Fishing, touring, protesting and eating

Sounds like the life, right? It is, except for that last one. Has anyone who lives in New Orleans ever succeeded at dieting? It's impossible. I heard trying not to drink in New Orleans is worse, but I'll take their word for it.

Elbow's parents are in town so last night we went to K-Paul's. I ate a corn muffin, 2 jalapeno rolls, a "mama's yeast roll," fried green tomatoes, onion rings, butter beans and rice and fried flounder with shrimp. But I did practice restraint: I took the dessert to-go. This is really how people eat down here. And it is frickin' awesome.

Then we did a ghost tour through the French Quarter and learned about the "Casket Girls" from France who, according to the St. Bernard Parish history teacher who was leading our tour, arrived from France to beef up the female population of the growing city of New Orleans. They were shipped with all their worldly possessions in trunks shaped like coffins. The only other women here at the time were practitioners of, ahem, the world's oldest profession.

Here's people taking pictures of St. Louis Cathedral, which really boggled my mind. I think I know how Parisians feel when they see people oohing and aahing at the Eiffel Tower and they're like, "Oh, that old thing."

Funny thing about French Quarter tours: they are constantly interrupted by singing drunks, local hecklers and marching bands.

 In other news, New Orleans is up in arms over the Times-Picayune newspaper. The owners announced that paper copies of the news will only be distributed Wednesday, Friday and Sunday starting this fall. A new company has been formed that will focus on digital news through the outlet Nola.com.

Our neighbor's sign.

To show our support for the Times-Pic, I signed the Fritz family up for daily home delivery. And then promptly forgot all about it. So today I was like "who threw trash on our porch?"

I'm a genius.

We have new friends with a boat and we went out there to the marsh last weekend. It was beautiful and totally different than Uptown New Orleans. There are mobile homes lifted on giant wood pillars called "camps." Where I'm from, we just put the trailers on cinder blocks. But it was awesome. The new friends went to the LSU-WVU game in Morgantown and came home with a WVU hand-painted wine goblet. I got to use it. 

This picture is really tiny but that is a Mountaineers wine glass I'm holding down in the marshland.

Tonight: Uncle Lionel's jazz funeral/second line. I'm trying to convince the Fritz's that it's totally fun/safe to go traipsing around the Tremé. We'll see.