I went back to ohio
But my city was gone...All my favorite places...
Reduced to parking spaces
A, o, way to go ohio
- Chrissy Hynde
No way could you guess, with a post that starts by quoting from "My City Was Gone" by the Pretenders, that this is a re-cap of my adventures in travelling to New Orleans last week for a three day conference about "Securing Ones' supply chain, in a post 9/11 environment."
See, I used to hang out in N.O.
A lot.
When you live find yourself living on the MS gulf coast, scratching your head, mumbling "what was I thinking" over and over and over, there's really nothing better to do on a quiet Saturday than get in the car, and....drive somewhere else.
80 minutes from my driveway to the public parking lot adjascent to the Ajax Brewery building.
but by getting so far behind myself, I'm getting ahead of my self, which ruins a good story.
First of all, I have something to confess. I'm on the federal naughty flyers list.
Not me, actually, but someone who plays me on TV.
No. Wait...
Someone who has the same name as me.
My evil twin, if you will.
And I'm getting pretty darn tired of him, cuz he's fowled up e-ticketing for me since 2005.
So after the usual song and dance
("Oh! you're the good _____ _____, not the bad one!" from the United ticket agent),
My boss and I make our way through a crowded, hostile airport to our gate. Hostile because every flight outboundto NY, Philly, DC and such were cancelled due to weather.
The company bought me a nice chicken sandwich from Mcdonalds, flight left without problem, and we arrived in N.O around 5:30.
stepped outside.... 85 degrees and air so thick you can spread it on toast.
yep. Just like I remember it.
My T.C. is a good guy. But he doesn't like being warm. and he gets warm REAL easy.
So the un-airconditioned shuttle ride to the French Quarter Marriott was not any fun.
to speed up this story:
made it to hotel, checked in, waited 30 minutes whilst my traveling companion wrassled with his room's internet connection, and finally got out.
And discovered...
all the places I used to go, all the places the wife and I would make sure to take guests when they'd come visit us in MS and we'd drive over to N.O. for the day, all the places that made N.O. worth the drive and the time to us.....
gone.
(hence the Pretenders quote)
The Magic Bus, the very best used CD store in America? gone.
La Madeline's french pastry and coffee shop? gone.
O'Flagerty's Irish Pub? gone.
The French Market grocery and flea market? gone?
you guessed it.
if the businesses were backed with corporate money, they weathered the post storm lack of tourism dollars far better, obviously, than local merchants, and this was obvious, everywhere I went.
As example, every hotel made sure to draw attention to the fact that they "proudly serve Starbucks".
I half expected to see Cafe Du Monde, the century old coffee shop, whose coffee you can buy worldwide, advertise this.
Larry Flynt was doing his part to bolster the local economy, as was the owners of the Coyote Ugly chain.
The # of crap T-shirt shops and take out Daquiri stands has quadrupled.
N.O. was always a day trip for us. we liked getting there early, getting a cup of coffee and some pastry, sitting on a park bench in Jackson Square, and watching the quarter wake up.
I went back to New Orleans, but my city was gone...
Given the above, I had never actually spent a night out on bourbon street before.
Bourbon street is full of large belt buckles, unsteady legs, excess, desperation and men standing in the middle of the street, hawking free admission passes to the various venues where one can give semi-clothed women a dollar for... being semi-clothed.
"C'mon in. It'll change your life!"
The essence of desperation and sadsack-dom became much more concentrated when you walked in to one of these places.
groups of young guys chain smoking marlboros, bragging about how you get in for free if you're in the military.
japanese men in suits, stacks of singles in front of them, intensely focused, expressionless, as the slightly built dancers try their hardest to part the money from the man's hand...
None of the guys actually seemed to be smiling. Apparently, this was serious business indeed.
film it in black and white, add a soundtrack of old tom waits music...
And when you were not in one of those clubs, you were sitting on a bar stool in one of the dozens of completely interchangeable bars along the street. All of them even had the exact same 70' rock/funk cover band performing. At least, they all seemed exactly alike.
And good news, it's three beers for the price of one tonite!
Oh, and it was spring break for thousands of high school and college students last week.
So you can sit and drink your three Buds for the price of one (one really expensive one), listening to Gap Band and Earth Wind and Fire covers and feeling like a dirty old man, without even really being a dirty old man, as the dance floor fills up with with 19 year olds, there to take full advantage of the Quarter's um...relaxed policy on legal ID's.
All the negative aside, I got to go out by myself for a couple of hours in the afternoon, on day 2 of the conference, thanks to a gap in seminars.
It was 65 degrees and sunny.
I walked the river for a bit, then cut inland to Cafe Du Monde, where I had a couple cups of their world famous coffee, while sitting on the patio listening to some good street musicians, watching an old man make balloon animals for the little kids passing by with the parents.
He's been working that corner for as long as I've been going to New Orleans.
All of this with Jackson Square and the horse and buggy parking as backdrop.
So, for that brief period, I got it.
It was the New Orleans of my memory, and I was a happy man. I had to call my wife, just to tell her.
"So I guess not every single thing we liked about N.O. is gone."
no, but it's a close thing.
Stopped by the New Orleans Kite shop on my way back to the hotel, talked for the very sweet middle aged owner, and spent some money. She told me how lonely it was, after the storm, when she re-opened, cuz lots of her fellow merchants were not around anymore.
http://www.kiteshopneworleans.com/, by the way.
That evening, we walked past every old, established, historical restaurant in the quarter, to end up eating at a bad sports bar with cheap food prices. My boss throws company pennies around like manhole covers.
Friday morning, we were in the hotel restaurant, having just sat down to eat our buffet breakfast before heading to the airport, when it happened.
A cockroach started walking across our table.
Breakfast was cancelled.
my traveling companion is a bit antsy. perpetually nervous about missing deadlines, flights, conference starts....
We were the first people at the conference on Wednesday morning, waiting 45 minutes before anyone else even showed up.
This carried over to leaving N.O., arriving at the airport 3 ½ hours before our flight.
There is simply not enough going on at the airport to keep you amused for three hours.
Had a great cup of coffee and a muffin at PJ's, a local coffee shop chain. My T.C. delighted in the fact that it wasn't starbucks.
He doesn't like their coffee, apparently. I know this, because I heard this, 15 times in three days....
we milked that coffee and muffin, and the highly in-demand table, for 75 minutes....
arrived late into O'hare, because it was Friday afternoon, and it's imposible to arrive on time into O'hare on Friday afternoon.
At one point, our pilot actually told us that he had been told to slow down as much as possible, to avoid being placed into a holding pattern.
I may be in the minority here, but I want my jet planes to fly as fast as they can. I don't like them when they're FLYING AS SLOW AS THEY CAN FLY, WITHOUT PROBLEMS OCCURING.
But I'm a sissy.
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