Floating

2024-03-29
New Orleans, LA

This morning we decided to reprise the beignets and stopped at a Café Beignet which seems to be a local chain. The beignets were a bit bigger and heavier than Café Du Monde so we each ended up taking one with us, buried in a mound of powdered sugar of course.

We then proceeded to find Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World. Trying to find the route, we were Googled. By looking at the map, it tries to send us along the river, which is cool. However, the Riverfront shopping center ended in a construction fence, so we had to backtrack pretty much all the way along that mall, wait for a train to pass, and then walk in front of the convention center (rather than the narrow back alley teeming with 18-wheelers as Google suggested) to get to Mardi Gras World.

As mentioned earlier, there are a hundreds of parades each year in New Orleans. In order to have a parade, first you get a group of like-minded people (they call them Krewes, like Mummers are Brigades) and pick a date. Now you need to choose a theme, make costumes, build floats, put props on the floats, get tractors to pull the floats, get people to change flat tires on the tractors that pull the floats, etc. Currently most krewes hire Blaine Kern to handle all the details of the floats. They are experts on float building and transportation, and currently have 20 warehouses around the city.

We learned that they tend to recycle props when they can. If you need a jester, they've got jesters. If you need the rock band Kiss, they've got Kiss. If you need a dog and all they have is a bear, they will change the face a little bit and repaint it and they've got a dog. So while we only got to see the contents of one warehouse, there were a ton of different props in there from previous parades available here and in other locations. Cooler still, they let you wander around amongst the props as much as you want.

After several hours of touring the warehouse, we decided to finish our breakfast. If you take away just one thing from our trip, this is the thing: To put it bluntly, eating the leftover beignets was like eating a memory foam pillow. 1/10; do not recommend.

We then walked over to the World War II museum which was only a couple blocks away. This place is very large. It's been a while since a museum was so big that I didn't cover the entire thing (or get kicked out because it was closing) but for this one while we visited most of it there were parts we skipped, and we certainly didn't read all the exhibits (as I am wont to do). It is a great museum and I would have loved to spend a few more hours there.

One of the coolest things at the museum is a German Enigma code machine. While several of these were captured, they are still relatively rare. Of the 35,000 that were manufactured, about 350 remain throughout the world, many in private collections. Apparently the NSA museum has one you can type a message on, but this one is behind glass so don't count on using it to decode the message you typed at NSA.

The two main exhibit halls covered the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific. Both had lots of interesting details and some personal stories. There also was an exhibit hall dedicated to D-Day, and one for the US during the war with shortages in materials and labor. And one large hall with several planes hung for viewing and some cool catwalks so you could get up close to them.

We took Magazine Street back to Canal street for a late lunch at the Creole House. Creole is a tough word to understand; apparently it has many definitions. At the Presbytery they told us it's just a mixing of people. Dictionaries say "a person of mixed European and Black descent" or "a person born in Louisiana but of usually French ancestry" or "a person born in the West Indies of Spanish ancestry." But Creole at a restaurant it means you can expect a handful of spices, some blackened stuff, and an option to get a Po' Boy.

Later we had the bread pudding that I insisted we get. I like bread pudding, and it was her first time having it. It was quite good. Then we headed out for another walk on Bourbon street in the cooler evening. Friday night was much more crowded than Wednesday, although still not the level of debauchery you'd expect from the reputation of the street.