New Orleans: Day 3

I focused on museums today.

The first stop was the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, which is a museum dedicated to the early history of pharmaceutical drugs in America. Among the many facts I learned, was that when heroin was first introduced, the majority of addicts were women because they did not have a vice -- respectable women did not get drunk. As the museum put it, men would go out to bars to get plastered, and women would stay home and get high.

After that I went to the Louisiana State Museum. Housed in the Cabildo, the site of the Louisiana Purchase Transfer, its permanent exhibition is dedicated to the history of Louisiana from pre-colonization up through Reconstruction.

In the afternoon I decided to do something touristy and went to Cafe Du Monde. It's famous for its coffee and beignets -- fried dough covered with a cup of powdered sugar . The line moved incredibly slowly -- I waited 20 minutes. I could not understand what was taking so long because there are really only two things that you can order: coffee and/or beignets. When I got to the head of the line I found up what the hold up was. The Cafe sold something called "black coffee," that apparently no one had heard of before. Person after person asked, "what's in the black coffee?" I blame this on Starbucks.

I didn't think the coffee was anything special -- it was really pretty bland -- but the beignets were delicious. Only if there was a way to combine bacon with them.