about the new president - but not today. Today's a good day and thinking about memories I have with people I love has got me convinced that everything is going to be alright again.

Let's keep it optimistic, shall we?

New Orleans II, Part 3

So in my last post, I used this little platform here to dish out an illustrious assortment of assumptions, impressions, and other rather vague ideas about what might reasonably have been New Orleanian geography (jury's still out). Of course, being somewhat acquainted with teaching methods of higher education (geographical proximity to actual teachers counts, right?), I didn't put you through this mess just for the fun of it. In this post, we're going to use all the information that we've gathered about various aspects of local Louisiana geography and talk about ...

Vegas! What did you think?

Right after I finished the last post, I hopped on a plane to Las Vegas to visit Sebbl, former leader of the great band Beyond Repair (nomen est omen) and gravitational center of my home town's circle of friends. Sebbl works for a company that is famous for having suicidal athletes advertise their magical energy drink that allegedly makes you fly. So it was only natural that his job would take him into Las Vegas. Said company staged two major events in the States in October and Sebbl and Paul, a friend and co-worker of his, decided to spend the time in between visiting the natural treasures known as Grand-, Zion-, Bryce- and Antelope Canyon. They only had to beg a little bit before I agreed to accompany them. The three of us joined forces in a Vegas hotel room, lit a few bucks on fire twenty stories below in the hotel's casino, tried to take in some of the glittering insanity that is the Strip and went to bed early like the responsible adults that we apparently turned out to be. I'm not even kidding, we were in bed by midnight. It's downright scary what growing up does to you.

But there's only so much fun you can have with responsibility, so the next day we went to Cruise America's headquarters and rented a 30x14x10 feet RV (10x4x3 m) for the three of us, because we're in America now and this is how America rolls. 

We called it Bigly.

There is no way my words could convey the beauty that we saw on our trip. Neither could pictures, but Sebbl and Paul tried so adorably hard anyway, it would be a shame not to give you a small selection: 

Woke up like this!

Somewhere in Arizona we turned into a boy band, apparently.

Based on an actual picture.

We're standing on four different states! Four States! You had to be there.

I see a cigarette!

Also out west people are getting ready for Halloween.

A few additional observations from the road:

• it's good to feel the cold again after months of humid Louisiana heat, but freezing at night gets old rather quickly
• a night sky in the desert is beautiful, and so is waking up to breathtaking landscapes when you parked your car in the dark the previous night
• I don't have a comparison, but it sure felt as if we passed the African savanna, endless Canadian forests and the red Australian deserts in the four hours it took us to get from Utah to Colorado
• Colorado actually smells like weed
• the roof of an RV supports two people at a time
• climbing on that roof to log onto a neighboring hotel's WiFi from 200 yards away across half a Walmart parking lot to watch the second debate in 144p did not quite pay off
• I didn't recognize the Grand Canyon. I mean, I knew what I was staring at, but I didn't recognize it from any pictures I'm sure I must have seen somewhere. Which is odd, as it's such a well-known landmark
• we met our trip's nicest waitresses at a diner on Route 66 that proudly encourages customers to "openly carry." World, we talked about this!

Needless to say, it was an amazing trip. Only thing was, it ended to soon (amazing trips tend to do that, don't they). After eight days on the road, we arrived back in Las Vegas. That gave me five days to explore the city on my own (Sebbl and Paul had to work), which resulted in me running out of ideas about forty minutes into day two. I don't gamble, didn't have enough spare cash to watch any of the surely incredible shows and with two guys who have to get up at six in the morning, partying wasn't really an option. I took a bus downtown to see what Las Vegas had to offer besides the Strip and the main attraction there turned out to be a slightly run down and cheap looking copy of the Strip (which I'm sure must make sense to someone). On my way back to the hotel I stopped in Chinatown (kind of cool, actually) ...

They found the West, alright.

... and then decided to get on a different bus and kept going until the neighborhood stopped blinking. I think I just don't get Vegas. 

Anyway, never one to brood (haha), I decided to take this opportunity and do what any sane person would do in a situation like that: I bought a 24h ticket to San Francisco. One of my oldest Friends, Flo, was there, visiting his girlfriend Christina. In what essentially was a touristic equivalent to a theatrical teaser trailer I got just the right mix of familiar faces, new and exciting images and a quick glimpse at the money shot to absolutely make me want to come back to get the full experience. What a first impression! 

I'm getting Vertigo just looking at it. Get it?

I hugged Flo and Christina goodbye, did a quick detour by getting on the wrong streetcar, miraculously made it to the airport, caught my plane and yet arrived at my hotel in Vegas just in time to see the staff lock up the pool area. That city really has issues. 

Mr. Cave, take it away:

New Orleans II, Part 2

Alright, I need to set the stage here. Do me a favor and click on this link. You hear that? That’s New Orleans music for you. Coming straight from WWOZ, which I've heard is a pretty well regarded radio station around here (don’t quote me on that though; with a grand total of 49 days in this city I’m still a month or two away from getting to call myself an expert on local music and heritage). Anyway, the music is great and the callsign WWOZ stands for Wonderful Wizard of Oz, so there really is no reason for you not to be listening to it right now. Which means we can commence with today’s lesson:

Geography
If you’re anything like me, you just winced at that word. Geography is annoying, complicated and unlike other, more decent sciences such as physics, it's dickish enough to get you ridiculed if you’re not good at it. I don’t like it, is what I’m saying. Anybody who’s ever been with me on a trip to a place that’s not my hometown can attest to that. And for a long time, I’ve quite successfully dealt with this issue like any problem-oriented grown-up would and put all my effort into ignoring it until it went away.

Then came one unflattering moment in February 2013 when I discovered that I’d always misjudged the Mississippi’s flow direction. That’s almost two years after I spent an entire semester in New Orleans in 2011. Not one of my proudest moments. I vowed to remedy that by working on trying to understand New Orleans geography, should I ever get another chance (not knowing I would return to the city in 2016 and actually have to make good on that promise). Which brings us here. Now that you know what got us into this mess (damn you, Mississippi) let’s get this over with:

Maps have something to do with geography, right?

This is New Orleans. Not sure if you’ve ever seen a map of New Orleans before (I certainly hadn’t before I first got here). Not only does it raise questions about how I was ever able to confuse that damn river’s flow direction, it shows some other pretty interesting details as well. For instance, what the hell is that straight line in the middle? Oh that’s just Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the world’s largest continuous bridge over water, no big deal:

Driving north ...

... and looking back towards New Orleans.

38km of pure joy that connect New Orleans with the North Shore communities. The North Shore is home to Fountainbleau State Park, the very popular local Abita brewery and that lovely gentlemen in camouflage I introduced you to in the last post.

The lake itself spans over 1600km2, which means you could fit just about 5 Lake Neusiedls in there (it's also very shallow, only a few meters deep on average). In one of its darker moments, it was the origin of most of the water that flooded the city during Hurricane Katrina, as the storm pushed so much water into the lake that the sub-standard levees couldn’t hold the pressure and broke. The water itself is brakish, somewhat smelly and reportedly houses alligators. This might be not such a bad thing, as UNO and its student dorms are located right at the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain and alcohol induced skinny dipping sounds like a bad idea, even without any alligators.

If we take a closer look at the city itself, it becomes quite clear that UNO is not really at the center of things. I’ve highlighted some of the cool stuff in this section and you’ll notice that there’s a vast stretch of housing that separates us from downtown New Orleans.

Details in no particular order: 1. Algiers, 2. French Quarter (with Bourbon Street), 

3. this is where I play volleyball!, 4. Frenchmen Street, 5. Bywater

This helps, of course, once exam time hits, but mostly it just makes doing fun stuff annoyingly inconvenient. Not too many students here (at least the ones from Innsbruck) have cars, busses leave once or twice an hour (depending on some astrological calculations I don’t understand) and bikes only get you so far. Thankfully, the city center’s gravitational pull is pretty strong and so sooner or later, everybody finds their way into town.

Who could resist that?

Most people who are new to New Orleans will start off by visiting the area around the French Quarter. Very famous, very tourist-y. It's where Bourbon Street is located. This epicenter of sleepless party nights is infamous, expensive and it feels like locals only go there to work or rip off tourists, but you know what you sign up for. It’s the do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-you-pay-for-it part of town - weird and sticky, but at least it’s unapologetically so.

If Bourbon Street is your charming trans aunt with an alcohol problem that keeps stealing money from your piggy bank, then Frenchmen street is your friend's dad who tells stories about the time he was your age. Yes, he has a regular income now, but when he gets out that bass guitar, he still plays it like a damn pro. It’s so much fun to be there, but again - most locals will be on stage. I'm not entirely sure yet how to feel about this. On the one hand, this place is famous for good music, so there will always be an endless supply of fantastic musicians. That again draws insane numbers of tourists, which, of course, is the last thing you want to see, as a tourist. The whole thing is very schizophrenic. There's plenty of great music outside of Frenchmen Street too, of course (Tremé Fall Fest was great!), but at the end it's the easiest way to catch a few live bands, especially if you don't have a car. However, it does feel a little bit strange to be part of an almost entirely white audience in a town that is about 60 percent African American. Makes you feel as if your part of a hard to define problem, and that’s not a particularly good feeling.

Which kind of brings me to St Claude and the Bywater. In our analogy, that area would be your friend’s hipster cousin. It’s where much of the artsy stuff happens right now. College crowd. Often great, sometimes over the top, all of it weird.

Not quite HD, but a good example of what I'm talking about.

I love so much of what’s going on there (how could I not? I’m a 28-year old student from Austria!). But I also didn’t grow up here and saw my neighborhood slowly being turned upside down and made unaffordable by a buch of kids from out of town. Right next to the Bywater is the Lower 9th Ward, which was almost obliterated during Katrina. And now the Upper 9th is falling victim to gentrification. Many of the people who originally came down here to help, fell in love with the city and stayed, bringing all their money, education and artistic sensibilities with them in the process. It's a very unsatisfying situation. I like my problems clear-cut and easy and this is very much not that.

And so I’m sitting here on a bench overlooking the Mississippi, thinking too much about problems people way smarter than me haven’t been able to solve. “What a great use of my time here,” I ponder and melodramatically glance across the river. And do you know what’s across the rive? A neighborhood called Algiers. Algiers, which is really only reachable by ferry and therefore has very little tourism. They call it "New Orleans' best kept secret". I take the ferry and spend a pretty cool day there in the midst of weird gardens, cool cafés, friendly people and fantastic live music at a place called Old Point Bar. I know I have to catch the last ferry at ten, but that’s quite alright. It’s a small price to pay for getting away from slightly distracting musings about annoying things such as tourism, gentrification and most of all, that bastard geography.

Found it!

New Orleans II, Part 1

I tried so hard to come up with a cool way to sell this, but let's be honest - there's nothing cool about what I'm about to do. So here goes nothing: Welcome to my comeback tour! Due to popular demand by one person (Margaret Davidson, my former boss at the American Corner Innsbruck, asked me to continue a tradition started by Maria Hitzginger - only the best person in the world - and give occasional updates about my time abroad) you'll once again have to deal with the irregular, incoherent and yet hopefully irresistible ramblings of a young-ish Austrian guy who tries to make sense of the beautiful mess that is New Orleans, Louisiana. Two important modifications though: as this is commissioned work for the American Corner, it'll be in English and there will be significantly less pictures of naked people. If you're disheartened by either of these changes, please scroll down a few pages. The old posts are still up, and really - what's the difference between a 23 year old student going abroad for the first time and a 28 year old PhD candidate with a couple of hundred bucks and a third of a crappy dissertation to his name and nothing but 10 months here that separate him from either finding a paying gig in the welcoming world of academia or moving back into his mum's attic. Am I right?

Cheers!

But I digress. Through the thundering noise of chirping crickets and a few family members and friends frantically trying to close this tab that I've tricked them into opening, I can hear some of you rhetorically asking what brought me yet again to this lovely little Crescent City, deep in the American South. Well, I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to finish my dissertation here at UNO's Center Austria. Now, some of you might be wondering what it is I'm actually working on, but even my mum tends to zone out a minute or two into my ever-changing attempts at answering that question, so here's the SparkNotes version: "18th century piracy in the Mediterranean - American captives in North Africa - captivity narratives reflecting and shaping early American identity." There's no immediate connection to New Orleans (except for weirdly named neighborhoods like Algiers, Tunisburg and Arabi, which I plan to look into), but I'm actually getting money and resources to work on my dissertation, so I'm not complaining. But none of you are here to read about reading, so let us move on to more pleasant topics. How's life in the Big Easy?

After a tumultuous last few weeks in Austria and a sweet little road trip in and around New York that involved a birthday party in Manhattan for Lisa (yes, that Lisa! Hope you didn't think I'd get rid of the best gift New Orleans ever gave me*), visiting my lovely aunt in Upstate New York and Mike and Lisa's wedding reception in Dillsburg, PA ...

Finally I can cross that off my bucket list!

... I arrived here in New Orleans. And what can I say? It's still the same old whacky city, only twice as hot. 

Nothing new on the stop signs front, they still don't work here.

I love my apartment, my roommate is great, and my new Center Austria family (Günter, Theresa and our guardian angel Gertraud) made me feel right at home. I don't have to take any classes (which is good, as student fees have just about doubled in the last five years), but I've visited some of my old professors (yes, I'm that kind of student) and everybody was extremely welcoming and super helpful in terms of burying me in books I absolutely have to (!) read for my research. I don't study all the time though. A glance at my finances tells me I'm doing my best to single-handedly take care of all monetary problems that the musicians and bar owners at Frenchmen Street might have to struggle with, so there's that. Also, I've been to a house party or two that may or may not have been shut down by the police. And I saw so much love (and indecent exposures of public nudity) during the gay pride insanity that is Southern Decadence, it made me almost question my fondly held belief in the stereotypically schizophrenic relationship some people down here seem to have with religion and all things sex. Thankfully the cavalry marched in just in time and had me know by way of beautifully designed cardboard-signs that God does indeed still hate fags. Wouldn't want to break with old traditions now, would we?

As promised, no nudity. Just pretty flags and a little bit of hatred.

In short, I'm having a grand time. There are two things that I did want to mention though, before ending this little introduction: One, last time I was here, I wrote a blog about the unbelievable experience that is a student's first semester abroad. This is not that, and never could be. To make up for that, I'll try and add bits and pieces about the city itself. A little history here, some culture there, let's see how this plays out. I don't have any kind of special knowledge about New Orleans, but I'm curious by nature, so maybe I'll come across some fun facts that are worth sharing. 

Second, you might have noticed that politically, these are interesting times indeed. Elections are coming up in November and it's pranksters like this friendly fellow in the picture below (not their actual faces!) wearing a #blackgunsmatter shirt, who get to decide whether or not they would like to give Joker's vicious little cousin a shot at steering this country head-first into the apocalypse: 

"This should be fun!"

If not actually pleasant, witnessing all of this should at least be an interesting experience, and maybe I can get across some of the craziness that might start happening soon (it's been eerily quiet so far). 

So yeah, this is what you're about to get into, should you choose to stay with me on this trip. If not, I'll have another nice journal to keep track of my experiences here, so no hard feelings. There will be sporadic quizzes though, so don't say I didn't warn you. Let me know if you have any questions or comments, but please be gentle - it's been a while. Alright, that's it for now, see you next month!

* Don't worry, Eileen, you're amazing, and we love you to bits. But Lilo just married, so let her be princess for a couple of days!