More New Orleans

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29th March
Television here is full of advert breaks - every ten minutes or so there is a clutch of adverts, no sign that the programme you were watching has stopped. Blink and you think you've lost the plot. I wouldn't mind if they were of the same standard as ours, but they're along the lines of Cillit Bang or soap powders. No art movies or technological delights. And quite often one advert clips the end off the next one so you don't even get the product name.
'Eat like a man' says one pretty fat character advertising, 'A lunch with a full pound of meat plus potatoes.' This is about the size of the portions here, and this character looked as if he could do with a yoghurt and a crispbread.
Kev saw an advert for a Viagra-type substance which unfortunately he missed most of apart from some of the side effects, 'Don't take this if you have high blood pressure, and if you have an erection for more than four hours, you should go and see your doctor,' - presumably so he can have one too.
So many channels to skip through and all you find is adverts, so it's impossible to find what's on. I've tried looking in the paper but I can't match up the channel names with the numbers on the remote control. Not that the titles of the programmes help me. I've managed to find a couple of episodes of 'Sex and the City' and an early 'Friends' before Rachel and Ross had got together for the first time. There were four sets of adverts in these - opening credits, adverts, first half, adverts, second half, adverts, closing credits, adverts.

'Yat' is the dialect spoken in New Orleans, derived from 'Where are you at?', a traditional greeting here. It can be hard to understand. It took me a while to translate the restaurant name 'Nawlins Flava'. The accent is apparently like New Jersey but with a sentence construction that is purely New Orleans' own. Our bus guide said after each snippet of information, 'How 'bout that? Yeah!' And a lot of people have difficulty understanding Kev, he is constantly having to repeat himself.

I've tried some local fare, 'Gumbo' a fish and rice soup thickened with okra, and very nice it is too. Seafood is plentiful here, 80% of the seafood supplied to 40 of the states comes from this area.

1st April
Today we took a streetcar out to its furthest stop in Garden City, and back again - so many beautiful houses out there. We were going to do the same with the Canal Street line going north out of the French Quarter, but the line was disrupted by the filming of a car chase scene with a streetcar in the way. We saw a couple of these scenes being filmed, one on the way out to Garden City and one on the way back. There's no-one famous in it, the policeman on duty reckoned it would be a B movie, so it probably won't be shown in the UK.
We took a paddle steamer boat trip down the Mississippi, lunch on board included and a guided commentary. We went downriver to the site of the Battle of New Orleans which was where, in 1812 the British decided to have another crack at America. Knowing Louisiana wasn't happy being part of the Union, the British thought they might get some support if they attacked the US. Not so, and they were routed at this battle by Stonewall Jackson, who now has a fine square in the town dedicated to him. Interesting stuff, and the weather stayed fine, only raining at the end of the afternoon, when we were finished for the day. Mostly the weather has been warm and sunny here and I've been back in shorts and skirts, no tights or trousers. We'll see what New York has in store for us - we set off there at 7am tomorrow, arriving in the afternoon the following day.

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