Landing in New Orleans marked an exciting achievement: I had visited all 50 states! It’s been a fun project. Once I got down to the last ones, there were many that I had been either avoiding or ambivalent to for years that I found much more interesting than I’d expected. I’ll do a proper reflection soon.
Once I got down to my last 12 or so, I determined which one I was saving for last, and that was clearly Louisiana. New Orleans is a great city for a celebration. In fact, this weekend wasn’t just a celebration for the culmination of my goal – it was also my friend Angeli’s birthday!
We had a weekend full of food and drinks and sightseeing planned. New Orleans is a peak foodie city. There are tons of regional specialties, like po’ boys and gumbo and jambalaya and beignets, and we went to a pretty wide variety of restaurants, from incredibly fancy to hole in the wall. Some highlights were Jewel of the South, which was Angeli’s official birthday dinner and was more fine dining; Sun Chong, the Korean-Creole fusion restaurant with some inventive spins on the flavors, and of course, the beignets at Café du Monde, which were everything I had hoped for. In truth, though, we didn’t have a bad meal the entire time we were in the city.
It’s also got great nightlife. I loved the live music that was found at a lot of bars, especially on Frenchmen Street. We avoided Bourbon Street mostly, which seemed like a much more raucous vibe, but there are a lot of other options with good cocktails and more relaxed vibes.
Mostly, though, we walked around a lot. Explored the city. I will say, I was surprised at how small the French Quarter is relative to the total area of the city. In my mind, when I pictured New Orleans, it was most of the city, but there are a ton of other neighborhoods beyond it.
Something interesting we came across while we were there – the Keep IV Waste signs. We saw them everywhere. On buildings, on cars, on trash cans. As it turns out, there is an ongoing battle over waste management in New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter. From what I could glean based on a few articles I read, the county went through a search for a new waste management company and picked one, Henry Consulting. But before they could get started, there were some contractual issues to resolve. In the meantime, while Henry Consulting worked through all of that, the city put together an emergency contract for IV Waste to act as a stopgap. But IV Waste turned out to be amazing, making the city cleaner than it had ever been, and so when the emergency contract period was up, the city rallied behind IV Waste and asked the city to keep them in place over Henry Consulting. It’s a very interesting local drama. Do you know how good a waste management company has to be for citizens to go to bat for them like that?
In August of last year, it was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I ended up watching a documentary about it, called When the Levees Broke, which was absolutely devastating but a very worthwhile watch. It left me with a lot of feelings, but the real takeaway from it was how incredibly resilient New Orleans is. I know people say that it isn’t what it used to be and that it probably never will be, but I think it’s incredible that it’s been rebuilt to the level that it is today. I remember when it happened, but I was young, and I wasn’t necessarily watching the news regularly and understanding the real effects on the people there. After seeing what happened to the city with fresh eyes, I am amazed at the city that stands there today.
We did venture out of New Orleans proper in order to visit the bayou. I was really excited for this tour! It was great to get out and see a bit more of Louisiana, and we got to see so many animals up close and personal.
It’s wild to get that close to alligators. I’ve grown up with a healthy amount of fear of them, since they are very much not native to anywhere I’ve ever lived, and so it’s not an animal that I was ever taught how to interact with safely. I don’t think I register as a snack for them now that I’m not a child, but as the original predator that hasn’t evolved in millions of years, they do still activate that primal instinct.
It was also strange to see all the alligator heads that you could buy at the gift shop. A little jarring, to be honest.
We also took a ghost tour of the city, which was interesting. The guide was great and very knowledgeable about the local history, telling us all kinds of dark stories about what had happened in the city over the years.
We also walked around the neighborhood of Treme, which is generally considered the oldest Black neighborhood in the United States. It was founded in the 1810s and has been a huge part of New Orleans’ cultural history. I found its colorful houses so charming!
We also walked in the downtown area, where there’s a nice walkway along the Mississippi River. No matter how many times I’ve crossed it, I’m always amazed by the scale of it. The transition between the French Quarter and the skyscrapers is strangely abrupt, going from one to the other in course of essentially a block.
In some ways, Louisiana was an interesting choice for my last state because it is so unique. The French influence isn’t as strong anywhere else in the United States, and Louisiana does still have a fundamentally different legal system than the other states in the union. There was something nice about that. Even after going to 49 other states, there are still new things to discover!
New Orleans was a great spot for a long weekend, and an even better one to finish off my goal of going to all fifty states! I will be thinking about the food we had there for a long time.