Rough Guides Directions New Orleans

Rough Guides, 2005. - 222 p.Proudly apart from the rest of the United States, New Orleans is intoxicating and addictive, the product of a dizzying jumble of influences. It’s a place where people dance at funerals and hold parties during hurricanes, where some of the world’s finest musicians make ends meet busking on street corners, and fabulous Creole cuisine is dished up in hole-in-the-wall dives. There’s a wistfulness, too, in the peeling, icecream–toned facades of the old French Quarter – site of the original settlement – in the filigree cast-iron balconies overgrown with lush ferns and fragrant jasmine, and in the cemeteries, or Cities of the Dead, lined with crumbling above-ground tombs. Doubtless New Orleans’ melancholy air – and perhaps its joie de vivre, too – owes much to the city’s perilous geography. Set largely below sea level and exposed to the devastating storms that career through the Gulf of Mexico, the city could be washed or blasted away in an instant.