G&E in the USA.
Part 19: Birthday in New Orleans

Click here to go back to the Dutch version of episode 19
Written on February 19, 2003

Conference in New Orleans

On Tuesday January 28 I left the Bay Area for the "Microbial Genomics" conference in New Orleans, organized by the ASM (American Society for Microbiology) and TIGR (The Institute for Genomic Research).
We were with four colleagues from the Relman lab, but we all travelled with different flights. My flight went via Houston, a flight of three hours, and then another hour to New Orleans. During the first flight the movie The Swim Fan was shown, but I had to pay an extra 5 dollars for a headphone. Being Dutch and frugal (the new word I learned this week), I watched the movie without sound, which turned out to be pretty easy since it was a movie with a very simple plot: girl wants boy, boy wants different girl (the story of my life).
After arrival in New Orleans I took the hotel shuttle to the town center. The shuttle was a big taxi, a kind of minivan, in which 10 passengers could be seated. I learned that most of the people in the shuttle were also going to a conference, but everybody was going to a different meeting. New Orleans is a real conference city, where lots of meetings are being held at the same time.
On the way from the airport to the town center large grave yards on either side of the road can been seen, with strange marble houses decorated with roofs and ornaments. New Orleans is situated in the middle of a big swamp, and the water level is so high that the dead cannot be buried into the ground. Instead, small grave monuments are erected above the ground, in which the coffins are put. It was a strange and spooky sight, and an appropriate introduction to a city that is known for its voodoo and dark powers.
After a short drive the shuttle driver dropped me off at my hotel, the old and majestic Fairmont, where the conference would take place. The hotel looked very upscale, but the service at the desk and later during the conference would turn out to be very bad. But the lobby was very beautiful, and I felt like a rich colonial when I entered the grand hall with the large cristal ceiling lamps (see pic below). My hotel room had two Queen beds, an antique looking wooden cabinet hiding a TV, and a nice marble bathroom. That would work for the next 4 days!
After a nap I went looking for the fitness room. I found it on the roof of one of the hotel buildings, a very transparent glass room, situated next to the outdoor swimming pool. Elies had never been to a public fitness place, so I did not like the fact that it was so visible from the outside. Luckily no other people were there, so I took a deep breath and went inside. The treadmills in the room proved to be very cheap and crappy, but enough to keep me busy for the next 30 min, luckily without any spectators.



Back in my hotel room I spent some time reading about New Orleans. The touristic center of the city is the French Quarter, consisting of 80 street blocks. Here you will find many restaurants and bars, where musicians play jazz, blues and Cajun music. In the heart of the Vieux Carré runs Bourbon Street. On the Mississippi side of the French Quarter is Jackson Square with the St. Louis Cathedral, now surrounded by scaffolding.
The houses in the French Quarter have beautiful ironwork balconies, so do not forget to look up. Everything looks very worn. The very hot and humid climate makes the paint chip off of the houses. During summer the humidity makes it very hard to live here, but it was winter now, and the weather was nice. On the streets tourists are riding around in carriages pulled by skinny horses, with their drivers telling stories about the city. Do not forget to buy a hotdog at the Lucky Dog booth.




In the meantime, two of my colleagues had arrived in the hotel, and we decided to have dinner together. It was already 10 PM, but because of the 2-hour time difference with California it still felt like dinner time for us. Most of the restaurants had already closed but the bartender in our hotel recommended Coop's Place for a late dinner. It was a long walk to the restaurant, straight through the French Quarter and past Jackson Square, so for me a nice first view of the city. Coop's Place turned out to be more a bar than a restaurant (see below, 2 pictures on the left), harboring a pool-table, jukeboxes and slot machines. But dinner was still being served.
As a starter we choose Fried Alligator Bits. I had never eaten alligator before but it was the "bits" part that worried me more. Luckily it turned out to be small unrecognizable deep fried pieces of meat. I guess sometimes you do not want to know which animal or which organ you are eating. The meat tasted like chicken, somewhat more tough and with a vague fish taste, not bad at all. For main course I chose Shrimp Creole, a delicious rice dish with tomato/shrimp sauce. All the food came surprisingly quick, and we suspected that it was not freshly prepared. We pictured a fat mamma who came every morning to Coop's Place to cook for a few hours, and meals that stood on the stove for the rest of the day. Anyway, it tasted very good. Later we found out that the bar had a webcam, so have a look.
After dinner we walked back to the French Quarter, and we came across an Irish pub, O'Flaherty's (below, two pictures on the right), where a life band was playing. Of course we had to go inside. It was not very busy in the bar. The band was weakly singing an out-of-tune Irish folksong, but luckily they decided to have a break. The band members mingled among the scarse audience, and it became clear that all 5 visitors (excluding us) were acquaintances of the band. After the break the band rumbled a little bit more on their guitars, but then decided to quit. A CD of the Waterboys was put on, there was soccer on the TV, and the atmosphere got nice after all.




Traditionally, a night out in New Orleans is rounded off with a visit to Café Du Monde. This place is open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The menu is restricted to coffee (cafe au lait) with beignets, so this is what we ordered. The beignets turned out to be deep fried pastries, covered with loooooooooooooooots of powdered sugar. It is impossible to eat the beignets without spilling sugar, especially after a couple of beers. Therefore, the floor under each table is covered with a white layer, and everybody is constantly dusting themselves off. Because the place is always open, even in the middle of the night, Café du Monde is a mixed crowd of all kinds of bar dwellers, policemen, drunks, loud young people and old couples, all drinking coffee and all covered with white powdered sugar. If you look around for a longer time, you will see more and more corners with lonely drunks dozing above their coffees.



The next day, Wednesday January 29 was not yet the official starting day of the conference, but there was a Workshop on DNA microarrays. I was hoping that it would be a practical workshop for microarray beginners (like me), but it proved to be very theoretical and advanced, one or two levels too high for me. All morning no coffee was served, and I felt myself dozing off every now and then. Between the morning and afternoon session a boring sit-down lunch was served, with chicken and pasta, but (hooray) finally some coffee! After lunch the talks went on till about 4 pm. I went back to my hotel room to take a nap, and spent half an hour on the crappy treadmills in the fitness room of the hotel.
Then it was time for dinner. A third colleague had arrived, and the four of us walked to Remoulade's Restaurant, in the French Quarter. The restaurant consisted of a large hall, with too many tables, where everybody was talking too loud. The high and curved ceiling created a weird acoustic situation which made the place very noisy. You could hardly have a normal conversation with the other persons on your table. We sat down anyway and immediately a plate with four cooked unpeeled red potatoes was put on our table. An interesting, strange and not very practical deviation from the usual basket with bread. What to do with it? I decided to cut the potato in half, put some salt and butter on it, and spooned it out. It wasn't too bad, but next time some bread please. For starters we ordered a Seafood Pizza and some salads. As the main dish I had Crawfish Etouffee in which the crawfish were cooked to an unrecognizable sauce. It was not a very memorable dinner, except for the fact that my whole intestinal flora was wiped out by it, and I had to run to the bathroom 5 times per day for the following two weeks. So draw your conclusions.



After dinner we walked on famous Bourbon Street, the heart of the French Quarter. It is a noisy street with lots of bars, restaurants and strip bars, and people trying to convince you of entering their property. People are shouting, the wet gutters smell of fish and urine, from the various bars fragments of jazz/cajun/country music sound, hotdog cars on the street, drunk people with beads start hugging each other and strangers, in short the atmosphere nears that of Amsterdam. Totally different than the Bay Area! It is one of the rare places in the US where it is allowed to walk on the street with a beer in your hand. Take a look on the Bourbon Street webcam for an impression. It was kind of entertaining but I wonder how it will be at 3 AM. People can do strange things when they are drunk, and getting drunk seems to be the main purpose of Bourbon Street. BTW, on Mardi Gras, the New Orleans Carnaval, the whole French Quarter will be completely packed. All day colorful parades are being held and Bourbon Street will turn into on big crowd, with everybody wearing the famous beads and hugging each other even more than on other days.
We walked a little bit further down Bourbon Street, and things started to get less crowded and noisy. On the left we saw an old house, now a shop, called Marie Laveau's House Of Voodoo . It was devoted to Marie Laveau, who was born around the year 1800. The daughter of a white colonist and a black woman, she was a famous Voodoo priestess/witch, said to have special powers for foreseeing the future and influencing relationships. In reality, she was a hairdresser, and her white female customers told her a lot of gossip, which she could use to blackmail others. The house where she lived is now a small shop with an altar with her picture. You can buy voodoo dolls, alligator heads and books. Almost every item in the shop is covered with a small sign saying "Do NOT touch the altar, or bad things will happen to you" "Do not steal items, or the voodoo powers will find you." "Do not open this book." "Do not take pictures, because voodoo will take revenge." Very scary and funny at the same time.



At what seemed to be the end of Bourbon Street was the goal of our walk: Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. It was a very, very dark and spooky bar. Except for some tea light candles on the old and worn wooden tables there was no other lighting, creating a scary atmosphere with weird shadows. We groped our way to the back of the bar, where we found an empty table. The only reason that this particular table was still empty was the pianist next to it. He could play the piano alright, but as soon as he started to sing you would feel the fillings in your mouth starting to crack. But it was a real authentic New Orleans experience!!! We drank a beer, but the horrible music forced us to go to another location.
The name of the next bar I do not remember anymore, except it had good beer, a pool table, a lady behind the bar and a mouse that kept on running over the floor. To sober up a little we went to Café du Monde again for coffee with beignets.
The evening was ended with a visit to the Casino, on Canal Street, not far away from our hotel. One of my colleagues proved to be an experienced Craps player. Craps a very popular casino game in the US. You stand around a table with a green cloth that has al kinds of numbers and boxes painted on it. It resembles roulette a bit, but the rules are completely different, and at first I had no clue how the game was being played. My colleague tried to tell us what the rules were. It was rather complicated, but simply said you can put your money on numbers between 1 and 12, and you have to throw with two dices. When you throw 7, all the money goes to the bank, but all other numbers can yield you money, when you play smartly. My colleague did just that and he gained 70 dollars! In case you want to know more about Craps, I have provided a link to AllCraps.com, a website with the rules and strategics of the game.
While we were playing and watching Craps, waitresses came by every now and then with free but watery drinks. In the background you could hear a constant flow of bleep/ploink/ping noises from the slot machines. With this sound still in my ears, I rolled into bed around 2 AM.



Thursday January 30 was the first day of the actual conference. The morning session was interesting, but the afternoon session was not very relevant to our project, so three of us decided to go to the Garden District. This is a very green neighborhood outside the city center, with majestic and elegant houses decorated with porches, bay windows and towers and nice gardens. This part of the city was founded after a big flood in 1819, which left the area covered with a fertile layer of mud, on which a plantation was built. Later, the plantation was sold to entrepreneurs, who from 1840-1900 build a complete new neigborhood with houses and broad streets.
To reach the Garden District we took on the nostalgic streetcars, one of the big touristic attractions, with wooden benches. We admired the driver, who was constantly turning steering wheels, pushing buttons, pulling switches and handles to slow down and accelarate the car in a very complicated and incomprehensible way. After watching her for a while, we figured out which handle was the brake, but I wouldn't be able to get my Street Car Drivers Licence in a thousand years.



After a nice ride of about 30 min we got out off the streetcar at Camellia Grill, an old-fashioned American hamburger place. We sat down at the sticky bar and ordered hamburgers, fries and coke. The food was prepared right in front of us, in the greasy and seemingly disorganized kitchen. I am not sure if all the hygiene codes were met in this place, but it tasted very good anyhow.



We walked the crumbled sidewalk of St. Charles Avenue (not suitable for roller skaters) back in the direction of the city center. After 30 min we reached Tulane University. It was a beautiful, quiet and nice campus, long and narrow, with brick buildings and tall green trees. We asked a couple of students if we could get some coffee around here, and they showed us the way to PJ's Coffee Shop, a small pavilion with a Starbucks-like assortment. We bought some coffee and went outside to sit in the sun and sip our drinks. Life was good.
When we had finished our drinks we took a look in the bookstore in the building next to the coffeeshop. In the hall students were donating blood, in public, very strange. We walked back over the campus towards St. Charles Ave and took the streetcar back to the hotel and conference.



After this truant afternoon it was time for some science again, and we went to the Poster Session, that just had started in the conference rooms. For those of you who are no scientists and have no idea what a poster session is, here is a small explanation.
There are two ways of presenting your results at a conference: you can give an oral presentation, or you can present a poster. A poster is a large sheet of paper, roughly 1 x 2 meters, in which you give a brief overview of your research, with an introduction, the techniques you used, some results, tables, figures, pictures, and a conclusion of your findings. Usually the poster is transported in a long cardbox cylinder. At the conference there will be on or several separate poster session. All participants go to a separate room where all the posters are on display, hung onto hardboard partition walls with pins or tape.
Below are some pictures that I randomly stole from the Internet, so they are not from our conference. It is just to show you what a poster session looks like.



Poster sessions are always a pain, especially if you have to present a poster your self. Here is a list of the things that can and will go wrong (partly from my own experience): Knowing all this, I was very happy that this time I did not have to present a poster, but there were a couple of other interesting posters. After an hour of reading posters, talking to some of the presenters and shaking hands, I took off for a little nap, because I had to be in good shape for the next pub-crawl.
First we had dinner in a modern oyster restaurant, the name of which I forgot. No visit to New Orleans is complete without eating oysters. The little animals are being sold per dozen, and being with 5 people we ordered one plate. The oysters are served on the "half shell". You sprinkle them with lemon juice, pick one up with a special fork, put it on a cracker, put some Tabasco on it, and just eat it in a single bite. As expected, they taste slimy and salty, and without the sauce and the cracker I don't think its much of food.



After this special starter I took Jambalaya as the main course, a tasty rice dish with tomatoes, fish and sausage.
We walked from Bourbon Street to the famous Preservation Hall, a tiny dark and old room where the Preservation Hall Jazz Band performs every evening. The band members vary per night but they are mainly very, very old. We had to wait a long time. First we had to stand in line outside for 30 minutes before the door opened, and once inside, it took a long time before the band members showed up and started playing. But once they started it turned out to be very special. The fingers were old and stiff, the tones not always without mistakes, the instruments were antique, and the repertoire was limited, but it had soul. Between the audience two cats walked around, the walls were old and covered with mold, the lighting consisted of a single bare light bulb on the ceiling, the windows were held together with duct tape, and most of the audience had to stand: a very special and remarkable concert.
The show consisted of 2 or 3 long lasting songs, with endless solos. After each session a man appeared who named all the band members, people applauded, there was a 10 min break, and then it started all over again. At the third session the band started playing the same two songs, so we decided it was time to move on.




Our next stop was the Napoleon House. It got its name because in 1821 the owner of the building, the mayor of New Orleans offered his residence to Napoleon as a refuge during his exile. Napoleon never came to New Orleans, but this is where the place got its name from. It was a special bar, an old house with chipping walls covered with old pictures, and small corners with mysterious doors and stairways. We drank a Pimm's Cup, a cocktail served with a slice of cucumber. We had to leave soon, because the bar was closing at 11 pm. The others decided to continue their pub crawl, but I went to the hotel, to bed.



Friday January 31st, my birthday! It was strange and lonely to wake up in a hotel room with no one to congratulate me, no kiss, no cake and no birthday song. I went to the fitness room to spend some time on the treadmill and then to breakfast. After that it was time for the morning session of the conference. During lunch my colleagues turned out to not have forgotten my birthday. They took me out for lunch at the Acme Oyster House, a famous New Orleans restaurant. We had to wait 15 min outside, because it was busy. Once inside the place was packed with people, a bar, small tables with plastic cloths, and lots of oysters. At the entrance a sign showed the numbers of oysters that some people had eaten here. The current record said 34. Not 34 oysters, but 34 DOZEN (n=12). There you go. It is enough to make you feel nauseous. This restaurant has a live webcam, the so-called Oystercam, where you can see live images of people slurping oysters, in case you still want to see this.... Because of the time difference with the Netherlands you will probably only see an empty restaurant with the barstools on the bar, anyways.



Somewhat nauseous from all the oysters we went back to the hotel for the afternoon session of the conference, which ended at 5 pm. I went to bed for an hour because this evening my colleagues would take me out to celebrate my birthday with dinner and more bar visits, so I had to be in good shape. We had a reservation at 7 at The Pelican Club, but when we arrived we had to wait some time in the bar. We started with some drinks and were then transferred to the dining room. It was a great meal, with Shrimp cakes as starters. I took Trio Duck as the main dish, so duck prepared in three different ways. Very, very good. Lots of wine to rinse it down, also. One of my colleagues discussed something with a waiter, but due to all the wine I hardly noticed this. But there came the dessert, Creme Brulee and White Chocolate Bread Pudding (we shared 2 desserts with the four of us), with a burning candle on top of it, for my birthday! Wasn't that sweet? I was very lucky that this was an upscale restaurant, so no singing and embarrassing by the restaurant staff this year.
The table next to us had much more wine than we did. The two ladies of this party were cracking up under the table, and one managed to knock a chair over. Compared to them we probably looked sober.



To get rid of some of the alcohol in our systems we took a walk all the way through the Vieux Carré, in the direction of Frenchmen Street. On the floor above a Thai restaurant with the not-very original name Siam we found the Dragons Den. It was a dark, strange bar with wooden statues and eastern accessories. Some young musicians were playing the type of jazz music that goes nowhere, exactly the kind I hate the most. It was an endless jam session, without beginning, end or rythm. Because it was my birthday and I did not like the music we did not stay too long here. We walked back over Frenchmen Street and passed a nice and busy place, The Spotted Cat. A band was playing and it sounded really good, but it was too crowded to go inside and too cold to listen outside.
We continued walking and ended up at Coops Place (see above), where my colleagues played pool and waited till their musical choice would be played by the jukebox.
At Cafe du Monde (also see above) we took the traditional cafe au lait with beignets. While we were eating and dusting down our pants that were covered with powdered sugar, three totally drunk women entered. They took a seat and sung a many-voiced country song, which they thought sounded really good, but that depended on how much you had to drink that evening.
After the beignets we proceeded to the Casino, for some games of craps. Around 4 AM (it was defenitely not my birthday anymore) I went to bed, totally exhausted, and realizing that I was getting too old for these kind of things.



Saturday February 1st
It was tough. Very tough. But: At 9.15 AM I found myself in the conference room listening to the first talk of that day. Good job, Elies! Nevertheless, I was very happy when the conference finally reached the coffee break at 10.30. That is where I learned that the space shuttle Columbia had crashed that morning. A strange news fact, because I had not watched any television for 5 days, and had no sense of anything happening outside of the conference center. With mixed feelings and the need for more information everybody want back to the meeting, to attend the last talks of that morning.
At noon the conference was over. After checking out of the hotel my colleagues and I gathered in the lobby to have lunch at the The Half Shell, a measly restaurant opposite of the hotel. Not recommended due to the bad service.
We took the hotelshuttle back to the airport. At the security check I had to take my shoes of, and this time the alarm went off. Poor Elies had to undergo a total body scan, in the middle of everybody, in a busy hall, very embarrassing. To comfort myself after this, I took a cup of coffee. Well, this coffee proved to be an all-time low in the 37 years of my life. Burned, bitter, bad. With lots of sugar and milk I tried to make it drinkable, but after a few sips the cup ended its life with a nice swing into the garbage can.
The flight back went fine, with another stopover in Houston. This time we got two movies: White Oleander (with Noah Wyle!) and The Good Girl, both again without sound. I had a window seat, and halfway during the flight (it was already dark) I saw a large city with a lot of lamps. A beautiful sight, and by the looks of it, a very big city. The man in the row in front of me also liked it a lot, and he asked the flight attendent which city it was. To my surprise she answered that she had no idea, because she had no clue with flight this was. But she would ask the captain. Moments later she returned: it was Phoenix.
Gerard collected me from San Jose airport, and that was the end of my New Orleans adventure.


End of Part 19: Birthday in New Orleans.

Continue to Part 20: Bier, boete, botsing en bommen (Sorry, only in Dutch).