Nashville

I'd like to say I was sad to leave Memphis but frankly, it couldn't happen soon enough. Nashville was only a few short hours away - getting to the hostel from the station took almost as long as the bus trip, since I had once again forgotten everything I learned and failed to write down the address when I still had wifi. I ducked into the library to use theirs, and also to hide from the guy who'd been following me for six blocks (I used to respond to people when they greeted me on the street. This country has broken me of that habit, because every time I do it never ends well). The hostel is in the west end of Nashville, away from all the tourist hotspots but still full of music and bars. Dropped my stuff off, walked around downtown a bit (highlights include the Charlie Daniels museum, which defies description. If I wasn't in the South I would think someone was parodying it, but they are completely serious. Every kind of confederate flag merch you can think of, a set of furniture made of cow horns and hide, bald eagles and flags and oh god), then came back and ran into Greg which pretty much made my day. Sadly, his next stop was Ashville instead of DC, breaking our trend, but we're almost certain to meet each other again in New York.

Woke up the next day and hit the Country Music Hall of Fame. I had been pretty ambivalent about going, figuring it would be dry and of interest only to diehard country fans, but my roommate Christina talked me into it. And yeah. I have never been so wrong. The third floor alone is worth the cost of admission - it's a history of the evolution of the genre and north american music as a whole. There are old instruments and stage costumes... you know what? I'm going to cheat and just link this, because I keep having to go and name check things and I guarantee I'm going to get it wrong anyhow (I will add that Webb Pierce's car also had horshoes replacing the pedals and a rifle welded to the trunk. The worst part is I think he thought it looked genuinely cool.) In summation : it was fantastic, and most importantly I did not see a single word about Shania Twain anywhere.

Later that evening went out to the bar strip with Greg and Christina to find some free music, which is easy in Nashville. The Broadway strip is mostly cover bands but they are good cover bands. The Flintstones theme, done in bluegrass. Good stuff.

Memphis, and bitching

Greg and I had once again chosen the same departure date - it's nice having someone to chat with and watch your bags while you wander about. We're fairly certain we'll be sharing a bus to Nashville as well.

I am writing this from The Edge - it is a small coffeehouse, with a mic and amp setup, wifi and terminals, an old-school arcade machine with thirty or so games on it (pacman, space invaders, donkey kong, etc), two pool tables, a wall of books, and random murals and drawings taped to the walls. If I ever go insane and decide to open a cafe one day I want it to look exactly like this.

It is raining in Memphis, which makes me happy. A nice respite from the suffocating heat of the last few days. Memphis is not as interesting as you would think...there are lots of bars and crackheads, and not much else. I'm probably being unfair here - there are a few museums and I'm sure if I looked harder I would find a lot of awesome things, but walking around aimlessly has been my exploration strategy for the last month and this is not a good city in which to try that - the area I'm staying in is directly in between old money mansions and cracktown. It's four blocks from the trolley to my hosts' house and they are not a fun four blocks. It is discouraging. Plus, tomorrow will be my third 12+ hour bus trip in the last week, and the novelty has worn off. I'll be glad to get to the northeast, where cities are only a few hours apart. Also, I am allergic to something down here, I haven't stopped sneezing since I got in the city.

Enough complaining. Good things: my cs hosts have a puppy who is weapons-grade adorable, I have a delicious new recipe, Anne drew a picture of my two favourite AIs, and there are both Jules Verne and Clive Barker in the cafe bookshelf.

New Orleans

Turns out this weekend happens to be the Bayou Boogaloo Midcity Festival, which is about five blocks away from the India House. I found it by accident this morning while looking for the post office, and decided to stay. It's a three-stage music and art/craft/whatnot event, and most importantly, free. And the word Bayou is there for a reason - the park it's in is right alongside the Bayou St. John, which at this point is more like a small manmade lake than a bayou but still has fish in it (I saw them jumping).
Spent about six hours wandering between the stages and craft tents, ate crawfish etouffee and fried eggplant, napped on the grass and refreshed my sunburn. There were probably about fifty different acts over the course of this weekend - everything from brass bands to folk-country to hiphop. Also got to see the youth segment of the Wild Mohicans perform in costume - the youngest was about six or seven, incredibly cute. Sat under a tree and watched people canoe and kayak down the bayou, and thought about how incredibly lucky I am. This is one of the good days.

New Orleans - Cemetaries and swamps

I was told the cemeteries were full of muggers, especially after dark, so I decided to go first thing in the morning on the assumption that muggers probably liked to sleep in after a long night's work. (Lonely Planet guide, you are full of crap, the neighbourhood was fine.) The current site of St Louis #1 was not its original location, and it shows - the monuments are crowded very close together, it feels a bit like the backlot of an abandoned tombstone manufacturing warehouse. But the graves themselves are beautiful. The upkeep of individual tombs is the responsibility of the family who owns it, and when families die out or move away no one is left to look after them. This means they are in various stages of repair- pristine whitewashed and stuccoed tombs are right beside crumbling piles of brick (the local brick is very soft, and if it isn't covered by cement or stucco will just fall apart in a few decades. I eavesdropped on a tour guide). Most people buried there died in the ninteenth century, though a few are recent additions to family tombs - the latest one I saw was 2003.
The star of the cemetery is of course Marie Laveau, the most infamous of New Orleans' voodoo queens. Her tomb is easy to spot; offerings of coins, alcohol, food, jewelry and so on are piled up against the entrance, and it is covered in XXX markings - this is how you ask her spirit to intercede on your behalf. Surprisingly hers is not the only tomb like this - I found two others with similar x's and offerings - one had mostly shells and jewelry, the other had combs and coins and photographs. Both were extremely old and any inscriptions on them had faded completely. I have no idea who is in them and it is driving me nuts.

The cemetery was a short walk from the French Quarter, so I headed back there and decided to hook up with one of the swamp tours. This takes you about an hour out of the city to a huge bayou/cypress swamp, part of which is a nature preserve. This means there are a ton of alligators.

We went out on a small flatbottomed boat for an hour and a half - our tour guide carried a bag of marshmallows with him, which he claimed were for the gators. I thought he was kidding, but no. It turns out alligators love marshmallows - they had learned to recognize the boats as a source of food, and would come swimming up when we approached. This bothered me - was I helping to perpetuate an ecologically damaging tourist trap? Were we endangering the gators by teaching them to view humans as a food source? On the other hand, tourism is one of the only things that keeps protected areas protected. This is not much of an excuse as excuses go. Unfortunately I was already in the boat at this point, so I consoled myself with the knowledge that if anyone got attacked it would probably be the local guides, and retribution would not be visited on the gators. That aside it was pretty awesome. During Katrina the water level in the swamp rose fifteen feet and burst its banks, plowing a hole through the treeline and sweeping any houseboats or houses that hadn't been properly raised (ie on cinderblocks instead of driven piles) downriver - we saw one, four miles from its original site. Most of the others were never found. The area cleared by the hurricane is now a marshy, grassy shallow water habitat, a perfect nursery for wading birds, turtles and baby gators. Circle of life, yo. Also saw feral piglets, which are a nuisance animal and therefore fair game for anyone with a gun. The locals both love and hate them - on the one hand, fresh bacon...on the other, it's like having really smart raccoons that weigh several hundred pounds.

Went for supper at Coop's Place, which despite looking and feeling like a dive bar has an amazing kitchen. I haven't even bothered trying to save money on food here - I think eating ramen in New Orleans is a criminal offense. That said it was still pretty cheap - delicious gumbo, followed by jambalaya, red beans and rice, fried chicken and pepper shrimp. I have never been that full of food before.

Wandered down to BookPeople, an enormous independant bookstore in downtown Austin. Seriously, this beast was three stories, twice the floorspace of the largest chain bookstore i've ever been in. They really aren't kidding about the "everything is bigger in Texas" thing. Unfortunately they only had the huge Erikson paperbacks, so I'm still stuck with Sophie's World.

The bus left at 7:30 that night - I wound up sharing it with another hosteller, Greg. It took me about an hour of awkward conversation before I realized that he was not Joe, the guy I had been talking with the day before. In my defense they were both tall, slightly scruffy and English (all English people look alike? does this make me racist?). After I clued in and apologized we go talong much better. We pulled into New Orleans at 630 the next morning, shuffled off the bus like zombies and stared blankly at a series of maps for half an hour before figuring out where we were and where we needed to go. Unfortunately we were at different hostels so I was on my own.

The India House is a big shambling old mansion - the inside is full of murals and assorted random junk, it is almost aggressively bohemian. I am going to attempt to take pictures, descriptions can't really do it justice. It's like a frathouse, if the fraternity was coed and made up of hippies and hipsters, with less things broken. Passed out in a dorm for a few hours, woke up around one and headed to the French Quarter to explore. Had the traditional cafe au lait and beignets at Cafe du Monde - the coffee is excellent, the beignets are exactly like every other fried doughnut thing that every single culture has a variant of. You can call it whatever you want, you can have the most elaborate recipe, but when you throw a lump of dough in a deep fryer and smother it in powdered sugar you have to accept that most of the delicate flavours are going to be obscured by delicious sugary grease.

Austin

My original plan was to leave San Diego on the 12th and head to Tucson for a few days, then take the train to Austin. After debating the merits of a 40 hour train ride versus three extra days at the beach (it was not a long debate), I decided to skip Arizona and New Mexico completely and fly directly to Texas. Getting on the plane took a surprisingly short amount of time, even with being searched; I got to Austin around six.

Erin had previously informed me that if I failed to go to the Alamo Drafthouse cinema, we would stop being friends. I checked their showtimes and realized the universe was trying to tell me something - Peaches Christ was presenting All About Evil, the movie I'd failed to see in San Francisco, in four hours. My new friend and roommate Alex agreed to join me. We bought tickets and tried to figure out what to do to kill the time in between. Alex then told me about the bats.

Every spring 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats migrate north to Austin and congregate under the main bridge. And every night, hundreds of people congregate on top of and alongside the bridge to watch them emerge to feed. It was like a fireworks display - people packed into anywhere that had an unobstructed view. Three ferries were floating around underneath, also full of people and shining red spotlights on the colony to give a better view. The bats started coming out around nine - not all in one massive terrifying cloud, as we'd hoped, but filtering out over the course of an hour. It was still pretty cool - along the riverbank, where we were, they zoomed by a few feet overhead. In the late summer months the population peaks and it is even more impressive.

We wandered around 6th street for a while - this is where most of the bars and live music performances are - and listened to a super greasy classic rock style trio - the guitarist had a bandanna and vest and was completely into his music, closing his eyes and rocking out. Headed to the Alamo to get seats - where other theaters show you commercials or movie trivia before the film, the Alamo gives you a menu and plays grindhouse trailers, which Alex had never seen. Trying to explain the appeal of grindhouse is difficult - you either think it's amazing or incredibly stupid.
The preshow was almost as good as the film itself - Peaches did a brief musical introduction, with her stage manager and costumer as backup dancers, where she revealed that she had become the greatest queen in SF by murdering all the others, and anyone in the audience wearing cheap perfume and acting like a whore wouldn't be leaving the theater alive. Afterwards was a brief Q and A with special guests and costars Mink Stole (a cult actress who's been in almost every John Waters film) and Cassandra Peters, aka Elvira, aka my new hero. There is selling out and then there is what Elvira does. She's made it an art form, everything from car fresheners to beer. I don't think she ever turned down a product endorsement. It is refreshingly honest.

Still alive

Whoo, wow, Vegas destroyed my brain cells, sleep patterns, and work ethic. But I have spent today doing nothing but lying on the beach reading, followed by a farmer's market, and am now revitalized. I am going to fill in the posts between now and then and post-date them later, yes it's cheating, no I don't care.

Today was a vacation from the vacation. Got up, went back to bed, got up for real, made pancakes and lazed around the hostel, then wandered down to Ocean Beach. As it's still fucking cold it was pretty deserted, save for surfers in wetsuits and a few sunbathers. Spent a lovely six hours alternating between reading and frightening tidepool crabs, then wandered around the Newport farmer's market. Highlights of that include the best strawberries ever, an eight week old retriever puppy, and a hippie riding around a bicycle with a five foot long iguana sitting on the handlebar pouch. Apparently she really enjoys these excursions ('enjoy' in iguana terms means 'does not run away from'). I may do it again tomorrow.