New Orleans - the other planet
With other life upon it
And everythin’ that’s shakin’ in between
If you should ever land upon it
You better know what’s on it
The planet of New Orleans

--Dire Straits

For those of you who'll be visiting New Orleans in the future, here's a dining tip: don't bother with the French Quarter tourist traps for oysters. Run, don't walk (okay, take a cab, assuming the streetcar isn't back up) to the oyster bar at Pascal's Manale, an old Uptown restaraunt on Napoleon.

Pascal's had only recently reopened. While he shucked oysters for us and a few others, Julius told us the place had taken a foot and a half of water, and like virtually every other business in the area, suffered from looters. "They took the booze, of course," he said, in a heavy New Orleans accent. "And a couple of old televisions." He stopped for a moment and shook his head. "Real smart. Televisions. We didn't have power for weeks, what the hell you gonna do with televisions?"

It looked for a while like Pascal's would never reopen. The building was full of the post-flood black mold that's rendered so many structures uninhabitable. Thankfully, in what's either a tribute to American ingenuity after a crisis or a neck-snapping shot of irony, Pascal's was saved by technology developed after the 2001 anthrax attacks and tweaked to serve the Katrina flood zone.

Sabre Technical Service, a company owned in part by one Rudolph Giuliani (yes, that one, sorry if your neck just snapped again), pitched a giant circus tent over the whole building and basically pumped it full of chlorine gas. "They said it was the closest thing to chemical warfare," Julius told us. "Killed every damn thing in the place. Mold, cockroaches, rats. Nobody could come in here for three days, but when they opened it up, all the mold was gone. I just wish there'd been some looters in here, too."

I shudder to imagine a New Orleans without Pascal's, so we toasted Rudy and his good works along with a large pile of the best oysters in town. We moved on from there to Dick and Jenny's, a small restaraunt on Tchoupitoulas and an old favorite of mine. As far as I could tell, it hadn't changed at all, except for becoming more popular. It took us well over an hour to get a table, but the wait was more than worth it. Highly recommended.

As we drove back to the hotel, something else that Julius at Pascal's said kept recurring in my head: "If the military had shown up earlier like they should have..."

The unfinished thought was obviously, "... a whole bunch of bad stuff wouldn't have happened," and he was most probably right. I have some thoughts on what that reality means... but I think they can wait for now. For now, and for then, it was enough to have had good music, good food, good company, the things we want to remember from the Crescent City, past and future.

Tomorrow, our last day at the Festival. Later, some hopefully-coherent musings about what the last few months have taught us, and on where we go from here.