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.