New Orleans: The Educational Part
Our tour guided at the family tomb of Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen
On Friday afternoon, because I have never been to New Orleans before and really wanted to get to know a little bit about the city, I went on a Cemetery and Voodoo tour with Kelley B, Kellie Cav, and Tiff. Our tour guide was a very energetic blond woman who gave us lots of fantastic background about New Orleans as we walked to St. Louis Cemetery - for example, did you know that New Orleans was Spanish for just as long as it was French? The thing is, it was French first, so when the Spaniards came in and changed the street names and insisted everyone spoke Spanish, everyone basically ignored them, and just changed the street names back to French when they left.
St. Louis cemetery was one of the several Catholic cemeteries in the city. It is full of those above-ground tombs that I'd always figured were popular in Louisiana because the ground is too marshy for underground burial. But, our tour guide explained, they were popular because they're a very efficient use of space: a family (or neighborhood association) would own a plot in the cemetery, and build a tomb on that plot that had a number of casket sized spaces - one, or two (like Marie Laveau's), or in the case of the neighborhood-owned or common tombs, more like fifteen or thirty. When you died, your body would be put into a coffin, which would go into that space in the tomb. Not so efficient so far, right? But here's the nifty part - after a minimum of a year and a day (this amount of time has something to do with Catholicism), when, say, your cousin dies and needs that space, they take out your coffin, take out your decomposed remains, shove them to the back of the tomb where they fall into a little cave in the bottom along with all the bones of your previously dead relatives. And hey presto! A new storage space for your dead cousin!
After wandering around the cemetery for an hour or two and learning lots more fun facts about New Orleans, burial grounds, and voodoo practices (those triple-X marks on the tombs of voodoo queens [and they are always queens, never kings] are a silly tourist thing. You shouldn't mess around with someone else's religion if you don't understand it, and anyways, all real voodoo practitioners are also staunchly Catholic. Our tour guide was also very opinionated), we went to visit a voodoo temple. There, we visited a room absolutely full of stuff - hangings on the wall and trinkets and statues stacked on the furniture and rolled up dollar bills and cigarettes stuffed everywhere. Then a woman (I guess... a voodoo priestess?) talked to us - or rather, at us - at great length about staying true to ourselves and not changing the outside because that will never change our insides. She seemed both insightful and a bit crazy - definitely an experience.
This was the end of our tour, and by then, having driven all night and then walked around a cemetery all afternoon, I was exhausted, so I met up with Dee and Q to head back to the hotel for a nice early bedtime of 5pm.
More photos on Facebook: one and two and three
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