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We came here after leaving New Orleans. Laura is a Creole plantation; it's a very different culture than Anglo plantations, and the house here is brightly colored and fairly small, instead of the typical Anglo big white house. It used to sit on 18 square miles of land--now it's just 16 acres, and is a museum. The tour here was really interesting, and you should go if you are nearby.
We ate lots of delicious sandwiches from Frady's. I personally swear by the french-fry po-boy.
See that innocuous-looking half-building in the middle, above? That's the old slave quarters for the people who worked in the brick building on the right. Pretty heavy. We didn't know what they were until someone told us--then we started seeing them everywhere. Most of the old, upscale New Orleans buildings have slave quarters.
We got kicked out of the first cemetery because it was 4:30 and it was closing. Then we got coffee and pastry at a little shop that also sold herbs, vitamins, and magic candles--obviously set up to cater to cemetery-touring oddies such as ourselves. Then we went back out and, ahem, snuck into a different cemetery. That's right, I snuck into a graveyard with my mom! The weird light in some of these shots--it was really dark, like the photo directly above--is because I used a slow shutter speed.
Mom and I rode the streetcar out to the end of Canal Street, where the graveyards are. Back when I was a 14-year-old Goth girl languishing in Leggett, CA, I would have told you that it was my profoundest desire to go hang out in a cemetery in New Orleans. And I made it! That was 14 years ago, but I'm still Gothy enough to appreciate a place like this. We thought this cemetery was just neglected, but it turns out that it was under water and God knows what else during Katrina, so some of the damage is probably from that.
I just thought these cats were cool, and then I saw the picture and how there's a cool calico pattern on the walls too--I just really like the textures. On the subject of kitties, people from here who are sweet-talking cats don't say "kitty", they say "min", which is French. In Ukrainian, it's "kiska". Now you have learned something!
We totally ate this whole container of crawdads, and could have eaten more. They were $3 a pound, and while a pound sounds like a lot, they weigh the whole crawdad and then you just eat the tail. They are bright red because of the "boil", the spicy broth they were cooked in. P.S. They were already dead when we got them, though in the pictures they do look sort of lively. Zombie Crawdads!
