New Orleans

1) The first afternoon I spent in NOLA I spent at a very nice cafe. I was working, which kind of sucked, but I also ate a big ham and cheese sandwich, which was a big treat for tastebuds that generally don't get the luxury of wheat or dairy, had a huge glass of smashed lemonade, which involved the juice of one and a half lemons, and I took some time to g-chat with Shelley, something I also rarely do but enjoyed very much.

After a few hours of typing and surfing and power pointing, drinking water and lemonade, I really had to pee. This is the problem with going to a cafe alone with a laptop in a strange city. But I watched for a while, and cafe custom was to take your wallet/purse and leave your laptop to be guarded by the kindness of strangers.

Protocol assessed, I looked around for the toilet. There was a door to the left of the counter, a normal looking door, with a hand-lettered sign above it that said Bathroom! and had an arrow pointing down at the door. This seemed like a dead giveaway.

I fished my wallet out of my bag, stood up, walked over, pushed through the door and stepped outside.

That's right. Outside.

The door shut heavily behind me. I could feel an irrational fear welling up. Here I was, in a strange city, my laptop on one side of the door, possibly tethered to a reality with which I was no longer connected. Was this leafy hallway the hipster version of Narnia? Was I meant to stop the evil machinations of a skinny woman wearing shiny leggings and large sunglasses?

I poke fun, but I did have a moment of panic. Real enough that I turned right back around to open the door and ensure that my reality out here was connected to my reality in there. It was.

And then I was amazed. I mean really, what the fuck? A bathroom? Outside? But what do they do in the middle of win-? Riiiiight. In the middle of winter, they put on long sleeves. It really did take me a minute or two to grasp that I was in a place where an outside toilet was feasible.

Honestly, it still weirds me out a little. It is such a fundamental difference from my experience of the world. Can you imagine this at the Manx in February? You'd have to start getting ready to go for a piss halfway through your pint. Hey, could you pass me my scarf and tuque and coat and sweater? I'm going to need to pee in 10 minutes, I should start getting wrapped up.

2) I present to you the chips accompanying my giant sandwich and smashed lemonade. You'll notice they thought the name of the flavour was so catchy it should be protected. In case you were wondering, I did actually eat them and no, they didn't taste like crawfish, spicy, cajun, or otherwise.

Holy fuck am I tired. A couple of nights out boozing with Trish and CT, and last night, also the Plone boys, as we call them at work. And that gender assignation is mostly very true. Trish and I are two of the three women out of about 70 at the conference.

Trish and CT and I have been moving around as sort of a unit. People keep assuming that we’re all co-workers, and then give us a bit of an odd look when I say, No, I’m from Ottawa, in Canada. Oh, you’ve been to Kelowna? I hear it's nice.

Last night, in addition to looking confused, someone also said,

'Oh. Then how do you all know each other?" We three slid our eyes at each other – we didn’t have our how we met story down. I decided to improvise. "We were all in Bootcamp together and they looked nice so I glommed onto them."

It made me happy that they both laughed surprised laughs when I said that. Much better than silent nods. Not that they would do that, because they are sweet and kind people.

After the Redwings won the Stanley Cup, I bought CT a celebratory Canadian beer – a St. Ambroise Pale. I’ve been drinking the local microbrew, Abita. It’s okay. I even fooled myself into thinking it was good. And then I took a sip of the St Ambroise and remembered what actually good beer tastes like. Fucking heaven, is the answer.

What is not heaven is the food here. It’s mostly deep fried or covered in butter or both. One local delicacy is beignets, which are sort of like a cross between a cake doughnut and a French crueller, served in triplicate and covered in icing sugar.

This is one of those posts that doesn’t have any kind of story. I’m tired. My brain is full of information it doesn’t yet have the neural pathways to handle. It’s full of the names of new people. It’s full of seafood and lust.

My main purpose for being in NOLA is to pretend to be a computer nerd. Doing a piss ass poor job of it, since 1) I’m running a PC with Windows, not Mac or Linux or Ubuntu or whatever and/or 2) I’m blogging instead of understanding how to code ZCML Slugs in Python.

But the logo for this event? I understand that, and I understand it is hi-lar-ious.

I’m at Bootcamp right now, and by right now, I mean at the moment the teacher is talking about Adapters, which is similar to subclassing, but more flexible, thank god, because I can’t believe the crampy corner subclassing had painted me into, if you can imagine. Bootcamp doesn’t have a menacing crawfish logo.

Or a t-shirt.

The Symposium, which starts tomorrow, has both. I’m hoping that one appears on the other and that tomorrow you will see a picture of me with a menacing claw on each tit and reeling with laughter.

Went for another long walk last night, mostly through the French Quarter. Found the GLBT resource centre, but didn’t go in because it was one big room with one little room off it, with one person sitting in the little room looking at a computer screen. I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that much attention.

The rest of the French Quarter is much nicer than Bourbon Street. It’s more pulled together than the other parts of the city I’ve seen, but not entirely. A lot of storefronts are empty, a lot for sale. A lot of people gone. But the architecture is grand, the plant life lush. It’s really quite stunning.

I was back early-ish, and ended up watching TV. TV is weird. It’s been so long since I’ve watched it, even TVDVD, that it seemed a bit foreign, like I was visiting a strange planet that used the same language, but one where the signifier/signified mapping was just slightly askew, and everything seemed just a little bit blurry.

Tonight I’m doing something different too. I’ve made friends with with a couple people from UC Davis. Trish, who was pinging my gaydar before she donned her Tegan and Sara hoodie, and her co-worker CT, who was disappointed that I’m from Canada and not a hockey fan. They invited me to go on a Vampire Tour with them. I hemmed and hawed a bit, because generally, I hate that shit. But they're nice people, and another evening of pharma adverts isn't appealing.

And I’m letting go.

Later: It's 1:47 am. I'm in the lobby of the hotel, which is the only place I can get internet. Greg, I learned why New Orleans has above-ground cemeteries. The heat in the mausoleums cooks the bodies down within a year. And then they push the bones off to a trench in the back. Learning that is why I particularly enjoyed the vampire tour. But mostly because Trish and CT are just lovely.

For lunch today, I ate 6 oysters on the half shell and a plate of sweet potato fries, at Felix's, under the watchful eye of the oyster bar man, who called me princess when I walked in and asked me where I was from.

"Ottawa, Canada."

"Canada? I've always meant to make it up there."

"Yeah? Whereabouts?"

"Oh, uh, yknow, unh."

"Well, it's a big country. Montreal is nice."

"Ayuh?"

"Uh-huh. Are you from New Orleans?"

He smiled, huge. Four of his teeth were rimmed in gold. "Born and raised!"

People from here are proud of being from here, whether born and raised or more recent immigrants. I was in a more hipster part of town yesterday, as part of a mammoth sweaty walk, and I saw three or four New Orleans tattoos. Not something that's been particularly noticeable in other cities.

I haven't asked anyone, but I wonder how much of it has to do with the post-Katrina rebuild.

Even three years later, you can see swaths of devastation. The twisted H of Holiday Inn pushed to the corner of a parking lot, boarded up store after boarded up store. Three years later. Without hyperbole, I cannot imagine what this city must have looked like 2 1/2 years ago. It is unfathomable.

Other than that? It's fucking hot here. Like Ottawa August. I'm slathered in greasy 45 proof sunscreen and sweating through that. The kind of hot that you just have to give up fighting and stretch into, because holding out against it will only make you want to throw things and poke people in the eyes.

It is also safer than you might expect. I meant to get back to the hotel before dark last night, because I'd heard so many horrible tales of how dangerous the city is. But I misjudged how fast the sun would set and how often the streetcars run and I found myself in the quickening dusk at a streetcar stop in a fancy but nearly deserted neighbourhood with a paper bag of groceries and my laptop on my back.

I started looking for a cab. And then the first runner came out. And then another, and another. Mostly women, mostly by themselves, after dark, because only certifiably insane people and tourists run here while the sun is up. I stopped looking for a cab and started hoping that the streetcar, which I really wanted to take, because it's open air and wooden seats and creaky and when you ding the dinger it makes this sound that's a cross between gunshot and electrical sparks and there really isn't anything to not love about it, hoping that it would come before my poor feet exploded from all the blood that was pooling in them in this August heat.

When I got back to the hotel I was starving. So I left again, unworried in the least about danger because my hotel is at the corner of Canal and Bourbon, the edge of the French Quarter, and the place was crawling with tourists and security.

Bourbon Street is awful. Awful. Horribly awfully awful. I hate it without reservation. At 9:30 last night, it was all tourists and people who make money off our desire to be someone different away from home. The feeling off the street was one of letting go. People who, in their real lives, are more uptight than they want to be, who don't let go at home, taking themselves to a city where they can give themselves a white slip to drink too much, to be obnoxious, to ogle and hit strip bar after Barely Legal strip bar, and drink weak margaritas out of blacklight lime green grenade-shaped plastic tumblers in the middle of the street.

I walked a block of it and went to the first restaurant that advertised a salad. I ate fast, I went home, I put my poor swollen feet up higher than my heart and tried to drain them.