Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November giving Americans the perfect excuse for a four day weekend. We begun ours with our best effort at a traditional Thanksgiving lunch with some Australian friends of ours Adam, Emma and their son Flynn. As we’re in Texas where everything has to be bigger and better we super-sized our Thanksgiving lunch with the gluttonous purchase of a turducken – a chicken stuffed in a duck which is in turn stuffed in a turkey. Can anyone say heart attack?
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| The traditional group shot in front of the fireplace |
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Collective breaths were held during the carving
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| The insides of a turducken |
We’re told that it’s a Texan thing to deep fry your turkey. Deep fryer rentals go through the roof at this time of year, as do the number of house fires! We’ve saved that dubious experience for another year. Emma and I did however go a little over board in the creation of side dishes, earning ourselves the self-proclaimed title of the real housewives of Houston!
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| The real (alien) housewives of Houston (note the Texan star on the apron, nice touch I thought!) |
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| Emma's beautiful table setting (the turkey feathers are cutouts of her 2 year old's hand - too cute!) |
Black Friday follows Thanksgiving and is the biggest shopping day in the US with retailers offering huge discounts and opening extended hours, some as early as 5am. Of course you see all the same crazy behavior as at home, with people camping out over night to be the first in line and score the biggest bargains on the store floor and of course there's coverage of the craziness on the local news. Interestingly (and most conveniently), the retailers also extend the discounts to on line shopping and start those sales days before Black Friday. As we weren’t able to shop in person, we took advantage of this for the purchase of a LCD TV to replace the one we left behind in Sydney. The price of electronics here is bittersweet - they're fabulously low but the products are useless back in Australia, or just about anywhere else in the world that uses 240 volt power supply.
Instead of being in the stores on Black Friday with half of America, we were on the highway with the other half! As mentioned in the last post, we had recently acquired a new Audi S5 (recently, as in two nights before), so naturally the first thing we did was fang it over 300 miles and six hours drive in to the neighboring state for a three day getaway in New Orleans.
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| Ahh, the joys of interstate driving |
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| Some of the vast Louisiana swampland we passed through |
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| These low bridges continued for miles and miles through the swamp |
We’d asked quite a few people who’d previously been to New Orleans (or Norlens as the locals say it) for some travel advice and spend the first afternoon checking off a few must-do touristy activities such as eating beignets at Café du Monde (sort of like a funny shaped donut covered in icing sugar), drinking Hurricane cocktails on Bourbon Street and walking along the Mississippi and through the beautiful French Quarter.
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| Vince more interested in the football than his rather potent Hurricane |
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| St Peters Street in the French Quarter |
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| Introducing Bourbon Street and the Ford F350. The car that makes the Hummer look small! |
We walked down Bourbon Street in the late afternoon, returning again on our way home later that night to find it completely changed and slightly scary! Bourbon Street is New Orleans’ famous party street that is a mix of Kings Cross style venues, cheap eats, bars and tourist shops. The alcohol laws are super relaxed and permit the drinking of purchased alcohol on the street, which means huge frozen cocktails are sold in plastic containers and consumed by large crowds hanging out on the street. There’s also a significant contingent that’re just there to cause trouble as indicated by the huge police presence on the street and in the air! Above the intersections marking the two ends of the busiest section of the street were these weird police surveillance pods suspended by cranes giving the whole thing a Big Brother feeling. We saw a couple of people grabbed and searched by cops and were careful to keep our bags close!
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| Some of the Bourbon Street "attractions" |
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| We're watching you! |
On Saturday morning we took a drive out to the Garden District where we had a reservation at The Commanders Palace in the Garden District for a jazz brunch. This proved to be a rather adventurous foray in to Creole cuisine that honestly was a bit hit and miss. A signature of the cuisine is the way they happily mix sweet and savoury in rather bold ways. A second course of sweet fluffy pancakes served with duck meat, maple syrup and a poached egg was replaced by very insistent wait staff when they noticed us gingerly picking at the pancakes with obvious care! The mimosas and Cajun bloody mary’s were much better received! A highlight of the brunch was the 3 piece jazz band who made their way around the tables taking requests and delighting the younger diners with Christmas Carols, the first that we’d heard and the first they’d played this year, as the practice here is to only celebrate one holiday at a time, so Christmas isn't acknowledged until Thanksgiving is over. That said, we noticed a lot of Christmas decorations suddenly appear the day after Thanksgiving and by the end of the weekend, Christmas was in full swing.
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| Pancakes with duck, egg and maple syrup anyone?? |
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| Cajun Bloody Mary's - bloody good! |
After brunch we took a walk through the Garden District enjoying the greenery and beautiful architecture. We visited the Lafayette Cemetery with the city’s distinctive above ground burial techniques, one of the many consequences of the high water table.
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| Lafayette Cemtery |
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| One of the filming locations of Interview with a Vampire |
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| Traditional Louisianan style architecture with French inspired wrought iron balconies |
One of the absolute highlights of the weekend was an evening spent at Preservation Hall listening to traditional New Orleans jazz. As the name suggests, the aim of this jazz hall is to preserve the original style of Jazz developed in New Orleans in the 1920’s, they’ll take requests but only if the request is from this period. We came in half way through their second one hour set of the night and stayed for their third and final set of the night, which they ended with a sing along performance of “When the Saints go Marching In” – a huge crowd pleaser as the Louisiana state football team are The Saints.
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| An awesome 6 piece jazz band who happened to be race and gender diverse! |
The other big highlight was a visit to a plantation about an hour outside of the city called Laura Plantation. Laura Plantation had operated as a sugar plantation from 1805 until the 1970's by just two families and was originally set up by the French Ambassador to Louisiana. It had been chosen by the current owners as the best plantation to restore and open to the public as it was the site that the tales known as Brer Rabbit were first put to paper, having travelled with slaves from their homes in Africa. The tour focused on the history of the first family, the Creole culture and the predicament of the slaves, which was both highly educational yet confronting.
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| The main house, place of both residence and business |
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| Original slave register |
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| The slave quarters and the bell that would summon them for meals. The slave accommodations continued for 17 miles in two rows either side of a road not seen to the right of the photo |
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| One hut for two families |
Filled with a new appreciation for our personal freedom, we headed out on to the highway to fight the traffic home to Texas.
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| Traffic jam heading back in to New Orleans which continued for about 15 minutes of driving at 70 mph, poor sods! |
We'd expected a lot from New Orleans and were absolutely not disappointed. We highly recommend a visit if you can get there. As for us, next stop: Christmas in the Big Apple!
