Down in the Treme

It's the start of a new adventure! For this new edition of This Is A Lake, we're going on our very own tour of the South of the United States, and the first port of call is New Orleans!

The trip began, as all trips out of Paris must, with train troubles, when the RER B left me stranded in the middle of Southern Paris with no service until past Les Halles -I had to dash out into the street and find a metro station to take me to Gare du Nord...

After that, thankfully, things went smoothly and I could meet up with Mom at the airport. We embarked on a 9h flight to Atlanta, Georgia, which honestly didn't feel that long. Harstfield-Jackson airport seemed huge; just our Terminal B alone could give Orly Ouest a run for its money, and there are 5 more terminals in ATL! I was kind of amazed by all the fast-food chains that I've never seen anywhere else in the US. I thought all American airports carried the same multinationals, but I guess things are different in the South!

The next flight, from Atlanta to New Orleans, was just shy of an hour and a half in total and already I could feel that we're not in Kansas anymore. By now we're the only Europeans in sight, for one thing, and I already started hearing y'alls around me. The flight attendant couldn't understand me when I asked for water (woh-ter -is that British?) until finally she went "Oh! Waah-ter". It's gonna be a learning experience!

Just towards the end of the flight I managed to see the landscape from the window. We could see the huge lake with the highway in the middle, the Mississippi river, and a marsh fire, a clear advancing line of flames with smoke billowing from it (I hope it was controlled).

As soon as we arrived in New Orleans, the weather hit us in the face like a warm, wet sponge. At 20:00 it was in the high twenties and extremely humid, so it's gonna get interesting tomorrow when we want to sightsee in that weather.

We took a cab to our Airbnb house (cab rides to and from the airport have a flat $33 fare here) in Treme. It's an actual house, two floors, a very odd layout but a nice place to stay. The neighbourhood seemed to be comprised entirely of single-family houses like this one. Looking forward to seeing it in the daylight!

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