The major thing that's happened in the last month was Mardi Gras. Until I arrived in Louisiana they only thing I knew about Mardi Gras was what I'd seen on tv from the Sydney festival, and some blurred memories from our own Mardi Gras party in Perth. It turns out that about the only thing we had right was the beads.
Mardi Gras is a religious festival, and a very Catholic one at that. The roots come from the celebrations prior to Lent, starting from Twelfth Night and finishes on Fat Tuesday. Those of you with a Catholic background might recognise Fat Tuesday as Shrove Tuesday, or pancake day.
Mardi Gras really gets going in the two weeks before Fat Tuesday, and is mostly made up of parade after parade after parade. These parades are run by social groups called "Krewes", and are mostly very family friendly. They generally consist of:
- People in masks on a float throwing beads, cups, doubloons, and if you're really lucky, a soft toy
- Followed by a marching band
- Followed by people carrying torches
- Followed by people on a float throwing beads, cups, doubloons & toys....
...and repeat....and repeat....and repeat....
You can tell the locals as they are well prepared for the windfall, and bring large bags along so that they can carry all the loot home. You could try and carry all the beads around your neck, but you'd end up hunched over like me after two hours riding a mountain bike.
The locals also stake out the good places several hours prior to the parades, often with 'parade ladders'. Parade ladders are a normal ladder with a wooden box nailed to the top for kids to sit in. When kids are up this high they present a good target for the people on the floats to aim at, meaning the kids are more likely to score a lot of toys.
There's a couple of exceptions to the family friendly nature of the festival, but I'll talk about them later.
You can tell it's getting near Mardi Gras season when king cakes start appearing in the office. These are coffee cakes that are smothered in cinnamon and sugar, and decorated with purple, green and gold beads. In each cake there is a plastic child (symbols again!), and whoever got the piece of cake with the child in it is supposed to buy the next cake. In reality, or at least in our office, people would stick the child back in the cake when no-one was looking; as the baby was in the last piece a suspicious amount of times.
Ok, enough intro, onto some pictures and stories of what we did. We went to a total of 5 parades over the course of the week, and also down to the quarter a couple of times for the proper experience.
About three weeks before Mardi Gras we went to our first parade, which was the "Krewe Du Vieux" parade. This is one of the less family friendly parades; and its stated mission is to "preserve the Mardi Gras parade as a venue for individual creative expression and satirical comment". Ie: it isn't afraid to offensive and politically incorrect. We loved it.
The parade is pretty much the only one that has hand- or mule-drawn carts and still goes through the french quarter. There also weren't any barriers to prevent people getting in close to the action, so there was a lot of push and shove to get as close as possible and score the beads. It also got pretty interesting when a larger float came along, as they had to push the crowd back to try and squeeze through.
My personal favourite float was the 'bring back Edwin Edwards' float, which had Edwards in a cell on the back of the float handing out Mardi Gras money for his re-election. And given that we just re-elected a politician who made the 'top 10 most corrupt officials' list last year, and had $100,000 in cash found in his freezer by police, surely even Edwards couldn't be that bad.....
Another high point was watching the brass bands try to march and play when the crowd was pressing in on them. It's ok for the saxophone players, but watching a trombone trying to hit a low note in a crowd and not whack someone in the head was pretty amusing.
Unfortunately we didn't take a camera with us, so you'll just have to follow the link below to see some of the parade pictures from the official website
The official site also has some nifty stuff about the history of the Krewe, and for those of you who can't be bothered following the link, I'll quote my favourite bit of it here.
".......the Krewe grew from about 150 drunks stumbling through the French Quarter in search of a bar, to become a relatively well-organized group of about 600 (most of them still drunk), with an actual parade route."
The week after that there was a parade on the Friday night nearby to where we live. Given how close it was, we decided to grab some dinner, a bottle of wine, a fluffy puppy and a picnic rug and enjoy the show from the median strip. And look, I've finally got a picture of something!
Gator Girl and the puppy relaxed on the median strip.
Swamp Boy doing his third favourite thing.
What is with those eyes?
Check out the RV in the background - for several days before the parade, RV's just started parking along the route to get the best possible position for the parade. It also means families can put the kids to sleep if the parade goes too late. The things in front are the parade ladders I was talking about before, where kids sit and get beads thrown at them.
Before the parades start lots of these guys wander the route selling beads, toys, flags, masks and all sorts of other goodies, generally off a converted shopping trolley. I'm not sure how successful that would be, as all you have to do is wait a couple of hours and equivalent goodies will get thrown at your head.
On to the parade itself. As you can see, there were hundred of people out on the street at parade time. This is a rare sight in these southern states - people walking! Always worth a photo.
There were pretty hossies.....
Two storey parade floats, impressively decorated with masked people hurling trinkets.
And the first words of any Nawlins child is normally "throw me something mister". I particularly like that the kid already has his hands filled with toys, and is still trying for more.We ran out of alcohol about half-way through the parade, but this is Southern Louisiana, this isn't going to be a problem. We got chatting to the RV owners across the road from us, and they started us on a beer lifeline. This is something we come across all the time down here, people are incredibly friendly and open with complete strangers, and happy to share anything they have with others.
Our friendly locals, but we were a few sheets to the wind by this stage and I don't remember their names.
The haul from about half-way through the parade. So the real question is what do you do with all those beads? The answers will be shared next week when the story of our Mardi Gras continues. Stay tuned for:Mardi Gras Part 2: Getting fat on Fat Tuesday (and I promise to get more pictures in the next one).
