Big Easy Weekend in New Orleans
The other day I started thinking back to the first time I intentionally picked up a 35mm film camera and realized it was when I purchased a disposable Fujifilm camera for a trip to New Orleans. So naturally, I feel inclined to honor the ~ beginning of it all ~ and write about it.
I traveled to New Orleans for the first time back in 2018. It was my first big girl trip, funded entirely by myself, setting up my first Out of Office notice as corporate fresh meat. I felt like I had achieved a life milestone and was therefore a pretty big deal. My friend and I planned on attending Buku, a 2-day music and arts festival, and otherwise indulging in Cajun food and beignets over an extended weekend.
woke up at 4:30am for my flight out AND took public transportation. Who even is she.
As much as I was stoked to lose myself seeing SZA live, I was also excited to witness Dixieland jazz in person. Growing up, my 9-to-5 manager father would invite me to hang out in coffee shops on the weekends. “Coffee shops” in this instance just mean Starbucks and Costa Coffee across the street from our apartment compound. Both are so commonplace now, but growing up in China conditioned me to fangirl over western franchises. I started going for the frappuccinos, eventually the vanilla/flavored lattes, and finally graduated to regular lattes. As middle school me gradually began to love the taste and smell of espresso, those Sunday afternoons at the coffee shop turned into sacred, studious sessions. Coffee, jazz, and relying on strangers for accountability conditioned a sharp focus I couldn’t find at home. Thus, coffee shops became my Adderall and my haven.
I often envy friends who took music theory classes in high school and wonder if I would appreciate jazz differently if I had taken those lessons, too. From a completely personal and somewhat uneducated lens, jazz carries so much emotional depth yet is so soothing. Seeing jazz musicians perform live is even more mesmerizing. I have endless respect for the manic bassist, drummers, pianists, and saxophone players whose eyes roll into their skulls whilst willingly suffocating and experiencing muscle failure during a set. Their music is more important than breathing. What I thought was a shared opinion of jazz applies to fewer people than I had once assumed. One friend once said jazz sounds completely chaotic and rhythmless. It sounds like noise.
Carrie Bradshaw confessing she doesnt like jazz. SITC S4E4
This photo is still hanging on the wall of Sofar Sounds HQ in NYC :’)
New York to New Orleans is a quick three-hour flight, which we booked according to flight price comparisons on Hopper (I was, and still am, obsessed with booking the cheapest flight possible). We stayed at Mansion on Royal Street, a Creole Louisiana-style mansion-turned-bed-and-breakfast in Marigny, a neighborhood squeezed between the French Quarter to the left and Bywater to the right. My friend and I flew separately. After landing, I took an uber to St. Roch indoor market and tried a cold brew with orange juice and vanilla extract (tt’s sweetness swayed closer to a frappuccino but it’s better than you’d think). I checked in, borrowed a bike from the bnb, and pedaled down a random street towards Bywater. I ended the evening by getting incredibly lost on my way to a rooftop bar for “the most classic French 75” in Storyville, the neighborhood filled with hotel chains ripe and ready to host the next healthcare conference.
The friend I was meeting up with in New Orleans landed around the time I finished that French 75, so I made my way back to the bed and breakfast to meet up with her. I think we went to a jazz show that evening, well at least I have the Instagram story archive to prove we did (it did not look Covid friendly, but what the hell was that in 2018?). We woke up to a gorgeous Friday morning and walked around Marigny, taking in the sun and all the colorful beads from Mardi Gras just a few weeks prior. I dragged us to Commander’s Palace on Washington Ave for lunch. I don’t understand how this place is not talked about more often even outside the city of New Orleans. Commanders Palace has been serving a signature jazz brunch and Creole cuisine from the same bright blue building since 1880. The interior is stereotypical southern chic - white walls, white columns with brown/tan rug, white table linens. Extensive menu aside, they serve martinis for 25 cents during lunch Monday-Friday. TWENTY-FIVE CENTS. I don’t know if that still exists in today’s economy, but tell me where else can I get drunk off my socks for less than a load of laundry. I’ll wait.
I don’t even think I got through my second martini before I was too drunk to be seated. We quickly got ready back at the bed and breakfast and headed out for day 1 of Buku Festival. Our uber driver dropped us off at the staff entrance/loading area, so no one checked our wristbands. The same thing happened the next day.
After resting Friday evening, we went out to Bourbon Street after the festival ended on Saturday. Nothing really prepared me for what nighttime Bourbon Street turned out to be. Here’s my takeaway:
There is SO much garbage everywhere (either from poor city management or the sheer volume of bottles, cups, and cans, or perhaps a combination of both)
The liter-large frozen daiquiris are an epidemic
Every bar flood will try to grab hold of your shoes
ATM fees on this street are a crime
Bourbon street is mayhem, and anything goes. At the end of the night, we stopped at a random hole in the wall for chicken tenders and fries and ended up chatting with a transplant from Hawaii who sounded just as depressed here as he described himself to be in Hawaii.
Sainte Germain House, which according to local lore is resident to a vampire!
I have heard about the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, but seeing the lingering effects more than ten years later is another entirely sobering experience. Most of New Orleans is below sea level but built on man-made levees, which is almost always a recipe for disaster. At its most severe, 80% of the city was underwater. Over in Mississippi, the storm drowned three-story buildings. Despite the relatively low death toll, an estimated 400,000 people were left homeless. The city reported an estimated loss of $125 billion. After being picked up from the Airport, I asked my Uber driver about his experience with Katrina. He gave a brief pause, pointed to the highway we were driving over and said, “you see this highway? This part of the highway was completely underwater.”
Buku is truly the perfect festival to add an extended weekend trip to because unlike most festivals, it’s only two days and it’s always on Friday and Saturday, giving you Sunday to recover by strolling around the city which is exactly what we did. Those beignets deserve their own morning.
Standing inside Cafe du Monde felt like being inside a museum. It’s so much bigger than you would expect, and the staff works in organized chaos with plates, beignets, and coffee mugs stacked on every surface with their own intended destination. Somehow, orders are fulfilled and everyone’s day moves on. Between my friend and I, we have no idea how we managed our blood sugar levels in New Orleans.
I have a theory that they keep the coffee extra strong and bitter at Cafe du Monde to balance out the powdered sugar on the beignets.
From Cafe du Monde, we walked to Jackson Square then back to French Quarter for gumbo and voodoo shops, then over to the Garden District to see the Buckner Mansion, which was used as the location for Miss Robicheaux’s Academy in American Horror Story: Coven. You can find a full list of Coven location guides in New Orleans here.
If you get a chance to bike in New Orleans, I would highly recommend it as an immediate activity. The city is relatively flat so there’s no need to worry about inclines, and it’s such a more interactive and restorative way to see different neighborhoods. Imagine biking down Royal Street on a Sunday, feeling the sun on your face, and hearing live jazz come from every other open bar; Imagine pedaling towards an endless tunnel of hundred-year-old oak trees down Esplanade Avenue. I think about that memory now and then.
Bourbon Street is a mayhem, but the rest of New Orleans is full of magic and weird. I wish for New Orleans to grow into a more splendid arts and music epicenter, attracting more talented artists to revitalize and rehabilitate the city.
RESTAURANTS
J’s Creole Wings
Satsuma Cafe
The Joint
Elizabeth’s
Peewee’s Crabcakes
Willa Jean (biscuits!!)
STAY
ATTRACTIONS/ACTIVITIES
Studio Be
Preservation Hall
Longue Vue House & Gardens
