Broadway   The Post-Antarctica period ran into the holidays, and the new year brought more work with Eden Bay, last-minute preparations for Mexico and then the month’s stay in Tampa, and overlapping preparations for the May-June trip to Portugal, Spain, and England. For this, my English is fine (!!), my Spanish is great, but my limited Portuguese has faded alarmingly. That’s why—talk about overlap--I took along a Portuguese review book and made good use of it on all the flights to Santiago, Easter Island, and Antarctica. I’ve also ordered some CDs for spoken continental Portuguese, using the Pimsleur method (for those language teachers reading this) to be sent to Tampa for further review. I think I’ll be OK.

I needed a couple of breaks, and in November, ordered a ticket for the revival of A Chorus Line, which I got for December, and for Jersey Boys, which I only could get for two months later, in January. We had seen the original A Chorus Line years ago, and the revival was just as exciting. After seeing the psychological trauma of all the candidates in jeans and t-shirts trying to get a job in show business, and then seeing their transformation in “One”, the final glitzy, gold-costumed, top hat-doffing, toe-tapping production number, this has got to be one of the high points of American Musical Theater. Watch it on YouTube: A Chorus Line: One

[Side remark: I used the mostly archaic word “doff” above. Not everyone realizes that doff and don (“Don we now our gay apparel” in the Christmas carol) are not only a pair, but are opposites. Furthermore, not everyone realizes that these words are contractions of “do off” and “do on”, so they MUST be opposites, just as “off” and “on” are. Their modern replacements remove the “do” element from both and instead use two different words with “off” and “on”: “take off” and “put on”. End of digression.]

I’ve said in the past that I haven’t followed popular music in decades, yet when Beverly and I went to see Mamma Mia! a couple of years ago I really enjoyed it and said so in these pages, even knowing little about Abba. It’s just that some things, including popular songs, just become part of the culture, one absorbs them, and then recognizes and enjoys them anyway. Still, the pop-music-based Jersey Boys was nominated for eight Tonys last year and won four: Best Musical (I really wanted to see the excellent Drowsy Chaperone to win, which I saw twice, but Jersey Boys is equally outstanding), Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical: John Lloyd Young (I agree, he’s outstanding, especially his singing), Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical: Christian Hoff (I agree, he gives a marvelous perfomance), and Best Lighting Design for a Musical (the lighting blows you away). With all this background, plus realizing that the unavailability of tickets must indicate something, I accepted a ticket for the best date I could get, even though it was on the Friday before the Monday I left on my trip.

Jersey Boys is the story of The Four Seasons, later Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. They do a marvelous job. It’s the type of show where the audience claps frequently, also claps along, then rises as one in applause at the final number, even before it’s finished. John Lloyd Young really sounds like Frankie Valli, including all the falsetto parts. It tells in Playbill that to learn to sing for this part he studied with a “legendary rock voice teacher”. I was able to recognize many of the songs, certainly including Frankie Valli’s biggest hit (1967):

Note how each line is exactly seven syllables long, without variation, and how the lines pair up in perfectly rhyming couplets. If you recall the simple melody, each couplet is sung further down the scale than the previous one. It’s also rare that the second line, and not the first line of a song, becomes its title. It’s a beautiful song, and Jersey Boys is a beautiful show. Here on YouTube it’s sung by Valli himself: Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons

I was going to leave the discussion of current Broadway musicals there where I’d left it after seeing Jersey Boys last night, but I realized today that would be doing The Drowsy Chaperone an injustice, so here are a few words about it.

The Drowsy Chaperone is hilariously funny, has great songs, is performed extremely well. That alone makes it pretty good, but not necessarily great. It’s the totally unique premise it’s built on that makes it great.

The Drowsy Chaperone is both a sendup and an hommage of the musicals of the 1920’s when story lines were nonsense, and it was just a “fun” show. The unique premise is this: a guy, referred to as the Man in Chair, is sitting to the left of the stage next to a phonograph and record collection. He chats up the audience about musicals years ago which were just fun and lighthearted. He asks the audience if they’d like to hear an example from his collection, and he chooses a record of the faux 1928 “Drowsy Chaperone”, supposedly some nonsense from the ‘20’s about a movie star’s wedding going awry, and describes the fictional actors and their weird bios. The rest of the stage is his rather dowdy New York apartment, with the entrance behind him on the left, his refrigerator in the back, and a Murphy bed on the right. When the record starts, so does the transformation of the stage, because suddenly all the characters on the record appear from everywhere, including from out of his refrigerator backstage, to perform what he’s listening to on the phonograph. You get to see that this guy has no life, and lives through the nonsense of these old shows.

The whole uniqueness is that you are really made to believe you’re listening to a record. Mostly the guy talks over the action, but if he does pause the record to make a comment, all other stage action freezes in mid-motion. At one point the needle starts to skip on the record over and over and over, and the action imitates the problem saying something like “Gotta go... Gotta go... Gotta go...”. We’ve all had the problem of sometimes not being able to make out a certain word on a recording, which is imitated here. A woman says a crucial line, and drops her walking stick, whose noise obliterates a certain word, so the man replays the bit 2-3 times and the action follows with the walking stick obliterating the word again and again.

Finally, at the beginning of the second act, he puts on the second record in the sleeve, and says the audience can hear the beginning of Act 2 while he runs to the bathroom. What you see is a Chinese court, with the emperor talking to a lady in a long gown. The guy comes rushing back, apologizing. Apparently his cleaning lady had put the wrong second record in this sleeve, one of another ’20’s musical with a similar cast in a Chinese setting. He puts the correct second disk on, the Chinese setting disappears, and the Drowsy Chaperone goes on. It’s very, very clever.

It’s appropriate that we’re discussing the American Musical (even a sendup of it) as a genre here, parallel to the Viennese operetta (Die lustige Witwe/The Merry Widow by Lehár) and opera, say Italian opera, even with a French name (La Bohème by Puccini). I find it difficult to see major differences between these art forms. If you say opera is “heavier” in subject matter than operetta, then think of the light-hearted Il barbiere di Siviglia/The Barber of Seville or Щелкунчик/Shchelkunchik/The Nutcracker. If you say that musicals are “lighter” than opera, then think of Porgy and Bess, Les Misérables, Gypsy, The Phantom of the Opera. Furthermore, note the crossovers of The Merry Widow appearing quite some number of years ago on Broadway, as well as La Bohème on Broadway just two years ago. Musicals can encompass aspects of both operetta and opera, to the point where the three almost become one. Note that the English word “musical” has entered many languages to describe this American contribution to the arts, and that the US does not have a corner on the market in musicals, since they can come from anywhere.

Also note that A Chorus Line was home-grown on Broadway, that Jersey Boys premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, and that The Drowsy Chaperone came from Toronto. As big a theatrical venue as London’s West End is, when Andrew Lloyd Webber has a success there, he brings it to Broadway as well. I suppose people feel the line from the song “New York, New York” is accurate: “If I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere...”.

Minor Celebrity Spotting   Before seeing Jersey Boys, I went to dinner to Orso on Restaurant Row, West 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. I’ve been to Orso maybe five times now, and found it in Zagat, which said it is a good location for celebrity spotting. I remember writing up my first visit, where Mike Nichols was two tables away, but never spotted anyone since.

I made up for it this night. Now you may or may not know these people, since they’re all just minor celebrities if that, and indeed, I was not able to identify one woman I recognized, but this night I struck the minor-league show-biz celebrity trifecta, and then some.

During my appetizer, I heard a familiar voice entering the restaurant passing me, which sat down two tables ahead of me. I also recognized the face. But the name? Ah, it was Ron Silver, of many roles, including Alan Dershowitz in 1990’s Reversal of Fortune.

I was sitting close to the bar and to the Maitre d’s podium and chatted them both up. Across the room I saw this middle-aged woman with a full head of hair and serious-looking face. I’ve seen her many times on shows like Law and Order and other dramas. Asking the Maitre d’ didn’t help, because he didn’t know her name. It was my only misfire of the evening.

Sitting at the lady’s table was someone else familiar, who ended up coming over and having a long talk with Ron Silver. I stared at that face through much of the main course. He’d lost a lot of weight, and was sooooo familiar. Finally I had to ask the Maitre d’, who said that was Richard Mazur. You may recognize the name or not, but you’ve seen him in many shows.

It was soon show time, and people were starting to leave. Coming back from the rest room, I saw the most familiar face sitting at a corner table. How exasperating when you KNOW that face, but can’t place it. Wait. Saturday Night Live. I asked the bartender if Lorne Michaels, its producer, was there tonight. Yes he was.

Well, I thought that was it, but as I was putting on my coat to leave, the Maitre d’ asked me if I’d seen who had passed between my table and the bar about ten minutes earlier. I recalled noticing a woman with her back to me who had stopped to chat with the barman, but no, I hadn’t recognized anyone. Well, it turned out it was Cybil Shepherd (Moonlighting). He said, just as Mazur had lost weight, Shepherd did look a bit older, but I was unaware of who it was. Well, it was still a good spotting evening. Only in New York? No. But pretty good, anyway, and a fun diversion.

The Crescent   The weekend between Jersey Boys on Friday and leaving on Monday continued to be filled with the overlapping preparations for Portugal-Spain-England, primarily online hotel reservations (how did I used to manage before online connections!!!). Then the London schedule began to get crowded. During my five nights there, I’ve been planning on daily rail excursions via a railpass, but I did want to see a certain play. Reviewing the London theater scene online, I now see there are two very interesting hit musicals that opened in 2006 that haven’t come to Broadway yet. I won’t mention show names yet, but I can fortunately also order those tickets online. Going to the theater three evenings over five days, including rail trips during each of those five days, is a very full schedule, but somebody’s got to do it, so I’ll volunteer. There is just too much to see and do in this life. But as usual, I digress.

After taking advantage of Penn Station’s Acela Lounge for its relaxed atmosphere, plus a complementary cinnamon bun and coffee, I boarded Amtrak’s Crescent headed for New Orleans. The name of the train derives from the fact that New Orleans is the Crescent City, named after the particular loop of the Mississippi in which it lies. I read that the earliest version of the train, with which I was not familiar, dating from 1891 and run by the Washington & Southwestern RR, had the unusual name Vestibule Limited. More familiar to me was the Southern Railway’s 1925 Crescent Limited, in 1970 becoming the Southern Crescent, and later Amtrak’s Crescent.

I have taken most of Amtrak’s trains (also VIA’s in Canada), but it was my first time on the Crescent. Leaving the underground platforms of Penn Station we crossed immediately the 2.5-mile tunnel under the Hudson, whose twin tubes were the first structural link of any kind, rail or road, tunnel or bridge, to cross the Hudson. Construction began in 1906; services began with the opening of Pennsylvania Station on 27 November 1910. I thought it appropriate that my sleeping car was coincidentally number 1910. The route follows Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor via Philadelphia and Washington (Reflections 2006 Series 12), then heads southwest into Virginia, paralleling the Blue Ridge Mountains, then through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, to Louisiana. Major cities beyond Washington are Atlanta and Birmingham. The scheduled time is 29h55m, but should be easily pictured as over 30 hours, since there are often delays due to the freight railroads who own the routes.

I need to point the reader to Reflections 2004 Series 23, the second part of a Travel Trilogy, this one called Montevallo: Reaching Across Time, in which I describe childhood memories of both Pennsylvania Station and of my cousin arriving from college in Alabama, “near Birmingham”, which turned out to be Montevallo, just south of Birmingham. I stated I was unaware, both at the time as well as when I wrote the article, of what rail route was involved in her trip. It is perfectly clear to me now that I’m taking the same trip she did, although given it took place in the late 1940’s, she would have been traveling on the Southern Railway’s Crescent Limited. The sleeping car attendant pointed out to me that, before fund-starved Amtrak took over the route, and when rail travel was more popular, the food on the Crescent Limited and Southern Crescent was so good and well-known, that people would take a round trip between Atlanta and Birmingham just to be able to dine in the dining car. Also, when the dining car would on occasion spend some time in Union Station in Washington waiting to be hooked up to the train, people from surrounding offices would come to eat there. Those days are gone, and Amtrak meals fall in the adequate range, but with adequate funding of Amtrak, all things could be possible.

New Orleans   I think we’ve visited New Orleans twice, once on the way to Mexico as described recently, and once again while driving around the eastern US. However, both those visits were in the 1960’s, and I haven’t been drawn to return until now, since I am of two minds about New Orleans.

On the one hand, it’s among the most unique of cities. A huge layer of French history from when it was the southern outlet for the Louisiana Territory, which became the Louisiana Purchase, a layer of Spanish history from when the whole Gulf coast from Florida to Mexico was Spanish, a huge layer of American history. Add to that the Acadians who were forceably brought there from Acadia, now Nova Scotia, and eventually alter their name to Cajuns. How else can you explain Mardi Gras, the whole food culture, both French/Continental and Cajun? Add the music culture, where you uniquely have even funerals with jazz music. Where else would the airport be named after Louis Armstrong? Geography also plays a unique role, the Crescent City lying on a bend of the Mississippi, largely below sea level with cemetery tombs famously on the surface because of the high water table; a major port inland from the sea, surrounded by levees to protect it from river, sea, and Lake Pontchartrain.

But to me, the other face of New Orleans, aside from the scorching summer heat I always encountered, was the widespread poverty, the endemic crime, the wholesale corruption, some of it going back to the days of Huey Long statewide, but also well entrenched locally. This aspect tended to spoil the uniqueness for me, a huge potential squandered, to my way of thinking.

Then came hurricane Katrina, and that unique geography became New Orleans’s undoing. Some years before that, I remember reading in National Geographic that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen, a below-sea-level punchbowl waiting to be filled as soon as a hurricane breached a levee or two, and in 2005, that’s exactly what happened.

When planning the train trip to Mexico, I found there was a change of trains necessary in New Orleans to proceed to El Paso, but since schedules of the two long-distance trains didn’t mesh, an overnight in New Orleans was necessary. Making lemonade from lemons, I decided to extend one overnight to three, and to see for myself how the New Orleans the visitor sees had fared and is recovering, plus just what the disaster areas looked like and how they were recovering, if at all. So here we are. There are of course still problems here that we regularly read about in the papers, most shockingly the sudden crime wave since New Year’s. This is a resurgance of what had always bothered me, but no one wants to write off this most unique and promising of cities.

In a lighter vein is the discussion of whether you stress the first or last syllable of Orleans. Of course, when both exist, both are just fine, according to personal taste (remember free variaton?). If you stress the first, it’s somewhat backed up by the fact that some locals tend to use a variation of that, calling the city NAW.linz, a pronunciation I find charming. Maybe I’ll adopt saying Nawlinz, at least while I’m here, to lend local color.

On arrival in the evening, the weather was not propitious. Putting aside those hot, humid and sweltering summer visits I remember, I expected January temperatures to be perhaps up in the 70’s, and brought appropriate clothes. Well, the temperatures were indeed in the 70’s—last week, as I hear. I arrived to winter weather in the high 30’s that evening, but rising into the 40’s the next day. These are the temperatures we had in Antarctica, but I just had a sweater and jacket. I was wishing I’d taken my knit cap, which a number of people were wearing. It was just a slight bit warmer the following days.

I had arranged to stay free on Starwood points at the W Hotel in the French Quarter. I had mentioned to the attendant on the train that my hotel was on Chartres at Conti. How would you pronounce those street names? I said SHART and KON.ti (I as in SKI). He looked at me. You mean SHART.rez and KONT.eye? Well, I suppose I did, and that’s what I ended up saying to the taxi driver. I also heard Chartres pronounced like the word “charters”. Anyway, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I would have two full days plus one morning here. How would I like it? Well, I am totally won over. Nawlinz goes back up near the top of my list. All the good things—history, atmosphere, good food, music--are still there, and thriving. And the “we’re still here” attitude is amazing, even though not all of the “we” are indeed now back here. I’ll have to be coming back again relatively soon, both to experience again what’s great here, and to see then what’s been further improved since Katrina.

My location in the French Quarter was ideal, near everything I wanted to do and see. But that term should be explained. If it brings to mind Bourbon Street partying, which isn’t untrue, but visualize it again, in a more historical manner.

The French founded Nawlinz, or, more precisely, la Nouvelle Orléans, in 1718. They needed a location to protect the entrance to the Mississippi. Everything downriver, way to the delta was too low for an encampment. The next good location upriver was Baton Rouge (“Red Stick”), which was also established, and is today the capital of Louisiana, but they needed something closer. They found some high ground which is today the French Quarter. It has rarely if ever flooded, even during Katrina. (The areas of town that did flood were lower-lying, but those were expansion areas, since as the city grew, there was no other land to expand to.)

French engineers laid down the town plan in 1721 along this bend in the Mississippi (“Crescent City”) on ground just a bit higher than the rest. The plan is in the form of a grid, turned counterclockwise into a diamond shape. There are just over a dozen streets perpendicular to the river, among them Conti. Not counting some extra, curved streets caused by the bend, there are just seven streets within the Quarter parallel to the river, including Chartres. This rather unique layout obviously forms a rectangle, which gives rise to the other, and in my opinion better, name for the area, the Vieux Carré. Carré (ka.RE, rhymes with café) means square in French, not a city square, but a four-sided figure (even though it’s really a rectangle). Vieux (pronounced VYÖ) means old, since this is the old core of the city, so Vieux Carré is a very appropriate name.

In the 1760’s, the Spanish took over the city. It became French again in 1803—but then just months later, Napoléon sold all of vast Louisiana (“Louisiana Purchase”) to the United States. One should consider how the French residents felt in this roller-coaster atmosphere. It is also said that the US was less interested in the vast but empty territories of Louisiana and much more interested in getting title to the Vieux Carré, sometimes referred to as l’Île d’Orléans/the Island of Orleans, an interesting reference to it being high ground, as though it were an island.

The French Créoles (créole means native-born, local) remained firmly entrenched in the Vieux Carré until the late 1800’s, living quietly in their town houses, with typical cast-iron or wrought-iron galleries on the upper levels, often referred to as balconies. Immediately bordering the Vieux Carré on the west is Canal Street, which runs from the Mississippi up to huge Lake Pontchartrain. Arriving Americans settled on the west side of Canal Street, and the Americans and French Créoles kept largely to themselves. Actually, the Créoles shunned the newcomers. Canal Street is so wide because it was originally planned to run a canal along it, never built, connecting the two bodies of water. There is a wide, grassy median going down the middle of Canal Street. It is referred to, not as a median, but as a “neutral ground”. This typical New-Orleansian expression, which now refers to all medians on all wide streets, originally only referred to the one on Canal Street, and indicates that there was no love lost between the Americans on the one side and French Créoles on the other in the Vieux Carré. For this reason, there is a historically negative connotation to the term “French Quarter”, indicating that “they want to be by themselves, so we’ll leave them alone”. No one using the term today realizes that, so there really is no negative connotation anymore.

With the coming of the 20th Century, as happens to most old residential neighborhoods, there was immigration into the Vieux Carré, and then the genteel quarter became commercialized, some of it becoming a rowdy night district. Although there are still residents here, the old Créole culture as it was has long since dispersed, so there is even less reason to see any negative connotation.

The old street grid, atmosphere, and architecture survive, but many of the town houses and other buildings are now hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, and such, so this is the part of Nawlinz that attracts most visitors. All street signs have the name in English, and in smaller writing above, in French. Adjacent, on many buildings, there are ceramic tiles stating what the street name was when New Orleans was part of the Spanish province of Luisiana (they spell it correctly in Spanish). I like this tri-lingual reminder of the history. Most times, the street names are the same, but some vary. I’ll mention the first four streets parallel to the levee and the river. (Do realize that a levee is just a raised berm of earth, high enough to keep rising waters at bay. The one in downtown Nawlins is now a park with nice river views.)

The first four streets, in order, parallel to the river, going inland are: first Decatur [Street], and above that name the very logical Rue de la Levée. Nearby signs show it was Camino Real (Royal Road) in Spanish. These are three different names for the same street, but that’s atypical. Next is Chartres [Street]/Rue Chartres/Calle Chartres; Royal [Street]/Rue Royale/Calle Real; Bourbon [Street]/Rue Bourbon/Calle Borbón. Beyond these four, and also on the downriver side of the Vieux Carré, away from Canal Street, is where most residents live today. But on these four, especially Bourbon, Royal, and Decatur, and including Jackson Square and the French Market, is where the vibrant public life of the Vieux Carré takes place.

Starting inland, Bourbon Street is the party street of the Vieux Carré. Although many would like to believe the street is named after the whiskey, it’s really named after the French royal family of the time. The whiskey is named after Bourbon County, Kentucky, where it originated—and that county is also named after that French royal family. So the royals get both place names, and the whiskey has nothing to do with the one in the Vieux Carré.

Next going toward the river is elegant Royal Street, today a street of shops and art galleries occupying early 19th Century town houses. On the upper levels of houses here and elsewhere in the Vieux Carré are the cast-iron and wrought-iron structures often referred to as balconies, but really long galleries, and are the hallmark of the area. You can imagine their being used during the summer heat by the resident créoles. At the moment, some of them have signs that they will be for rent during Mardi Gras, which this year is February 20th.

[Note: the party theme in general, but especially during Mardi Gras, is expressed in the phrase “Laissez les bons temps rouler!”, which purports to be authentic French, but which is highly suspect. Although I think you could express “Let the good times roll” in French that way, it is unusual and quirky, the normal way being “Que les bons temps roulent!”. That first way seems too much to be a deliberate and over-close translation of the English, and seems to represent five wolves in sheep’s clothing, the five English words being the wolves, covered by the sheepskins of the French words. Picky, picky. Actually, Nawlinz being a blend of cultures anyway, I suppose the phrase is appropriate.]

Chartres Street, where my hotel was, is of lesser importance, although Saint Louis Cathedral, at the head of Jackson Square, is technically on it. Jackson Square then runs down one block to busy Decatur, where the French Market is, right in front of the levee.

My Vieux Carré walk took a good part of my first day. Because of the cold, I had to pop into the occasional shop to warm up, but it was no problem. As to the recovery of the tourism industry, there were reasonable numbers of people around, especially considering it was January, it was cold, it was midweek.

Over decades of travel, I’ve become accustomed to having two meals a day, brunch and dinner, which is what I also do at home. Knowing in advance where I wanted to eat in the Vieux Carré, things worked out perfectly. That first morning I headed for the Café du Monde on Decatur Street, at the Jackson Square end of the French Market for what would be brunch.

The Café du Monde, dating from 1862, is a Nawlinz institution, and is open 24 hours. You go there for two things, and two things only: beignets and coffee. A beignet (ben.YAY) is a rectangular deep-fried hole-less doughnut, served hot and sugared, three on a plate. What is unusual is the confectioner’s sugar. The portion comes covered with a snowstorm of sugar, perhaps a half-inch thick or more. You can barely find the doughnuts. You shake off most of the sugar, then dip in for more. Caution: breathe out at the wrong time and you’ll be wearing the sugar. Breathe in at the wrong time, and you’ll choke.

The coffee served is café au lait, but that should not be a surprise. Au lait sounds like the Spanish cheer olé and means “with milk”, but that doesn’t explain it all: café au lait is half coffee and half warmed milk. The coffee is enriched with chicory, a root vegetable that is ground and roasted specifically to be a coffee additive.

You pay the waitress cash on being served, and you then have a Nawlinz Cultural and Culinary Experience for about $3. Can’t do better than that.

It is worth noting that when the Café du Monde reopened after Katrina, it was one of those moments when the city knew it was coming back. The last time I looked at their website doing research, there was still a poignant note to employees who were still dispersed to e-mail the Café du Monde to let them know of their whereabouts and situation.

The rest of the French Market (1813) is today converted into boutiques and other shops. One shop demonstrates the making of, and sells, pralines. In Europe, the word praline is prah.LEEN and refers to any kind of candy or bonbon. A New Orleans praline is PRAY.leen and is a confection made from melted sugar and other ingredients that is made to form a puddle around pecans and then is allowed to harden. It’s about three inches across and also comes in a chocolate version.

Across the street, Jackson Square is a beautiful park, around which there are street performers. The park is open to the levee on the south, on either side are the Pontalba Buildings, and to the north, just across Chartres, is Saint Louis Cathedral, flanked by two buildings, the Presbytère on the right and the Cabildo on the left, where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

Jackson Square had been called Place d’Armes by the French (Plaza de Armas by the Spanish). That name always refers to the armaments kept nearby for the militia, so that the name place d’armes would probably best correspond to the phrase Parade Ground.

I walked across Canal Street and into the Central Business District and the now artsy Warehouse District. This whole area had been the “American” district when the Créoles had been in the Vieux Carré. I did not go beyond into the famous Garden District, but only walked up Saint Charles Avenue along the Saint Charles Line streetcar tracks to Lee Circle, and here we need some explanation.

The Garden District, which starts just a bit further along from where I stopped my walk, is one of Nawlinz’s premier residential districts, known for its homes. It was formed from a subdivided plantation in 1825 and laid out in the 1830’s. With two other areas it formed the town of Lafayette, which was annexed to New Orleans in 1852. We drove through the Garden District years ago to see the homes.

The New Orleans & Carrolton RR was built down Saint Charles Avenue through this area, spurring development, with service starting in 1835, both by steam-powered trains and mule-powered cars. In 1893 the service on the Saint Charles streetcar line was electrified. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers confirms that the Saint Charles Line, with a lineage dating to 1835, is the oldest continuously operating street railway in the world.

By 1900, this one line had become 28. Later in the century most of these lines suffered the closures that became familiar in many cities. There is a somewhat out-of-date sign in Lee Circle near the tracks that must have been put up after the closing of the also famous Canal Street line some years ago, poignantly stating that Saint Charles was New Orleans’s “first, and last, streetcar line”.

But April 2004 marked a milestone. After an absence of forty years, the Canal Street Line returned, on the same route, from the river up to the cemeteries. (New Orleans cemeteries, as are others in the region, are a visitor destination since, because of the high water table, burials are above ground, in tombs.) As in other cities, there is talk, probably diminished at present due to Katrina, of restoring other lines and building new ones.

Is streetcar talk boring you? Will a literary illusion help? One of the now-gone lines ran across the Vieux Carré, one way on Royal, the other way on Bourbon. East of the Quarter, the line went about 15 minutes into a (rather rough) neighborhood in which a number of streets are named after abstract qualities, such as Piety, Abundance, Pleasure, and—you guessed it--Desire, this latter street being the last stop on this line. All eastbound streetcars on this line had the street name Desire in the front of the car, and Tennessee Williams used that fact to name “A Streetcar Named Desire”.

Even without understanding the literal meaning of the title, the symbolism in the title remains clear as to the emotions of Stanley Kowalski and Stella. Complex as the allusions here are, a lot gets lost in translation. The German name is “Endstation Sehnsucht”. A streetcar isn’t actually mentioned here, but it’s last stop is, in “Endstation”. “Sehnsucht” means longing or desire, but there is no Sehnsucht street in New Orleans. So the English title is both literal and abstract, but the German title has to be satisfied with just being abstract. If you refer to, say, Brando’s performance in “Streetcar”, everyone will recognize what you’re talking about; even shortening the title to one word works because the streetcar allusion is so very famous. But the streetcar allusion doesn’t actually appear in the German version. This is an example of something being (necessarily) lost in translation.

Leaving literary streetcars, and getting back to real ones, the Saint Charles Line was due to be temporarily closed down to be rehabilitated when Katrina struck. It’s fortunate work hadn’t started, since any new work would have just been lost in the storm. The present status is this. Canal Street cars are running. Saint Charles cars presently run just the few blocks between Canal and Lee Circle, while the majority of the line is being rehabilitated over the next year or so.

I want to wait to go back to the Garden District until my next visit when I can do it all the way on the Saint Charles Line streetcar. Meanwhile, with locals dispersed and few visitors about, the Canal cars had one or two people on board, the Saint Charles cars had no one. I suppose we could use A Streetcar Named Hope/Endstation Hoffnung.

At the river end of Canal Street is where the Harrah’s Casino was built a few years ago. I visited it, but I’m no gambler. Right beyond that is the ferry that crosses the Mississippi to the other bank, to the community named Algiers, founded in 1719. It’s free to foot passengers, but not cars. Once the cars loaded, it crossed in only about 3-4 minutes, and gave a good view of the skyline, before returning.

And the jazz. In the evening a small jazz band marched down Chartres, followed by a group of people. While I’m not the hugest jazz fan, here it’s part of the culture and it’s great. Earlier in the day, between the cathedral and Jackson Square, there was a four-piece jazz band playing (wearing knit caps and hoods—it was cold!). They were good and did play some old favorites, including “Sunny Side of the Street” and “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream”. One 20-ish couple, then a second, started doing a jitterbug right out on the street. The band was good, and these kids were outsstanding. I’ve never seen such clever dancing. If you’re picturing that these kids dancing so marvelously were black, you’ve got a stereotyped image; they were white.

The day being so cold, I had to jump into more shops than usual to keep warm. Some were t-shirt shops. These slogans showed spirit:

Some mentioned Katrina, but the vindictiveness went toward FEMA:

I stopped into a store selling Po’ Boys (also written Po-Boys, and rarely Poor Boys; rarely, since it’s not pronounced that way). A Po’ Boy is a Hero/Sub/Grinder/Hoagie, but on Nawlinz French Bread. I passed this up, since I couldn’t fit it into my meal schedule, and I figured it wasn’t that different from what I knew.

Shops were selling Jambalaya mix (rice and seafood), gumbo mix, filé powder, Tabasco Sauce. Gumbo is a marvelously spicy, thick seafood soup. It contains okra, and actually, gumbo is an African word for okra. Filé powder, also called gumbo filé, is a spice of dried and ground sassafrass leaves, used as a thickening agent for gumbo. I’ve known for a long time that Tabasco Sauce (my favorite!) is made in Avery Island, west of New Orleans near New Iberia, having read magazine articles about the place, and have considering visiting the plant. I have to pull a “Carpe diem” soon and finally go there. Maybe if I come back to Nawlinz soon as mentioned earlier, but also rent a car to go to Avery Island? The National Trust for Historic Preservation, of which I’m a member, also has a property there, the restored plantation Shadows on the Teche. Sounds like a plan to me.

Two random points that don’t fit in anywhere else: Nola is a name the city is often referred to by. It is of course an acronym for New Orleans LA. Maybe I’ll start using that a bit, too. Also, two different people have mentioned to me that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have just bought a house just the other side of Jackson Square from where I’m staying.

As to dining: Nola has plenty of restaurants the locals regularly go to with a variety of cajun, soul, continental, French cooking and others. I know that. I’m sure there are some major new ones as well. My culinary purpose this trip though was to go to the biggies, the world-famous older ones that locals only go to on special occasions, and visitors go to as well, since visiting Nola is a special occasion. They are Galatoire’s, Antoine’s, and Brennan’s, all in the Quarter, and all 2-3 short blocks from where I was staying.

Galatoire’s, on Bourbon Street, dates from 1905, which means it just had its centenary the year of Katrina. Zagat rates it the highest of the three mentioned above, and another source says it “defines the New Orleans dining experience”. I now can say that I agree. When it re-opened after Katrina, they had restored the traditional green-wallpapered interior to what I read is exactly the way it had been before. I also read that Galatoire’s is where, in “Streetcar”, Stella took Blanche to escape Stanley’s poker game, so Galatoire’s name is now entrenched in a literary classic. Given current Nola circumstances, a reservation was not as necessary as it would have been otherwise, but the room was close to full. Among other things, I had a most memorable and very savory Créole Gumbo. Crawfish Étouffée is a classic dish; crawfish not being in season, I had Shrimp Étouffée (shrimps on rice). It was a memorable evening (for me, Stella, and Blanche), and won’t be my last at Galatoire’s.

This trip I also sampled a cocktail I’d heard of, but had never had. The Sazerac was invented in New Orleans in the 1850’s. To bourbon you add sugar and something called Peychaud’s Bitters (you apparently are clearly not to use the more familiar Angostura Bitters), plus a lemon twist. Most unusual is that the inside of the glass is first coated with absinthe (anisette or sambucca can also be used). The Sazerac is a strong drink, but interesting.

If my first full day involved walking the Quarter and nearby areas, my second went further afield in an attempt to see areas visitors wouldn’t normally go to see, except for Katrina.

But first came brunch: a muffuletta. The muffuletta sandwich was invented in 1906, just a century ago, at the small Central Grocery, which is also a deli, on Decatur opposite the French Market. It has become a Nola specialty. It’s a flat, round, sesame-seeded roll, about the size of a small pie plate, which is split lengthwise and onto which are layered standard Italian deli cheeses and deli meats, but on top of which is also layered an olive salad. I looked up the ingredients of this olive salad: olives, pimentos, celery, garlic, cocktail onions, capers, oregano, parsley, olive oil, red wine vinegar. The sandwich is cut into four pie-like sections, and you buy half, which is more than enough for one person. After you buy it, you sit at a counter in the back to indulge. I had no line to wait on, but when I left, the line went out the door. Leaving Nawlinz on the train, I told someone who lived locally I’d had a muffuletta. He asked cautiously where I’d bought it. I said “at Central Grocery—I know what I’m doing!”, and we both smiled.

The more serious and sobering part of the Nola visit came that second afternoon. I don’t like tours, I don’t take tours, I find my own way with a guide book and map, thank you very much. But even if I had a car there is no way to know how to visit the Katrina destruction areas, do I had checked online and found the Gray Line Katrina tour, which lasted three hours. I’m glad I did. It was excellent and very revealing. The guide spoke with occasional emotion, as she had herself evacuated to relatives in Atlanta. She pointed out that the population had been lied to, that it was known that the city couldn’t survive a storm of that intensity and she described the chaos of evacuation.

We’ve read so much of this that I won’t go into it, but we passed the Superdome, the Convention Center near the river, two places where people had taken refuge. She pointed out taller buildings where people thought they could ride it out on a high floor, especially since the building had its own emergency generator, but then the generator had been put in the basement and got flooded out, resulting in no more elevator service. We swung up to the Lake Pontchartrain area where the 17th Street and London Avenue canals had burst, and then swung east to the Ninth Ward and Lower Ninth Ward.

These are some FEMA stories. FEMA paid contractors an incredible $2000 per tarp to put FEMA blue tarps on the roofs of houses to protect the house from leaks. All Americans are paying for those tarps. They’ve become a joke, and I heard that there are earrings and pins available of small roofs with blue tarps on them.

The worst is the FEMA trailers. They cost all Americans an incredible $75,000 each, plus $1400 each for delivery. Still, they are hard to come by, many have disappeared, if you do get one you have to requalify frequently to keep it, it is very difficult to get the power company to connect it. It seems almost a joke, but the trailers are unstable enough that, if a storm comes, people living in one are strongly advised to go back into their ruined house until the storm passes. They’ll be safer there.

Some university students designed a small simple house for half the price of a FEMA trailer, but FEMA won’t pay for them because they would be a permanent solution and the act that grants FEMA its powers says it can only pay for temporary housing. The joke became to put fake wheels on the sides of these houses.

New Orleans owns only about 52 miles of local levees, with the federal government owning many hundreds of miles more. A nearby community voted a bond issue to improve its levees, and then the federal government issued a cease and desist order that they can’t repair federal property. Some local citizens are considering the possibility of suing the US Corps of Engineers.

It seems the locals are stomped on by the government for so many things they try to do. There is no housing for blue-collar workers, so there is no one to do blue-collar jobs.

But picture this: we passed a large truck that looked like an oil tanker. The guide explained that the sewer system where we were had failed, so they pump out the sewerage and cart it away in these tanker trucks. She says you get $30 an hour to drive the poop trucks, and maybe she’s in the wrong profession.

I don’t want to go on with this much more, but the main thing is the houses and the neighborhoods, rich, middle-class, poor, for whites and blacks. Driving through them you often see the high-water line. You see the holes in attics from where the lucky ones escaped. You see the symbols written on most houses: an X, one stroke was written when rescuers went in, the other stroke afterward to prove they had come safely out. I forget what symbol was put in the top field of the X, but in the left field we saw AZ, meaning the rescuers were from Arizona, and I also remember FL for Florida. One of the other two fields usually had a zero, meaning no dead animals were found, and the other also had a zero, meaning no dead people were found. We fortunately only saw the ones with zeros. Most of these X’s were high up on houses, showing the height the water had been. She also said many people died because they wanted to stay with their pets. What you did not see in these neighborhoods was people, not walking dogs, not mowing lawns. They were dead neighborhoods.

You can not—can not—imagine the extent of these ruined neighborhoods. I thought I knew from seeing it all in the newspapers and on TV. I knew nothing. Picture any neighborhood you know of regular middle-class homes, upscale neighborhoods, poorer neighborhoods—I can picture Queens and Long Island, Minneapolis, Tampa—then picture them abandoned, with ruined mold-infested houses, block after block after block, no person in sight.

One last image. There is a very famous scene in the film of Gone With the Wind that takes place behind a railroad station. At first you see an incredible number of wounded, dying, and dead Confederate soldiers. But then the camera pans back and up and you see more, and more, and more, to the point of gasping. That’s the difference I see between what I imagined before and what I’ve seen now.

Support Nawlinz. It’s too nice a place to lose.

The evening of my second day I dined at Antoine’s. Antoine’s is the granddaddy of these restaurants. It was founded in 1840 and has been owned and operated by the same family since. It promises an antebellum tradition. It’s one street over from Conti, on Saint Louis, between Royal and Bourbon. It had some of the most dramatic Katrina damage in the relatively untouched Quarter; an outside wall had collapsed.

But not all is fine at Antoine’s. It was once the ultimate in fine dining, but now there are more and more complaints. Frommer’s guide says “it’s hard to ignore a legend, especially one we came so close to losing” so suggests you do try it. But even loyal locals suggest you skip the entrees and focus on appetizers and dessert. Its website still says it’s open only Thursday to Sunday, and when I was there, it was relatively empty.

Beverly’s travel diary says we went to Antoine’s on July 1, 1967 (that visit was our last time in Nola). I remember we could then afford to splurge at only one of the big restaurants, and this is the one we chose. I recall we liked it, but on this visit I’m not so sure. It looked good; the waiter was charming and helpful. Their gumbo wasn’t as good as Galatoire’s. I had the Oysters Rockefeller, which Antoine’s invented in 1899, and that was good. It’s a half dozen oysters on the half-shell, covered in a thick green topping with the consistency of mashed potatoes. Antoine’s refuses to say if it’s spinach or parsley that makes it green, but other ingredients are parmesan, flour, butter, milk. Antoine’s felt the dish was so rich, they named it for the pre-eminent rich family of the day. I suppose if it had been invented today it would be Oysters Gates.

The steak was good, as was the sauce with it, and creamed spinach on the side. I don’t mind spending money on a good meal, but this was over the top for what you got, and both the sauce and spinach were extra. I don’t like to give negative reports, but all in all, I reluctantly have to give up on this “legend”, although maybe the thought of skipping the entree another time might be a good idea. It’s a nice place, but I’m not in a rush to go back next time. It’s a shame.

Well, I had two full days plus a morning, and three restaurants to try. What to do about Brennan’s? No problem. It would be interesting to try Brennan’s at dinnertime, but this establishment is known for it’s “Breakfast at Brennan’s”, which made for a great variation in routine, after beignets and muffuletta. My train left just before noon, and I don’t like watching the clock in a restaurant, but this worked out perfectly.

Brennan’s is on Royal, just off Conti (I LOVED my hotel’s location!). It is the baby of these three restaurants, dating only from 1946. The slight mist falling was no problem, and where I was seated, next to a huge window looking out onto the courtyard with tropical plants in the mist, was very atmospheric.

They have a prix-fixe breakfast menu, and the food is, shall we say, very rich. (Please don’t use the phrase artery-clogging.) I started with a baked apple in cream, which I love and hadn’t had since I was a kid. The main courses were heavy on Eggs Bénédict-type dishes. I chose the Eggs Hussarde, which is a Brennan’s invention. It’s Eggs-Bénédict with its usual hollandaise sauce on top of the eggs, but a Marchand de Vin sauce below them, and is very good. I had also had this sauce the night before at Antoine’s on the steak (at that extra price), so it might be a local specialty. It’s a thick red-wine and mushroom sauce, and complimented the bright yellow hollandaise well.

As a final course I chose—what else—Bananas Foster, famously invented at Brennan’s. The bananas are sautéed tableside in butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and banana liqueur, then flambéed in rum and served on vanilla ice cream. It was a marvelous ending to this New Orleans visit.

Sunset Limited   The Sunset Limited moved in the 1990’s from being just a New Orleans to Los Angeles train to being the US’s first true transcontinental train, from Florida to Los Angeles, which is how Beverly and I took it a few years ago. But Katrina seriously damaged the track infrastructure on the Gulf Coast, and the train now runs, temporarily one hopes, only from New Orleans to the west once again. I’ll be using it to go to El Paso. It only goes three times a week, and is a two-level train. I’ve taken a bedroom on the upper level. A bedroom is roomier, has a sink, and the toilet enclosure cleverly has a private shower built into it.

Surprisingly, up until as late as 1947, trains going west out of New Orleans, when they reached the Mississippi, crossed it on ferries. In that year the massive Huey P. Long Bridge was built, named for the “colorful” 1930’s Louisiana senator and governor. Colorful to say the least. With approaches it’s 4.4 miles long, and has rail on the upper deck and road traffic on the lower. In this area we cross many bayous, which are slow-moving bodies of water. Shortly afterward is New Iberia, which I mentioned earlier I’d like to visit. The train moves on into Texas, through Houston and San Antonio, to El Paso, virtually at the farthest point west that Texas reaches. As the saying goes, Texas consists of miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.

El Paso   The train goes along the Union Pacific route to the west coast, the southernmost of the great transcontinental rail routes. As the Rio Grande (and the Mexican border) bends, it is close to the train route for two longish stretches, the second being approaching, passing through, and leaving El Paso at Texas’s western end. El Paso hugs the river and border, and I remember the last time we took this trip noting that as the train left the station in downtown El Paso westbound (Beverly’s travel diary says it was August 12, 1993), although the station and downtown were only a few blocks from the river and border, the train pulled ever closer to the river, ending up going right along its northern bank. It was a surprise being directly on the relatively narrow river, and looking across it at the Mexican kids splashing in the water on the very close opposite side in Mexico.

Since the Rio Grande starts up north and comes down through New Mexico in a southerly direction before turning and forming the Texas and US border with Mexico, when the train leaves Texas for New Mexico shortly after El Paso, it crosses the Rio Grande on a bridge, since for this tiny stretch, the river forms the western border of Texas as well as the southern border afterward that we usually picture. Also do recall that most of southern New Mexico and southern Arizona are part of the US because of the infamous Gadsden Purchase of this stretch of land from Mexico, which was made specifically so that the railroad could have the best route to the west coast along this southern stretch.

El Paso offers nothing to see that interests me. The reason I wanted to come here, even after the GrandLuxe train leaving from here on the Mexican side was cancelled, was to be able to walk across the international border. To this point I shall add some background.

You don’t literally cross borders when flying. That’s why ports of entry are called international airports. The same is true on shipboard. As for land crossings, on trains (or buses), when crossing a border the train stops and the authorities come on board to check papers. When driving, you usually pull up to what looks like a toll both to have papers checked. Even this experience no longer exists on trains and cars throughout so much of Europe now; since border formalities have been eased in many places, crossing international borders is like crossing from Connecticut to Massachusetts.

But how about walking across an international border? I’m not referring to locals who may do so regularly, but to travelers. It has to be a highly unusual situation for a person to be without transportation, yet at a border crossing. It won’t be out in the boondocks somewhere, but in an urban setting, where there is a town or city on both sides of the border. This does not happen in too many places. I said at the end of the last Series that I didn’t recall ever having walked across a border before. On reflection, I have found a couple of very unusual times I did do so, but that fortunately aren’t possible anymore to do. Here are the experiences I’ve had that come to mind.

I will not count Baarle (Reflections 2004 Series 13). This is the Dutch town, technically called Baarle-Nassau, that has 30 Belgian enclaves within it, the Belgian parts of town being technically called Baarle-Hertog (in French Baarle-Duc). Even though walking down the street you walk from the Netherlands to Belgium and back again and again, this is an aberration I will not count. We are talking about border crossings where you definitively cross an international border.

Checkpoint Charlie comes to mind. Although you would actually be crossing from Berlin to Berlin, it was technically at the time West Berlin and East Berlin. Today you stand in Friedrichstrasse and see the little toll-booth like hut in the middle of traffic rushing north and south, between long rows of department stores, apartment buildings, and shops, so you have to use your imagination to visualize how it used to be. The first time we walked through Checkpoint Charlie, we checked in with an American soldier in the booth, then walked across the border through the barbed-wire opening in the Berlin wall to then be checked by the eastern authorities. Then we’d walk north for blocks of totally vacant land, all the way up to Unter den Linden, which did have some shabby buildings on it. We also once drove through this checkpoint, and the car had to zigzag around barriers put there so that no one would rush the checkpoint with a truck trying to escape from East Berlin. On Friedrichstrasse beyond Under den Linden, we also entered East Berlin on foot (these were all different trips) through the checkpoint at the Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn station. Fortunately, Berlin is again one city.

The other example also refers to a divided city, and was an even more extreme situation than in Berlin. I’m sure almost no one remembers the Mandelbaum Gate, and younger people might not have even heard of it, but up until the 1960’s, it was in the news all the time. This was the period of a divided Jerusalem, where the demarcation line had been drawn separating West Jerusalem, in Israel, from East Jerusalem, which included the Old City surrounded by its walls; East Jerusalem was then part of Jordan. Although this sounds like West Berlin/East Berlin, the major difference was that in Berlin, although the Cold War was in progress, both sides did communicate with each other, but in Jerusalem, a state of war still existed and Jordan and the other Arab states would have nothing to do with Israel. If you had an Israeli stamp in your passport, you couldn’t enter an Arab country, which is why either Israel would stamp your passport on a loose sheet of paper, or you worked it out to visit Israel last. On our one and only trip to the Middle East, we did the latter.

The only crossing between the two parts of Jerusalem was the checkpoint known as the Mandelbaum Gate. It was just north of the western edge of the Old City, and was named for the Jewish merchant whose house had stood there earlier. There was no communication between the authorities on both sides of the “gate”. From what I said earlier, it should be clear that it was for non-official traffic only, in other words, foreign travelers, and was also a one-way passage only, from Jordan to Israel. Rather than being a literal gate, it was a concrete and barbed wire barrier. You also could not do it on your own, but you were required to arrange for a special travel agency to assist you in the following manner. Their Jordanian representative would pick you up at your hotel on the Jordanian side and bring you up to the “gate” where your papers would be inspected. He then brought your luggage a few steps further and put it down. You were then required to take your own luggage and cross through the Mandelbaum Gate totaly on your own. On the Israeli side, an Israeli representative of the same agency would meet you, take your luggage, and bring you to your hotel. This all occurred with armed guards on both sides watching you. How’s that for walking across a border?

I’m sure no one is aware today of the Mandelbaum Gate, as much as it was in the news then. I read that during the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israeli forces tore down the “gate”, and that today, only an historical marker remains. Jerusalem is, too, once again one single city.

So walking across borders is unusual, and the two I’ve described no longer exist, thank goodness. But another border now often in the news is the US-Mexican border, and most cities on one side have a twin city on the other. I’ll only discuss two pairs.

The biggest conurbation on both sides of the border is San Diego/Tijuana. In the last Series, I referred back earlier to Reflections 2001 Series 10 telling about how on August 30, 2001 we drove from San Diego to Tijuana and back. I’m sure many locals cross there on foot, but the problem is this. Central Tijuana would be a short walk from the crossing, but central San Diego is many miles from the crossing. I believe there is bus service for those who need it, but most visitors would sample Tijuana by driving, not by walking across the border.

El Paso/Ciudad Juárez is the second largest combined metropolitan area on the Rio Grande, and both are on the river. This is where I want to experience the walk across the international border.

First, the name of the river. English speakers call it the Rio Grande, although most shorten Grande from two syllables to one, making believe it’s the English word “grand”. But Rio Grande, meaning Big River, is a good Spanish name, right? Yes it is. The only thing is, it’s not the Spanish name for this river.

In Spanish it’s called the Río Bravo. Surprise! Actually, it’s full name is longer than that. Apparently there’s another Río Bravo somewhere, so this one can also be referred to as the Río Bravo del Norte, or Northern Bravo River. So much for dispersing old notions.

Ciudad Juárez means Juárez City, and it’s often shortened to just Juárez. I’m sure English speakers call it wa.REZZ, but in Spanish it’s HWA.ress. I reminded recently that Benito Juárez is sometimes referred to as “Mexico’s Lincoln”. Juárez is Mexico’s fifth largest city, but it has little of interest to me.

The El Paso/Juárez conurbation has a combined population of almost 1.8 million people. You may not realize that Juárez is twice as big as El Paso, in other words, 67% of the combined population is in Juárez and 33% in El Paso, although El Paso of course has the cachet of being in the US, and Juárez is the poorer area. Yet, the river is not the edge of the earth (although some maps almost show it that way), and taking a flight further into Mexico from Juárez is the easier solution than from El Paso, as I described in the last Series.

It’s just as cold in El Paso as it was in New Orleans, but I have to admit something. I really don’t mind it. It’s a new way for me to travel.

El Paso is a simple city (as is Juárez). I’m staying at the Camino Real Hotel, originally the Paso del Norte hotel from 1912, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places with a huge dome made of Tiffany glass over the circular bar, and yet the hotel rates are very reasonable. I’m on the 14th floor, and you can see down the few streets south of us in El Paso to where the river forms the border, and then see plenty of Juárez beyond that.

A historical marker points out that El Paso was established to be a gateway to Mexico, so I feel it’s appropriate that that’s what I’m using it for. The hotel van zips you down to the border, and you walk across the rather high, modern bridge to Juárez. This bridge directly south of the hotel has northbound traffic to the US only, and it seems backed up somewhat. I assume the bridge a few streets over is southbound. There is a pedestrian toll. On the southbound walkway it’s 5 pesos or 35 cents, but coming back on the northbound walkway on the other side the Mexicans charge only 30 cents. The Mexicans don’t check documents on arrival, but even on the American side coming back he just looked at the cover of my passport, after which I just walked back to the hotel.. The different look of the two cities is palpable. The El Paso streets looked a bit dowdy, and very early 20th-century American. The Juárez side—and there were buildings right near the bridge--looked as Mexican as could be (a lot of stores were selling cheap medicines). It wasn’t a language difference. This conurbation is bilingual, and you’d better believe it! There were lots of signs in El Paso in one language or the other, as was the case in Juárez.

At the hotel they had said earlier that a taxi from the hotel tomorrow to the Juárez airport would be very expensive. They said I should just take the van to the bridge, walk my bag over, and take a taxi from the other side, which would be cheaper, so I scouted out the taxi stand.

But it was the border that I had come to walk across. It was clearly marked in the middle of the bridge, with Mexican flags on one side and US flags on the other, so you could easily stand in two countries at once. The river below was perplexing. There were lots of mud flats, but the Rio Grande was channelized in concrete in the center. It couldn’t have been more than 30 feet across, although there was two other smaller channels on either side.

It was a simpler border experience on foot than Checkpoint Charlie or the Mandelbaum Gate, which are both gone now, anyway. Tomorrow I’ll walk across again to a taxi and then fly to the Copper Canyon. Reports are that, since it’s located in the mountains, it’s even colder there than here. That’s January travel for you.