Day 2
As you can imagine, we were quite tired from the night before, but we woke up to go to Breakfast at Brennans. People down here in New Orleans talk about Breakfast at Brennans so often, you'd think they work there.
Breakfast at Brennans is unique. In fact, it's probably the most unique breakfast I've ever had. In fact, it's changed my entire view of how breakfast should be served, causing great confusion in our household.
Why is Breakfast at Brennan's so unique? Essentially they've made breakfast a meal as is dinner. It has three courses, drinks, even dessert. For example, we started with a turtle soup, had a seafood salad, eggs benedict and bananas foster for dessert. A full meal at 9am. I found the concept mind-blowing.
Of course, you can always have a variety of dishes at a buffet, which is great to get a sampling, but if you order your average breakfast at your average restaurant, you'll get the Denny's style main course of eggs and two sides... not multiple courses. In addition, the dessert is Bananas Foster, which was invented right here in Brennan's.
Needless to say, when a restaurant changes my philosophy on eating a meal, I fall a bit in love with it.
After breakfast, we had a few walking tours lined up, which was pretty fortunate since we needed to start burning things off. In New Orleans during the summer, you inevitably burn things off, but that's a bit due to the aforementioned heat and humidity. Not the best idea to do a cemetery tour (no trees in these cemeteries) in this heat.
Well, we did New Orleans Spirit Tours Cemetery and Voodoo tour, which as the name describes, does hit a cemetery and some voodoo aspects. For the cemetery tour, we headed over to St. Louis #1, which is also famous as the setting for one of the scenes in the movie, "Easy Rider."
New Orleans' cemeteries are famous and unique because everybody is buried above ground. The water table is so low (New Orleans is 4-5 feet under sea level), and the bodies would just pop up during the next flood if they were buried underground. In addition, being above ground in mausoleums after a year or so, the body is nearly completely cremated simply by the heat of the sun.
The Voo Doo section involved a stop at a voodoo temple, where the priestess talks in a free-flowing state of consciousness, at times she sounds mystical, and at times a bit confusing. After her talk about Voo Doo and the world in general, I was left with the impression I don't know if Voo Doo is real or not, but I have enough fear it does, to risk saying any disparaging comments. I did learn though, that it's not all evil and voodoo actually believes in doing good and practicing peace.
We felt one tour wasn't enough, so we decided to head back down to Jackson Square to meet the "Friend's of the Cabildo" to do a French Quarter walking tour. The "Friend's of the Cabildo" tour guides are so well known to be experts in their field,that the other tour guides were bragging about them.
The "friends" do live up to their reputation of knowing the French quarter like the back of their hands. They tell you the history of the area from the French colonial days, to the Spanish colonial days, to becoming part of the United States via the Louisiana Purchase.
We visited some of the historic sites, revolving mostly around Jackson Square, which becomes a bit of a living history. Much more exciting than high school history class.
Well, before dinner there was one more thing everybody in New Orleans seems to mention, and that's coffee at Cafe du Monde. Every tour guide recommended for us to go there to get coffee and a beignet. It's one of the oldest coffee houses in the city and the coffee is uniquely "New Orleans" ... it uses chicory in the coffee, which adds a bit of a kick. A Beignet is essentially an Italian Zeppole (or a mini donut without the hole) and covered with powdered sugar.
Hyped up from coffee, we headed over to Arnaud's to dinner. So far, we've been trying to do everything recommended to us, and Arnaud's was at the top of the list also. Arnaud's is one of the city's oldest restaurants, and serves high-quality, high-class Creole food.
In addition, they have great live jazz music that really makes your day. Margherita had the infamous "Shrimp Arnaud," which had a spicy Creole Remoulade Sauce, and the highlight for me was actually the French fries that started everything off. They were Potato Souffle French fries, so they looked like French fries, but were actually completely hollow.
After dinner, we went again towards Jackson Square, and this time to meet the Vampire tour by Haunted History Tours.
Our guide was dressed in a long black leather coat that almost touched the floor. His head was shaved, and he had gothic metal jewelry on. He didn't actually appear like somebody you'd want to take home to meet your Mom, unless your Mom was into the gothic scene.
Anyway, this tour was one of the most unique. It wasn't exactly a tour, although we did go around town, but almost a touring storytelling show. It's hard to explain, as all of the "stories" were 100% true and documented, but it was not a tour as in, "Let's see these various objects." We walked to scenes where haunted or vampire events happened, and our guide told us the events using the best storytelling methods I've seen in a while. He was as dramatic as a stage actor and really took you back to the time of these events.
Read part 1 ~~Read part 2 ~~Read part 3
