Mardi Gras!

So Joshua and I thought a lot about how we wanted to celebrate our very first Louisiana Mardi Gras season. And let me tell you, they don't mess around about Mardi Gras here in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. All of the schools in Louisiana at least have Monday and Tuesday off of school, LSU has three days off, and some schools even have the entire week off for Mardi Gras! Joshua and I were dumbfounded that it was like a real holiday here. You start seeing displays like the one below in all of the stores just after the new year.

Anyways, we thought it'd be a real bummer if we let our time in Baton Rouge pass by and not celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans, so when a few of my coworkers invited us to go along with them we figured why not. I will tell you, we had an absolute blast! Maybe I had an over exaggerated picture in my head about how crazy and sketchy the city would be, but it wasn't nearly as crowded or as risque as I thought it would be. That being said, it WAS pretty crazy still and there were a lot of drunk people and a lot of bead throwing (poor Joshua got pummeled in the head by flying plastic a few times). We arrived around 2:30pm and headed to a bar called Pat O'Brien's to have one of their world famous Hurricanes. It was a pretty neat place with two ladies taking requests and playing piano and lots of singing. We walked around the french quarter some, grabbed some delicious beignets from Cafe Du Monde, went shopping (I got a masquerade mask), had a delicious dinner, and went in search of some bar that had some drink called a 'hand grenade' (they even had little plastic grenades in them) that some of the guys wanted to try out. By then we met up with a few other guys that we work with in time to catch the parades! The floats were really neat even though the people on the floats that threw the beads all had these really creepy masks on. The first parade was 'Hermes' themed so there were a few Greek mythology inspirations to the floats, but after that I have no idea where the inspiration came from. Some seemed really random and others were trying to make some kind of political statement.

I have a few pictures below from our adventures:

 (Sorry for the poor picture quality...I didn't bring a purse to carry my camera, so I just had my phone)

 

All in all, it was a super fun night. And while it might not exactly be our scene, we are really glad that we got out and experienced the Mardi Gras craziness, and I think it will be one of our favorite memories that we take with us from Baton Rouge.