Strolling around the French quarter

Today was my last free day in our last real port before we fly back home. Tomorrow I’ll be working and on Sunday it’s off to Miami and our last days on T/S Gunilla.

I would like to say our last days on Gunilla for this time, but the sad thing is that there won’t be a next time. This last trip has been beyond expectations though, so it would be a shame to complain. I will miss this life onboard, so I plan on making every minute of these last days really count.

Today I spent my free time strolling around the French quarter here in New Orleans. It’s such an amazingly beautiful city; there are bands everywhere playing jazz and singing, street performers and artists line the walls, and one or two stands for tarot card and palm reading are placed in the middle of the small plazas that litter the place. The city overall has exceeded my expectations, I already had high hopes but New Orleans blew me away.

A few friends and I started our day with visiting a cemetery with old graves, those ones that almost look like small houses. New Orleans has one in particular that’s famous and has been used in a few movies and TV series, so that was cool to see. After that we mostly walked around, taking a coffee here and there and enjoying the typical New Orleans food like Po-boys, gumbo and jambalaya.

What was a little special with today was that a school in this city found out that we would be here this week, and invited us to the premier of a musical that their music students had put together, a Mamma Mia musical. So, around seven pm we arrived to the school and sat down in their aula where they preformed a wonderful musical for us. The students had been practicing for six months and it was such an experience to see the fruit of their hard work, it really showed that they loved it, they seemed to have as much fun preforming it as we had watching. The musical was done at around 10 pm and after standing ovations we were invited up on stage to sing and dance with them. It was such a cool experience, and another thing that made me think of how much I love my weird school.

That was all for this time,

Liza, Midship.