December 12, 2015

New Orleans

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my mom, sisters, niece, nephew, and I went on a little trip to New Orleans. We had so much fun. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Canal Street, toured the Garden District, shopped on Royal Street, and ate tons of beignets and pralines and other New Orleans specialties.

We saw so many neat things. At night in Jackson Square, fortune tellers read tarot cards by candlelight. There was a girl dressed up in faded 19th-century clothes, including high-button shoes and a hoop skirt. Holding a tattered parasol, she posed by the iron gates of Jackson Square Park, her face painted like a skull. A white horse pulled a carriage past her, but when we looked closer we saw that it was no ordinary horse; it had glittering hoofs, a single white horn, and white feathered wings.

I’m tempted to write about everything we saw and everything we did, but I know that would be boring. Instead, I’ll just tell you about two funny little incidents involving Sophie and Jake, my niece and nephew:

On Thanksgiving Day we ate at Chartres House. It took a while to get seated. As we waited around on the sunny, warm sidewalk, Jake kept dancing next to Sophie and playing an invisible saxophone. He seemed to be playing some smooth jazz. Sophie was so embarrassed. She kept coming up to Kris and saying (she was just teasing), “Mommy, if you don’t take control of your child, I’m going to throw him in the street!”

One of our favorite shops in New Orleans was a little place called Adorn that sold surreal (but cute) cat portraits by the artist Cary Chun Lee. There was a whole wall of these bold, bright, funny, cool cat paintings. We were mesmerized. Some cats held voodoo dolls. Others held cigarettes or flowers or pizza.

“I like the little guy eating a piece of toast,” I said, pointing.

“It’s a beignet,” Sophie said, teasing again, rolling her eyes at me. “You’re uncultured, Leslie.”