The World Outside Your Door: Memory Lane, Mulates and Debauche in New Orleans

When I was nineteen, I took a bus trip across the country, staying in youth hostels wherever I went. This journey took me from my home on the east coast across the country to San Francisco and the Grand Canyon, and included a memorable hitch-hiking adventure up and down the Big Sur coast of California. But my first stop, and in many ways the most memorable was in New Orleans. Six or eight hours into my first
leg of the itinerary it must have sunk in that I was on my own and there was no turning back. This was a welcome sensation to be sure, but also an unsettling one. Some thirty hours later after short layovers in dusty bus depots in the Old Confederacy--Montgomery, Mobile, Biloxi--and an interminable drive along the Gulf Coast by an unusually law-abiding bus driver (when passengers began to demand that he step on it, he pulled the bus over to the side of the road and lectured everyone on how he was not going to break the speed limit) I arrived in a strange city after dark.
  I was scared, but found my way to the youth hostel on Canal Street, at the time an old converted motel. When I climbed the stairs with my backpacks to the dorms upstairs I found the hall lined with people my own age playing cards, smoking (am I dating myself?), drinking beer---and I knew I was going to be okay.
I've been back to New Orleans half a dozen times or more since then, and it always brings back memories.
  Back then I stayed in the French Quarter and rode the streetcar out to the Garden District. On return visits I've been happy to scout out things off that beaten path. Here is Mulates, which is in fact not far off the beaten path (it's up the street from the mammoth Convention Center) and is not exactly unknown. But it offers the real Cajun thing.

On more recent trips to New Orleans I've discovered Fauborg Marigny, the neighborhood on the lip of the quarter. Frenchman Street has great live music (some of it on the streets) and is more favored by locals than by tourists (although a local in one of the places I visited lamented that this was changing; "Our beloved Frenchman Street is becoming overrun with tourists," he said. Well, this tourist happened upon an awesome local talent, "Debauche," a group that bills itself as a "Russian Mafia Band." Think the Pogues, only in Russian. I would fly back to New Orleans solely to see this band play again. Here's their website, http://debauchemusic.com/. And here's a clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hva2v18q1cE