Four Days In N'Oleans

I spent four days this past week in New Orleans. This was my second trip here, both times being for tradeshows for work. New Orleans, along with many others, are on a long list of cities that I’ve been lucky enough to see thanks to my job. Thank you marketing jobs! I love you!

Welcome to New Orleans!

Arriving In The Big Easy

I spent most of Wednesday traveling, and soon after arriving we had a company dinner and meeting. Not much of note happened that night. Well, aside from the fact that I had the weirdest hotel room ever! Okay, so the room wasn’t that weird, it was my bed. I initially walked into the room and admired the size of it. It was larger than normal, almost as big as a suite, and had a bar area over to one side. As I glanced around the room I thought “Cool! A bar!” (Not sure why, not like I was going to be mixing drinks or anything.) My eyes finally settled on the bed, and it took me a minute to realize why the bed looked so weird. It was on the floor! The boxspring was right on the floor! I tried to think of why you’d want your bed on the floor and couldn’t come up with any theories (handicapped? senior citizen? NO! A bed on the floor would be worse!) and thought oh well, whatever, at least I still get a nice big room!

My Weird Floor Bed

Oysters, Rabbits, and Frogs – OH MY!

The next day our tradeshow opened and it was into a suit and heels and onto the show floor for the day. Luckily it was a short day. Only 9:30am – 7:00pm. Can you sense the sarcasm? That is a REALLY long time to be on your feet. In heels. I have perfected an icy look of disdain for all the men who complain about how much their feet hurt after a day at a tradeshow. Oh really? You want to talk about foot pain? Put on a pair of of heels! After the show closed we all went out to dinner at K Paul’s. I had been to K Paul’s on my last visit to New Orleans and remember the menu being full of flavorful seafood and spicy creations.

K Paul's Louisiana Kitchen

The menu must have changed a lot over the years, because the primary theme I saw throughout the menu this time was DEEP FRIED. Insert frowny face. Literally 90% of the menu (appetizers/entrees) was deep fried! The only two options that weren’t deep fried were the pork chop and the two steaks. Even the chickens were deep fried! I reluctantly ordered a steak but didn’t enjoy it all that much. There were a few other interesting things on the menu – fried frog legs and fried rabbit. Yep, Kermit and Bugs Bunny were on the menu. Poor little hopping creatures! Not to totally escape the blame of eating cute creatures, I took the recommendation of the waiter and my local colleagues and ordered the Turtle Soup to start out with. Mmm mmmm good! I of course tried not to think too much about my former pet turtle Greensleeves. I had little Greensleeves for several years, until finally my dad suggested that we let him move on to another family. After watching a turtle sit on a rock for about 5 years, I didn’t put up too much of a fight.

Celebrity Spotting #1

The next day it was back to the tradeshow! Luckily on Thursday we had normal hours: 9:30am – 5:00pm. For lunch we went to a restaurant across the street called the Grand Isle Café. Amusingly, when our Louisiana sales manager recommended the place to me I heard “Grand OWL” café, and texted that very name to a couple people to meet up with us. Oops! Luckily it was just across the street and easy to figure out.

This restaurant had a couple interesting items on the menu including alligator sausage. They also had turtle stew and the waitress convinced me that even though I’d had turtle soup before, turtle stew was a lot different and I really needed to try that as well. I did, and was not that impressed. To make matters worse I didn’t realize that eating turtle stew is along the lines of eating shark fin soup. Great.

As we were leaving the restaurant my boss said “Hey, did you see that we just passed George Foreman on the way out?” What?? NO! I missed him! I walked back a bit to see him through the window. After a second glance I’m still not sure I could pick him out of a crowd again. But I was excited to see him. The inventor of the George Foreman grill!? Amazing! Just about every person I know has owned one of those at one time or another, and my dad is one of the biggest fans of that cooking contraption. I immediately called my dad to share the exciting news. “Guess what dad! I just saw George Foreman!” My dad seemed decently impressed and asked if he was with one of his sons, also named George. Apparently he has 5 sons and they are all named George. Okay, that’s weird.

George Foreman & Grill!

I chatted with my dad for a bit about New Orleans and he asked if we had gone to dinner at the restaurant run by “That famous chef, the really big one”. I remembered seeing a picture of K Paul on the seasonings they sold at the restaurant and asked if he meant K Paul. His response? “You mean the guy that dresses up like a lady?”

HUH?

Oh wait… are you referring to Ru Paul? No! Not Ru Paul, K Paul is someone else. Guess that’s not who my dad had in mind. David suggested later that my dad was probably talking about Emeril. That makes sense, “big” as in really famous, not “big” as in the size of a house. Whoops! Sorry Paul, but you’re a bit on the large side.

RuPaul vs K. Paul

Would You Like To Buy...?

We went back to the tradeshow and finished out a few more normal hours at the booth. Normal except for one person's question! As a Marketing person at the tradeshow booth, I'm used to getting the non-dollar-generating questions and inquiries shuttled over by the sales reps. Most commonly:

• Where can I get this information for my website?
• Do you distribute products in my country ___? Who can I contact for more info?
• When will you be launching product ___?
• Would you be interested in advertising in the publication ____?
• I'm from the __ dental society/group/club/cult. Would you be interested in sponsoring a booth there?

So I saw one of the reps starting to walk a man over to me and heard her end with "Monika can probably help you with that." I was expecting him to be asking about advertisements, product videos or the likes of that. Instead, he immediately asked " Would your company be interested in purchasing cadaver heads? We have very competitive pricing!"

Ummmm..........

Um... did he just say CADAVER heads? EWE! Oh wait, they do practice dental surgery on cadaver heads. But ewe, why is he asking me? Oh yeah, that's something our corporate office would handle.. if we did. But I don't think we do. Don't the universities usually handle that? We just have dummies with simulated materials. (All this time of course staring at him with a frozen smile.) I finally recovered enough to let him know that I was not the person involved with that but knew who was, and I'd pass on his information.

EWE.

Moving on....

Dinner at GW Fins

On Friday night we had reservations at an upscale seafood restaurant named GW Fins. Wow, the food was amazing there! We started out with the best crab cakes I’ve ever had, savory clams, and sizzling seasoned oysters. (Okay, I’m on the flight back right now typing this and I’m getting hungry again just thinking about that meal!) After that I had an amazing Chilean Sea Bass and my coworkers had a variety of other great looking dishes. To finish it all off we had sorbet and crème brulee. So yummy!

Sizzzzzling Oysters!

GW Fins Dinner Group

Jazz Hands!

After dinner we rolled ourselves down the street to the Ritz Carlton lounge to check out a local live jazz band. Ever want to see people who love their job? Come watch this jazz band play! The way they were shaking their heads and tapping their feet and belting out the music, wow! It really made you feel like you were really in New Orleans. We hung out there for the rest of the evening and finally called it a night around 1am. That translates to about 5am in Monika’s book! I’m usually in bed by 10pm!

Jeremy Davenport - Ritz Lounge

Live Jazz Video

The last day of the tradeshow was Saturday and was luckily only a half day. I stopped by the “Riverwalk Shops” next to our hotel/convention to pick up a few souvenirs and I spotted something that will go down as the first Christmas gift on my list. (Sidebar – I can’t believe we’re halfway through November already! Only a few weekends left to do Christmas shopping. Yikes!)

Celebrity Sighting #2

By Saturday I was tired from the night before, my feet hurt, and I was ready to go home. I had a quick flight from New Orleans to Charlotte (US Airways hub), and then Charlotte to San Diego. As the flight was boarding I got into my window seat and was happy to see that the trickle of people boarding the plane were all passing me and it looked like I was going to be so lucky as to have no seat neighbors. Whoo hoo! It looked like everyone had finished boarding and I was stretching into the next seat a bit working on my crossword when I saw a last minute person get on the plane. Uh oh! I hope he wasn’t going to end up sitting next to me! Wait a minute… this guy looked familiar. He kind of looks like one of the Baldwin brothers! You know, the blonde one with the rounder face that isn’t all that famous. Not Alec ... what are the rest of their names? Stephen? Was that him?

Baldwin Brothers
What are the non-Alecs' names??

As he passed the flight attendant and the people in front of me were whispering “Did you see who that is?? That was one of the Baldwin brothers!” I was running through my mind trying to remember the other brothers names. Stephen? David? Brandon? Why couldn’t I remember the non-Alec Baldwin names? I think other people have this problem too. I’m glad I’m not know as one of the “Carlson Sisters” whose first name no one can remember. Total benefit of being an only child! High five to me! A quick Google image search on my Blackberry revealed that this was indeed Stephen Baldwin.

Stephen Baldwin!

After that celebrity sighting, the rest of my trip was fairly uneventful. Well, besides the grumpy lady next to me in first class who has been drinking wine the whole flight. I hope someone’s picking her up and she's not driving home. Cheers lady!

My trip to New Orleans was short but fun. Some of the food we had was great, but some of it left me feeling like I needed to only eat raw vegetables for a week while I detoxed. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll get to travel back just for fun and can see a little bit more of the city.