Mardi Gras

So I moved my family to New Orleans for work. New Orleans is a wonderfully diverse city with some of the best restaurants, venues, and parks in the country. It is also home to the best Mardi Gras celebrations in the country. Not being from here I went to my first Mardi Gras not knowing what to expect. We showed up with some of those bag chairs one gets from Walmart and sat. It was a colder evening than we had anticipated so we had to do a lot of rubbing our hands and blowing our noses and we continued to wait. The police began to close off the roads and people moved to the middle of the crossing streets. We sat on the neutral ground across from a bank. Remember I am not from New Orleans and when everybody talked about the neutral ground I had no idea what they were talking about. The neutral ground is either the space between the cross traffic which usually has grass but where we were it was the street car tracks or the space between the sidewalk and the road also usually has grass and trees. Neutral because no one technically owns the space. A side note, when I first heard the word neutral ground I actually thought about the civil war and thought maybe people in New Orleans during the battles could go to the neutral ground if they were injured. It sounds silly now but that is what I thought first. The other thing that is odd about Mardi Gras is ladders. Again people told me all about how you take a ladder with you to the parade. These can actually be set up for days along the parade route and no one will take them. Most often on top of the ladders are attached a wooden box with a short rail on it. Little kids then sit in these boxes so they are out of the way from the crowds but are up high so people will throw things to them. Mom or Dad will stand behind them on the ladder to help. Some of these ladders have attached wheels to the boxes so it is really easy to wheel a ladder to and from the parade. The parade started at six thirty in the evening some two miles from where we were sitting. We were still cold. I got up frequently to stamp my feet and put my hands in pockets. There were street vendors that came around selling light up swords and hats and other trinkets. There were street vendors that sold candied apples and peanuts and cotton candy. All of these people were pushing or pulling some sort of shopping cart with various metal poles and mesh to hold all of their wares. The carts look like mountains of light and color. The people pulling them also look like a bundle of different colored lights. The crowds were about two deep on either side of the street. Still not really knowing what to expect the parade started to pass where we were. First are the Shriners who come on either motorcycles or little dune buggy type cars. They are loud and have strung LED lights on the, that blink and change color as they go. It seems that the Shriners are husband and wife teams. Husband driving and the wife throwing beads and candy. Then come the horses with caped and hooded men. These are usually throwing dubloons. These are the plastic or wood coins that are stamped with the name of the parade and the year and an emblem or something on either side. The floats start to arrive with queens and kings also throwing beads or dubloons. Interspersed through all of these floats are local bands, dancers and musicians of all types. When the larger floats arrive they are double deckers. This is where there are people standing at chin level and then others that are standing almost twelve feet above the road. This makes for a great time as they through beads, cups, trinkets, light up do-dads, and sometimes even garters or underwear. The parade is wonderful. The crowds are constantly yelling and dancing to the music passing by. There is not a quiet moment the entire time. As I hung one strand of beads after another around my neck I realized that I was getting heavy. Looking down I probably had fifty strands of all different kinds of beads. I unloaded and got some more. By the end of the parade with garbage, broken beads, and plastic bags thrown around the parade route, it was time to gather up and go home. It was eleven and the parade would not actually get to its end until well after midnight. We gathered up what became two bags full of beads each weighing in excess of forty pounds. All of this in the first night. Imagine what happened the next night.