Life of Thadii.

Mardi Gras!!!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009

For the first time in my life, I attended a Mardi Gras parade. Literally meaning, "Fat Tuesday", Mardi Gras is a carnival celebration originated by French Catholics (I think?) held just before Ash Wednesday. Anyway, putting history and culture aside, my mates and I decided to endure a gruelling 8-hour drive down to New Orleans in Lousiana for the famed Mardi Gras over the weekend. Although the highlight of the festival is on Tuesday itself, the days preceding the event have plenty of revelry as well.

We arrived in New Orleans early on Saturday morning, like at 7am. It was too early for the party so we ended up touring the city. New Orleans, despite being hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, seemed to have rebuilt itself. We didn't visit the famed Super Dome that sheltered the many refugees back then during the natural disaster, but we saw it from afar. It was HUGE, like a nuclear reactor. Too bad we didn't take pictures because we were cruising by it on the interstate.

The architecture found in New Orleans (besides the usual cityscape that is) is very unlike in Atlanta, probably due to the French roots of the city.

Walking in the streets of New Orleans reminded me a lot of walking in Melaka/Bugis Street. The residential areas had lots of quaint houses while the city district had lots of shophouses with grocery stores a lot like those "mama stores" we have in Singapore! Well, except that the stores were ran by blacks.

During the tour of the city, we learnt that New Orleans, besides having a rich French Catholic history, was also a good spot for ghost tours and voodoo tradition. Yea, New Orleans has a RICH voodoo culture due to the slave trade, and most of the voodoo practices were introduced by West African slaves and syncretized with the French Catholic traditions. It was really surrealistic to tour an American city littered with French architecture and artefacts, and peppered with Voodoo and occult practitioners and stores! It didn't even feel like America anymore.

We visited the French Quarter market, and bought some beads for Mardi Gras. During Mardi Gras, people in the float procession throw random stuff out, primarily beads. Random includes toilet paper, soft toys, toilet pumps, sweets, lingerie etc, all marked with Mardi Gras. It's up to pure luck if one lands in your hands. Also apparently, if you gave beads to a girl in Mardi Gras, she would be obliged to show her breasts to you! YEP! So Alan and I decided to invest in some beads before the parade proper hahahaha...

Sadly, we couldn't take pictures in the market as it was strictly prohibited. Besides the party-gear and cheap clothes, there were crazy voodoo stuff in there like REAL alligator heads and claws, and voodoo dolls! Freaky stuff!

We proceeded to visit the oldest cathedral in America, St Louis Cathedral. An interesting point to note is that New Orleans breaks the "Protestant-belt" of the southern states by being a predominantly Catholic city. Protestant churches are almost absent in this city, or even if they are, the many cathedrals overshadow them.

As a Catholic, I felt very proud to visit the cathedral and explain much of the traditions, rites, and various artifacts in the church to my friends. The French level 1 I took last sem came VERY handy too...hahaha...I managed to decipher some of the stuff written around the church!

Saint Joan of Arc...

After visiting the church, we had an "interesting" afternoon-snack...square French doughnuts served at a place called Cafe du Monde. It was supposedly famous and had a really insane queue. I would show you a picture of it if only our hands weren't so dirty...yea...the icing sugar on the doughnut is insane. Imagine half a bag of shaker fries...now remove the fries and put in the square doughnuts, and fill HALF of the bag up with sugar. Yes...it's that insane. Every bite we took, icing sugar flew into our face, hair, and clothes. The ENTIRE street was WHITE!

Anyway, the doughnut wasn't spectacular. Square dougnnuts = Hum Jing Peng. I kid you not. The Cafe was ran by Asians and what they were making were really Hum Jing Peng + Insane amount of icing sugar. Period. Nothing spectacular...I think I'll try selling You Tiao with icing sugar next time and call them "long doughnuts" haha...Americans will fall for it for sure!

Now for the parade proper...pictures! Note the out-stretched arms for the freebies! :p

It was crazy fun jumping around and reaching out for the random stuff the floats threw. The crowd went wild snatching, and everybody would proudly deck themselves up with whatever they grabbed, much like medals. The carnival atmosphere was awesome, with everybody yelling, dancing, and screaming on the streets half-drunk or otherwise in the middle of the DAY. It was really awesome to see couples, youngsters, teens, elderly...you name it...break out into song and dance in the middle of the streets.

There was even a procession midway during the parade-break, where someone was yelling dance moves out and people danced across the entire parade area. "Left, right, turn around, do the twist..." and the dance crowd grew and grew as more and more people joined in! From a mere 5 to 10 people...it soon became a swirling mass! What an experience!

Pictures of the party during the mid-parade breaks...people "leave" their seats...look carefully...lots of foldable chairs!

The party lasted way into the night, and by then my camera was out of battery. Not that it would matter either, since at that point of time the streets was filled with puke and trash, people were insanely rowdy and nobody was taking pictures. Flashing a camera out at that point in time seemed...out of place. We finally returned to our hotel at 4am.

I gotta admit that Mardi Gras totally blew my head off. I don't think I can ever behave the way I did, decking myself up in beads, dancing spontaneously on the streets, grabbing for random useless stuff against hundreds of other people, drinking alcohol rampantly in the middle of the day on the streets...except at a carnival like this!

Our net total grabs after 4hours of grabbing fun!

Alan and I did end up giving most of our beads away...but whether or not we saw breasts...hehehe...that's our little secret...go give Mardi Gras a try for yourself folks!

P.S. check out more photos via Facebook here and here.

One of the Thadii blogged at 6:35 AM.
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