End Orleans

At the end of my trip, I was craving vegetables so much. I had great food, but I don't think I could eat like that all the time.

The 9th Ward: Robin met a local who took her on a tour of the 9th ward on Fri. Here's the Lita Blog entry about it, with pictures.

For dinner on Friday, I first met up with the other ALA interns at Cajun Cabin in the French Quarter where I had a cup of seafood gumbo (it was ok). Afterwards, we stopped by another happy hour at some Irish place with a fountain. Then, it was out to find food again. We stumbled upon Cafe Beignet which had a nice live jazz group playing in the courtyard. There, I had some fried okra and bread pudding.

On Saturday, the exhibits opened and I heard Madeleine Albright speak. I met up with some new conference friends, and we headed to Acme Oyster House. I got a sampler plate which had gumbo, red beans and rice, and jambalaya. The gumbo here was much better than at the first place. We also went up to Cafe du Monde to have some beignets and chocolate milk. Beignets are essentially a square of fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. I also somehow lose my white sweater around this time, though I don't realize it until I pack to leave.

Sunday, I realize, sadly, that Central Grocery was closed on Sunday and Monday, meaning that I'd missed my chance for one of their muffulettas. The bell hop I talked to pointed me to Napoleon House instead. I split a muffuletta with another Rutgers alum that I ran into at the restaurant. With the sandwich, I'd hit everything that I wanted to try in New Orleans. My favorite item was the jambalaya.

At the conference, I'd attended some important committee meetings dealing with privacy and telecommunications (for libraries and in general). One thing that we'd like to do is to push for ALA to begin a national conversation about privacy. As Nancy Kranich pointed out, librarians set the groundwork for a national discussion on privacy with our work on the USA PATRIOT Act. Privacy isn't just important or relevant with library records, instead, we must work for everyone to understand why privacy is important, for everything from phone and banking records to the webpages that we look at to the people that we hang out with.

At the exhibits, I met Neil Gaiman at a book signing for HarperCollins, shipped 2 big padded mailers of books back to myself, and shipped 1 big padded mailer of books to Scott's mom, a children's librarian, and carried another big bag of books with me on the plane to distribute in Chicago. I also left with 2 notebooks from Google, Microsoft mini-Nalgene bottles, and about 12 cloth bags. It was a fun time.