Yesterday 
Yesterday luca and I toured the Garden District a bit and went to one of the old cemeteries.
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1
This particular cemetery is across the street from the well known Commander's Palace restaurant in the "heart of the Garden District", which was mostly an "American" area, as opposed to the Creole areas of the city. For those of you who do not know the story, people were buried in above ground crypts in New Orleans, (they still are today to some extent...), because the caskets used to pop up out of the ground during flooding when they were buried in the ordinary way. I suspect there were other factors... the bodies were layed in the crypts and then the little door was sealed. The brick enclosure and the heat tended to work like a little oven to speed the decomposition of the bodies and help reduce the danger of spreading disease. Also, there just wasn't all that much land available for burial and the system was an efficient use of space; when it was time to put someone else in the crypt, the remains of the previous family member were pushed to the back to make room for the next occupant.
Once a year, on All Saints Day, the whole family would come to the cemetery with a picnic lunch and white wash the tomb, doing any repairs that were necessary, clean up the grounds and put flowers and candles out.
a little city of the dead
The old cemeteries of New Orleans fell into a state of disrepair over the years as some of the families and organizations that were responsible for the care of the tombs died out. Some of the tombs are totally gone, others damaged; there is now a group called "Save Our Cemetaries" that devotes it's energy to preserving the cemeteries and their history. The Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 has become a very popular tourist spot since Anne Rice placed her Vampire Lestat there and also made it the resting place of the Mayfair Family from her novels. Her descriptions of the Garden District area of New Orleans are very much to the mark.
After that, we had lunch at an Indian restaurant and then went shopping on Magazine Street, a street full of antique shops, art galleries, all kinds of interesting shops. We found a place with a very large collection of Newcomb pottery, (although for some reason I keep thinking of "nukem", hehe.). Eventually, we got down the street to one of my favorite shops,
Prince and Pauper. They have a huge and truly eclectic collection of stuff! luca found, among other things a 4 foot tall hand carved wooden frog dressed like "Mr.Toad" of Toad Hall for an incredibly reasonable price.(pics later.)
Then, we headed home for a rest. We headed back into the Quarter to meet
Mike and his roomie, Lynn at the Napoleon House for dinner.
Lynn, Mike and luca... hehe.
Fabulous evening! We spent hours talking and eating in the gas lit courtyard. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the people I've met from this GayCams group have all been interesting and fun; this night was no exception. We parted company in front of the Napoleon House and luca and I headed home.
luca left about 11 AM this morning. Got a call from him about six; he had made it safely to Houston, although he was almost in a wreck when a rake fell off of a truck right in front of him and almost went under his car at 70 mph! (I'm sure this is true, but luca was probably doing eighty at the time, hehe.).
Hey, this was a very nice week! Good to see luca again, very nice to meet Mike and Lynn, (and Baby). Very nice indeed!
I'll be in chat tonight at 11PM CST. Hope to see you there!
and....thanks to luca for the pics of the cemetery... I looked at mine and then had a very stoopid moment during which I erased all of them!
