halloween, pt 1

Had a fantastic Halloween weekend in New Orleans. (I took my Pentax, so have been waiting to get my film processed before posting about it, and still have another roll to finish.)

We had weekend passes to the Voodoo festival. We saw Jonsi (who was wonderful!), a bit of Weezer, Muse, Florence and the Machine, White Rabbits, Janelle Monae (had a stage and time change, then started 45 minutes late, but was still good), Interpol (one of our favourite bands, always good live) and MGMT.

The venue, City Park, was great. Although the main stages were out in the open and got quite hot in the middle of the day, there were lots of nice big trees and shaded areas to sit. Pretty good food stalls too, lots of local food.

We also fit in a visit to the aquarium, and a couple of very tasty meals in the French Quarter at Deanie's Seafood (incredible charbroiled oysters and BBQ shrimp) and Crescent City Brewhouse (nice beers brewed in-house, and good food to match –
we had a deli platter, more baked oysters and hot wings. Yum).

Hope you had an enjoyable Halloween. And if you want to see, there are more photos on Flickr.

sounds of louisiana

I came across this clip as a featured video on Youtube:

I looked around for some more Cajun and Zydeco clips. Found a couple of old ones, including this, of Buckwheat Zydeco (who won the grammy)...

... and this one of Dewey Balfa and his nephew, Todd Balfa, on the fiddlesticks (!)

It's been raining all day here, and I've been watching water run down the walls in our living room. It's actually starting to drip from the ceiling on to the carpet now. Let's hope the wall doesn't collapse or anything. Anyway, I'm going to put some cups on the floor to catch the drips, and bake some of these...