DAY 5

At 6h30 AM, we were already on our way and after almost 8h on the road, we got to New Orleans. The city’s great skyline was the first image we got from our next destination.

Our friends-to-friends network didn’t fail this time either, and it took us to our gracious-awesome-fantstically-knowledgable-about-everything host, Will. We hadn’t met him before, but through a friend of Mari's (Thanks, Rafael!) we got in contact with him just to ask for touristic tips on the city and guess what: the guy is a couch surfer (http://www.couchsurfing.org/) and immediately offered us a very nice place in his cozy home. Will not only proved to be an amazing host, but also an excellent tourist guide and great company, certainly one of our biggest highlights in New Orleans.

It was pretty soon when we got there and we had two main (obvious) goals on what to do in the city: jazz and food. It was too soon for concerts, so food it was! Will’s roommate Aaron 2 (or was it Aaron 1..?), a chef wannabe, recommended to us a small, lesser-known-by-the-tourists local restaurant (Ignatius – Magazine St)… just the way we like. AMAZING ROAST BEEF PO’ BOY sandwich and shrimp creole. Legitimately the best meal of Syd's life. Highly recommended. The only issue was that they were temporarily not allowed to sell alcohol, but Mari didn’t find it that bad to buy her $1.60 “bud” across the street.

We were extremely tired (syd for driving all day and mari for a terrible sleepless night) but there was no way we would miss our #1 night program: random jazz at the French Quarter. We dressed up our only fancy clothes for the whole trip and took the famous old street car (or bondinho, in Will’s good Portuguese) to Bourbon St.

Honestly? We’re sorry if this is a heretic confession but we found it quite disappointing. Too many lights, too many tourists, too many naked women, too many jello shots, too few places for good music. Just to make it clear, we are talking about Bourbon St. (on Jan 31^st, 2011, Monday, 9pm), there are plenty other places and mind-blowing-amazingly-good music, and we definitely got a taste of some of it later on, but that’s another story. We did find a nice and cozy place to have a couple of drinks and listen to good jazz live, but in general what we got that night did not meet our expectations. We were finally beaten by the tiredness and Mari’s weird rejection to her contact lenses, which made us get home around 11 pm. Mari kinda blind but happy with her golden fleur de lis necklace (one of the traditions for the Mardi Gras – New Orleans’ Carnival to be held in a couple of weeks) thrown by a random guy at a random balcony.