Alll the Beads

Weekend before last, C-- and I were in New Orleans. We left on Mardi Gras carrying back every bead. Seriously. I could hardly lift our bead bag. Last Friday night, I threw the beads over prospective students at the party I organized for them. I threw the beads over anyone who wasn't wearing any. I stuffed the beads into a pinata, and made them take more and more. Now they are mostly gone.

New Orleans was wonderful, wonderfully strange, relaxing, humid. We went to parades and stretched out our hands and screamed for beads. Right when we got off our plane, we went to our first parade. I got onto C--'s shoulders and held up a sign and got a pretty shoe. Those were the best parades. Later, it would sometimes be cold, and parades would mysteriously stop for long stretches, and beads would get thrown (surprisingly hard) at my face. I kept the necklace with the small skulls that hit me over the eye. Of the things they were throwing, my favorite were the cute stuffed animals. I got a happy little Nemo fish, and a pair of fuzzy dice, and C-- got a red sea horse.

We stayed with my friend M--. She has a dog, by the way, who also thought the Nemo fish and fuzzy dice were adorable. So we graciously let him have them. But we kept the sea horse. M-- is a friend from college. She showed us everything, put up with impossible traffic, gave us _all_ the New Orleans food. One of the best moments was after she took us to the Cafe du Monde for beignets. We put on the little paper hats she got for us, and sat with our bags of powdered sugar on the steps of a park and watched the people go by. And there passed a second line, which is when people march down the street playing music and dancing and carrying umbrellas and stuff. It was for a wedding procession, but we suspected that some of the second line had no previous connection to the married couple.

For Mardi Gras, M-- got a pink wig that, in her own words, mind, made her look like an Anime character. It was pretty sweet.

For a good chunk of time, C-- and I lazed around M--'s house, lounging on her sofa, reading math, sleeping, not having to do anything at all.

I may have mentioned that we ate a lot of things. I had my first ever po' boy (which I ate while wearing one of those little paper hats, like for the beignets). And I had probably the best hot dog ever at a place called Dat Dog. It's run by this guy, Constantin, who wears a fedora (I think) and dark glasses (definitely). The glasses have perfectly round lenses that look slightly too close together. He'd just opened his hot dog place, so he hung around outside it, talking to everyone there. He used to be a federal prosecutor. Then, he tried olive farming in his father's native Greece. After which, in his own words, rather than running for President, he decided he would rather sell hot dogs. Which he is doing now. And they are delicious. We sat outside at brightly painted tables, in the pleasantly warm sun, and talked and ate.

And after one last Mardi Gras morning parade, at which I got a coconut (!) we flew home. And it was non stop work (meeting with two profs, preparing for a talk, planning the party) for the next three days. And then I gave out all those beads, and passed out around 1am on Saturday morning.

[This rambling post brought to you, as always, by Needing To Sleep, But Blogging]