French Market Deux

After the cemetery, we took a drive to the French Market to check out the shops and find food. Along Decatur, there are a number of shops devoted to uber fashion. Uber fashion is so fashionable, it's actually really ugly, as Rebekah demonstrates below. The picture doesn't even do this dress justice, and there was a whole shop full of similar designs. The store is still open, apparently, so someone must be shopping there.


Apparently Memphis does not corner the market on interesting graffiti, but this is a little less moving.
I want to ask the author if it worked, but the frown face implies it didn't and that it was not a pleasurable experience. That mystery is solved.

After browsing the Decatur Street fashions, we found a Mardi Gras costume supplier. As you can imagine, they don't do too much business in the summer, but the store was amazing. The picture below is actually stained glass in the dressing room.

The store had a number of headdresses, uniforms, clown outfits, and dresses that were at least 15 feet long. Everything was available to try on.


I decided to try on one of the capes. I'll be back later for more. You can see Christina in the background, probably wondering what kind of crazy person is sharing her housing this summer.

After the costume shop, Rebekah was starving, and Ken wanted to try crayfish, so we headed down to a restaurant near Cafe Du Monde. Below is the giant platter originally brought to us before we clarified that we only wanted a pound.If you've never had crayfish before, let me describe the process of eating it. You rip its head off, peel back a few of the sections of its tail, then take out the meat inside and devein it. For added fun, you can squeeze the head and suck out the juice that comes out. It took awhile to get over the original ick factor, but I enjoyed eating crayfish and will do it again, especially because they're coming into season now. (They also seem to bring out the kid in everyone. My tailless crayfish became puppets quickly.) We also sampled gumbo, etouffe, jambalaya, and red beans and rice. All were pretty good, but jambalaya is still my favorite.


After dinner, we went over to Cafe Du Monde, where a hilarious argument broke out between two waiters over who was going to serve us. The little guy in the foreground won but was extremely flustered as he took our order. Hey, that woman even intimidated me!

Below is yet another example of what people around here do for money. It's free to take pictures of them but to take pictures with them costs money. It actually gave me the idea to learn the Thriller dance and dress up with some of the other people here as zombies. I bet we could make quite a bit of money off of tips. Not everyone else was as excited by the idea, probably not understanding I was serious.
Later I'll talk about the Funky Pirate, the vampire on Bourbon Street, AmeriCorps training, and the not-so-funny irony of a missing GPS.