I took my niece around town today, first over to Mandina’s for a shrimp poboy, then down by the house she was born in on Mulberry Street off Metairie Road. Then we drove down Carrolton Avenue and around the riverbend to see Tulane and Audubon Park. We stopped in at Duffosat to pick up something from T’s tenant and learned that MTV’s Real World was soon to be filming in the house right across the street – “they’ve tinted all the windows” – then down through the Garden District and by St. Elizabeth’s (Ann Rice owned it when I lived next door), and then down Prytania and around the mansions and into the Warehouse District passing the D-Day museum (Stephen Ambrose was my professor), and into the Central Business District and across Canal into the Quarter and then drove down Frenchman Street into the Marigny to show her Snug Harbor and DBA and the Spotted Cat and then down Esplanade and home.
Damn this is a beautiful city and a wonderful place to call home. The architecture, the lush vegetation, the smiling faces of the people who live here, the food, the music oozing out of the radio from WWOZ, it’s really a wonderland for the senses.