Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Road Trip: New Orleans Day 2

New Orleans is the only destination we spent two full days in, because Ben had never been there before and there is so much to do. On the second morning we drove out to Slidell, LA for a tour of the Honey Island Swamp. The tour is in a flat bottomed boat, and they just drive you around the swamp for a few hours to check out all the wildlife. We saw a ton of alligators:
Small one chilling on a log
The tour guides throw marshmallows to them, so they know to come near the boats and hang out for treats. They get really close:
The guides also hold out sticks with hot dogs on them, so you can watch the alligators jump up and eat them. It's pretty crazy how fast and how high they can jump:

We also saw a bunch of herons:
Giant grasshoppers:
Ben picked one up. Gross.
And even wild boars:
The boars also know to come near the boats for tasty marshmallow treats:
Besides animals, we also saw the homes of people who live in the swamp.
These are small sheds for 1-2 day fishing trips.
Regular full time house.
Building a new house
Swimming party!
Most of the homes, including the one that is under construction, are only accessible by boat - that means everything they use, including the lumber to build them in the first place, has to be brought in by boat. Crazy.
After the tour, we had lunch at a delicious Colombian restaurant.
Arepas!
Ajiaco!
After lunch we swung by Mardi Gras World, where we were too cheap to do the full guided tour, but we checked out all the giant float leftovers around the exterior:
Tiny Ben, big Elvis.
Mermaid Horse!
We then went home and napped off our food coma for the rest of the afternoon, before finishing the day off with Dat Dog and some live jazz on Frenchman Street. Yay, New Orleans!

Road Trip: New Orleans Day 1

We started the day off right, with beignets and café au lait at Café du Monde:
Beignets make Ben "yay!"
Then we went for a self-guided walking tour of the garden district. There were many gorgeous homes, but the but there was a disconcerting disconnect between the beauty and the knowledge that most of the homes were built by slaves and with profits from slavery.
It would be one thing if the homes were now memorials to the atrocity that built them, but they are just luxurious private homes for (almost entirely white) rich people, at least some of whom apparently don't have a problem with where their good fortune came from:
"Proudly remembers." I've never wanted to deface anything so badly.
We also walked by an old cemetery, which is neat because the swampiness of the land requires all the graves to be above ground:
We were good and had salads for lunch, but then promptly made up for it by getting snowballs, which are a New Orleans classic:
We spent the afternoon walking around City Park, which is huge (50% bigger than Central Park) and gorgeous:
Ben is dwarfed by the giant trees
Why did the geese cross the railroad tracks? Who knows!
We had classic creole food for dinner:
Jambalaya!
Followed by ice cream from Creole Creamery for dessert:
We will be lucky if we can fit through the door of our new home in SF at this rate.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Road Trip: Jackson

The first thing we did in Jackson was meet the new baby of the friends we were staying with:
Baby!
He's only three weeks old - you might think that most sane people wouldn't have house guests three weeks after having a baby, but these friends are serious about their Southern hospitality. For example, here's the cabinet in the guest bathroom:
There is at least three of each travel size item.
The next day we visited some of the historic sites around town, starting with the bus station where the Freedom Riders were arrested:

Medgar Evers' statue, which is next to a library and park named after him:
We also visited Medgar Evers' home, but didn't think it was appropriate to take photos with a murder scene.
It was unsettling to stand right in the driveway where he was assassinated in front of his family, especially given recent acts of white supremacist terrorism. There's not much there to commemorate it other than a plaque:
And speaking of white supremacy, this is what the Mississippi supreme court looks like:
I know it's the state flag of Mississippi, but it's still appalling.
In the afternoon, we went to the Mississippi Museum of Art, which was beautiful:
The art inside was all by Mississippians, and was incredibly diverse. There was everything from mechanized models of the constellations:
To gorgeous handmade quilts:
I also got a reassuring message in the gift shop:
We spent the rest of the day at home with our friends, playing board games and ogling the baby. It was a great third stop!

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Road trip: Atlanta

Atlanta is great! We started the day with the best pancakes ever:
Corn on the left, sweet potato on the right
Then we went to the Center for Civil and Human Rights, which is a really cool interactive museum about the US civil rights movement historically and the global human rights movement today. The most intense part is when you sit at a model lunch counter wearing headphones, and listen to people screaming and jeering at you while your chair shakes and lurches as if it's being kicked. It's only three minutes long, but it's a very difficult three minutes. We didn't take any pictures in the museum, but here's a few shots of the outside, which is gorgeous:
Ben and the fountain
The museum itself
After that we drastically reversed course and went to the Coke museum. We posed with giant decorative Coke bottles:
And looked at small Coke bottles from around the world:
Why is Croatia wearing a tie?
Watched Coke being bottled:
Wondered what the heck this thing is:
Wondered if this memo about "Project Kansas" (aka New Coke) could possibly be real:
And sampled Coke products from around the world:
Lastly, in the section about Coke and sports, there was a triangle of Coke bottles featuring Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, which seemed appropriately symbolic:
We spent the night having great dinner with great friends, and tomorrow it's off to Jackson!

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Road Trip: Charlotte

The last few weeks have been a bit nutty: two weeks ago we flew to San Francisco to look for housing, we went from SF straight to Boston for one last weekend there before we leave the East Coast, then we drove back to Philly by way of Connecticut to meet our friends' new baby (yay!), spent three days packing all our stuff before the movers came and took it all away, spent three more days sleeping on the floor and doing all the random last things we had to do before leaving Philly (while hanging out with my parents and sister, who were in town for a final visit, and trying to cram in as much time with our Littles as possible), went to a wedding, and then this Monday we took off! I also cried a lot the last few days, because I don't want to leave.

To try and ease the painfulness of leaving Philly for a place that we didn't want to live, we are making the move a vacation and spending three weeks driving to SF and stopping to visit friends in various places along the way. Here's the itinerary:
I know it seems pretty random - it was dictated by (1) places where we have friends we can stay with, and (2) trying to go to as many new places as possible. The first stop was Charlotte!
Char-what?
We went to the Harvey Gantt Center for African American Arts and Culture, which had some really cool art that you unfortunately couldn't take pictures of, and then we walked around downtown Charlotte (except they call it "uptown"), which also had cool art and you could take pictures:
A bear for some reason
A mosaic
We also ate a lot of great (mostly fried) food, played board games with the friend we were staying with, and generally had a great time. This morning we had breakfast at a really neat cafe before hitting the road, and now we are in Atlanta!
Ben at breakfast

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Art art art

There was a big interactive art festival near us this week! Saint Gobain, which is a giant international company I've never heard of before, was apparently celebrating their 350th anniversary - they created four interactive art "pavilions" and took them on a world tour. Their North American stop was Philadelphia, since apparently it's where their headquarters on the continent are. It was pretty groovy looking:
The pavilions!
Lit up after the sun went down!
The lines were pretty long, so we only had time to go into two of the four pavilions - one had a groovy fog and laser show inside, and the other was a bunch of spinning platforms with big colorful walls:
Selfie on the spinning color thing!
Yay, art!