New Orleans Part IV The New Orleans Inhabitants

New Orleans is a city of contrasts. The famous French Quarter produces so contrary feelings and emotions. I ve caught myself at the conception that I m on the island that is not in the USA. Perhaps this thought appeared for a good reason. The first reason was concentrated on the New Orleans inhabitants. We met basically among them black men, who spoke very strange language. It was very difficult to understand them. In general all these variations of English created in the black suburbs of megapolises and mutated into a special dialect of Afro-American people were hardly enough perceived by usual Americans or Canadians. By the way many people couldn’t understand them. The situation in New Orleans is much complicated: Afro-American language is pronounced here with brightly expressed southern accent. Imagine the words where the consonant at the end are cruelly swallowed and instead of them you hear only the inarticulate mumbling. Well if the conversation turned about the local inhabitants I want to mention the characteristic for New Orleans feature. It consists of a strange undue familiarity and aggressiveness. It strikes you at once. Certainly not every person but the majority that I had a possibility to talk with, began their conversation with a strange scornful tone or just began to outrage without any reason. The rudeness of the local inhabitants was felt in the air of the city. Such sort of behavior is usually typical for people of little education or badly brought up. Although, in my own opinion, New Orleans is just right that city where such people live. I mean the local inhabitants only. The best representative characteristic we can find in the American literature. The famous literature character Stanley Kowalski from the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” is the typical representative of the New Orleans’ inhabitants. However I have to tell that it’s only my opinion. There are a lot of tramps in New Orleans as in every city. I think that after that disastrous hurricane the number of such kind of people has increased. The tramps strolled about the streets without any purpose, checked up carefully every garbage cans and constantly stuck to the tourists with a request to throw off them some small coins. In the afternoon these people aren’t seen at all, but early in the morning when the streets aren’t filled with the tourists they made up the majority of people on the streets. In general walking trough New Orleans I understood that it is not so unambiguously. I can’t confirm that everything was very bad or contrary very good. Everybody knows the simple principle that our imagination is richer than the reality. Of course when we draw a picture in our mind it is more colorful then the real picture. New Orleans is just right the same thing. The real picture doesn’t match with the imaginary. You can meet the strange contradiction in this city. On the one hand it is a city of great holiday, the sensation of the constant and continuous holiday doesn’t leave you. On the other hand you meet with poverty, dirt and poor conditions of life. Two parallel streets Bourbon and Royal are very different. The first one is dirty, grey and is not remarkable by any sights; the second one, on the contrary, is pure, clean and is rich with art galleries and antiquarian shops. However, the human talk made famous the Bourbon Street. The French Quarter doesn’t come in any comparison with the business centre of the city needless to say about the Garden District. The Garden District is a territory of expensive houses that were built in the colonial style. Garden District is a district for millionaires where every house looks very impressive. However, every tourist that comes in New Orleans wants to visit the French Quarter. Why? Who knows? May be because that life here is not similar to our every-day life. You meet holiday and enthusiasm here, but everything else is like our life. And where is the reason to make a trip to New Orleans? Certainly to find something interesting that doesn’t remind us about our life. That is why we want to visit the French Quarter and walk down the Bourbon Street. Iuri Tarabanov writes about interesting travel experiences. His Discount Travel site is http://www.travelime.com