Voodoo Magic

Today we explored the city of New Orleans.
This is another place I’d been curious about for a long time. All those stories of voodoo and black magic – I really wanted to see it for myself.
Now I know some people would be freaked out about the idea of it because it’s certainly easy to be scared of things you don’t understand but it’s much better to be able to understand why things are the way they are than get freaked out over old folklore.
So just to let you know, places to eat in New Orleans don’t open until later. In fact, most places open at 11am so if you’re looking for somewhere to have breakfast, you might find it hard unless you visit the old Ihop.

We wanted to have something different and as much as we love Ihop, I am writing a food blog and I don’t want to have the same content all the time even though it may be a different location.
Our body clocks were still running on the time from the last city so we opted to have some Popeyes Chicken for “breakfast”.
Feels kind of weird having fried chicken for breakfast but as I said before, we were still running on the previous places time zone so we were about ready for lunch.
I have to say that the chicken here was surprisingly good. I was expecting it to be super oily and gross but the skin was crispy with flakes of batter which were the melt in your mouth kind.

The “biscuit” also wasn’t bad. I still can’t get my head around the term as back home, biscuits are things which are generally flat and sweet and can sometimes have fillings depending on which one you get. Take a Tim Tam for example – this is what we call a biscuit so to come here and have a US type biscuit was a bit of a shock to the system.
Here in the States, “biscuits” are more like a hard scone in my opinion.
Anyway, the ones at Popeyes were pretty good.
We wanted to see the Museum of Death but that wasn’t open until later on as well.
I don’t know if it’s just a New Orleans thing or because people like to go out and get wasted at night that this is the reason why things don’t open until late but it’s a bit annoying for those who come to visit and want to fit in as much as they can into the days they have.
In any event, we couldn’t do anything about it so we went for a walk around the shops and then went back to our hotel and did some laundry.
By the time we were done and got back out, it was close to 2pm in the afternoon.
We thought we’d have a light lunch at the Bourbon House where we had our very first taste of a Po Boy.

The one which was the special for the day was the grilled shrimp. I can’t say what the exact flavour of it was as I’ve never had anything that has tasted even remotely similar before but it wasn’t too bad to be honest!
Now if you don’t like seafood, you’ve come to the wrong place as if not all, 99.9 percent of the restaurants here have seafood based menus.

Everywhere you turn on Bourbon Street which is the main strip has the word ‘seafood’ in its title. Which is why I had a corn and crab soup rather than your typical chicken and corn.
The consistency of this one was a lot thicker than what I’ve had but the taste was good.
The serving sizes weren’t too bad and we were given a loaf of bread to begin with which was absolutely delicious. You could tell it was freshly baked and to be honest, was quite filling on its own.
We headed over to the Death Museum after eating.

Now I know this is supposed to be a food blog but as I stated in one of my earlier posts, I wanted to share my experiences of my trip to the US and Hawaii with you guys and I want to be completely honest about the places I visit.
I didn’t find the Museum of Death worth the visit. It was $15.00 to get in and you can’t take photos which is why I haven’t posted any in this blog post.
I found it quite small and really not worth the money and I don’t want to keep slamming the place but this might be why they don’t allow photos…
It’s basically a room with a smaller room out the back which plays a video on different deaths which have been caught on camera.
The actual exhibit room contains materials such as skulls and a casket or two which you can’t touch nor is open. The walls are framed with pictures of deaths and newspaper clippings of articles on deaths from the likes of people such as Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez.
Most of these things I could have just Googled and read online in the comfort of my own home, I don’t really see the point of standing there for hours reading each and every article. So to be totally truthful, if you aren’t interested in reading all of these articles, you would have finished looking at the museum in about five to ten minutes.
We were quite disappointed and weren’t sure what to expect with any of the other museums but we were out of things to do so we chanced going to visit the Voodoo Museum as it was just over an hour until it closed.
When we got there, it was a five dollar entry fee. We asked the lady if it was okay to take photos and she said yes to which we were very pleased about.
She also offered us a walk around tour for an extra ten dollars to be scheduled for the following day.
When we walked into the back, we could already see that it would be so much better than the Museum of Death!
The history hallway was covered in pictures and articles of the Laveau family and an explanation of how voodoo came to be. Now I know what you’re thinking – it sounds the same as the Museum of Death but trust me, it was nothing like that.

The first room, called the Gris-Gris Room, had a large painting of a voodoo queen dancing with a snake, called Le Grand Zombie, an alligator man statue by the name of Rougarou and the skeleton, Ghede who is the master of the gates of the cemetery and between life and death.

The second room was the Altar Room which is where people leave small personal objects on altars for favours and intercessions although, when you walk through the whole museum, people have taken to leaving offerings all over the place, adding to the ambiance.

This place is definitely worth the money!
Anyway, after the museum, we had a bite at the Hard Rock Café to see if there was any difference between the food here and Australia.
I ordered the mac n cheese and it was just as good as it is in Australia.

Hubby ordered the rack of ribs which he also really enjoyed.

So nothing to complain about. If anything, it was better here as we got free refills with the drinks which we don’t have the luxury of back home!
After our meal, we thought we’d walk the calories off so we googled voodoo stores and chanced visiting the ones which were open.