New Orleans is a city of contrasts. The famous French Quarter produces such contrary feelings and emotions. I have gotten caught up in the idea that I am on the island that is not in the United States. Perhaps this thought appeared for a good reason. The first reason focused on the inhabitants of New Orleans.
Among them we basically put black men, who spoke a very strange language. It was very difficult to understand them. In general, all these variations of English created in the black suburbs of megacities and transformed into a special dialect of African Americans were hardly sufficiently perceived by ordinary Americans or Canadians. By the way, many people could not understand them. The situation in New Orleans is much more complicated: the African-American language is pronounced here with a strongly expressed southern accent. Imagine the words where the consonant at the end is cruelly swallowed and instead of them you only hear the inarticulate mumble.
Well, if the conversation turned to the local inhabitants, I want to mention the characteristic of New Orleans. It consists of a strange undue familiarity and aggressiveness. It catches your eye at once. Certainly not everyone, but most people I had the chance to talk to either started their conversation with a weird dismissive tone or just started getting indignant for no reason. The harshness of the local inhabitants was felt in the air of the city. This type of behavior is usually typical of people with little education or poorly educated. Although, in my own opinion, New Orleans is just that city where those people live. I mean local people only. The best representative characteristic that we can find in American literature. The famous literary character Stanley Kowalski from the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” is the typical representative of the inhabitants of New Orleans. However, I have to say that this is just my opinion.
There are a lot of homeless people in New Orleans as in all cities. I think that after that disastrous hurricane the number of these types of people has increased. The homeless wandered the streets without any purpose, carefully checking all the garbage cans and constantly sticking to tourists with the request to throw them a few coins. In the afternoon these people are not seen at all, but early in the morning when the streets are not crowded with tourists, they made up the majority of the people on the streets.
In general, walking around New Orleans, I understood that it is not so unambiguous. I cannot confirm that everything has been very bad or, on the contrary, very good. Everyone knows the simple principle that our imagination is richer than reality. Of course, when we draw a picture in our mind, it is more colorful than the actual image. New Orleans is exactly the same. The real image does not match the imaginary one. You may come across the strange contradiction in this city. On the one hand it is a city of great vacations, the feeling of constant and continuous vacations does not leave you. On the other hand you find poverty, dirt and poor living conditions. Two parallel streets Bourbon and Royal are very different. The first is dirty, gray and does not stand out to the naked eye; the second, on the contrary, is pure, clean and rich in art galleries and antique dealers.
However, human talk made Calle Borbón famous. The French Quarter does not compare to the business center of the city, let alone 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 each house looks very impressive. However, every tourist who comes to New Orleans wants to visit the French Quarter. Because? Who knows? It may be because that life here is not similar to our daily life. Here you find holidays and enthusiasm, but everything else is like our life. And what is the reason for taking a trip to New Orleans? Certainly to find something interesting that does not remind us of our life. That’s why we want to visit the French Quarter and stroll down Bourbon Street.
