Living in the French Quarter

Spoke to a girl and potential new client in NYC yesterday…she’s an event planner looking for help with her marketing campaign... “I’m your girl!” I said, naturally. She told me some other stuff about how it is to live there. She says one night her and her husband came home from a party at 8pm and he had to drive around till 11pm looking for a parking spot…so 3 hours looking for a parking space!!!

That reminded me of New Orleans. I had a little upstairs apartment on Royal, next street over from Bourbon Street. And there's no parking around there except on the streets. So, if you get off work and get home by 5pm, you can usually find something. What I always did was go upstairs to my apartment, take a shower and lie down for 20 minutes. We always worked 12 or 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. Lying down for 20 minutes, you can kind of catch your breath and relax all your muscles for a few minutes.

Then when you wake up, you’re starving so you got 3 choices:

*Soup warmed in microwave.

*Walk somewhere around the neighborhood and find a café.

*Get in your car and drive somewhere.

The problem with that last one is that, say you leave at 6 pm and drive to a good restaurant. I know where there’s a really amazing Mexican place. Also, there’s Café Dumond... that place! It's 3 blocks down Royal and over to Decatur. The café faces the Mississippi River, an amazing area where you’ll find lots of good jazz musicians, open porticos that serve jambalaya and crawfish pie. They have plenty of seating, like picnic tables and those old tables with chrome metal legs and Formica tops - retro-looking!

So, you get seated by 6:30pm, eat then get back home at 7:30pm to find NO PARKING AT ALL!! Every possible place to put a car is gone. You drive around and around. Finally, you park down close to Verti Marte. That’s only 2 blocks from where I lived, not bad. If you drive out of the neighborhood to eat, it’s a hassle to park when you get back home.

Miss those days! Don’t miss Katrina at all.

One night I walked to the store, Verti Marte. They have ready-made sandwiches, a few small round tables with cheap plastic chairs. Not a very clean place but busy. I ordered my dinner and sat down across from a strange man and his cat. The guy was dressed like a cross between a clown and a homeless guy. 

The cat was scruffy, dingy white. He was sitting in a chair at the table like a real person with a plate of food sitting in front of him on the table. The cat and the man were eating dinner together and everyone pretended it was normal for a guy to take his cat out for dinner.

I ate at the next table and enjoyed polite conversation with the man and his cat. They were nice folks. It was a pleasant evening and I didn’t have to worry about losing my parking spot. Plus, I got a relaxing walk. It's very common to see strange things and strange people in the French Quarter. I enjoyed my time there.