Alligators and Southern Art

Museums


I visited the Museum of Southern Art and a historical museum about New Orleans history. At the Southern Art museum, they had local artists, mostly those who came from other places and decided to stay. Unfortunately they didn’t allow cameras.

But in the historical museum I took some. I hope that was allowed.


They discussed the slave trade and the subjugation of Native Americans as well. Other things were displayed, such as the history of music, the civil war, a Hurricane Katrina photo series, a video narrated by Morgan Freeman, and the major founding rich families.


A photo of an old bench where they displayed humans to be auctioned as slaves. And, a photo that I thought went well with this one, although they were on different sides of the museum.
















Alligator Tour
This was an exciting, beautiful and overpriced tourist trap. But, I had fun and got to touch an alligator, and that was pretty good considering I had never seen one in person. The tour guide was an interesting guy, who kept making beer references and got the alligators to stay around for the tourists by feeding the creatures marshmallows. Along the river and tributaries, I would say there were two adult alligators and some baby ones. Each time we stopped, the alligators got their allotment of sugar. I took one picture of a marshmallow on one’s head.

Also, the tour guide told us that much of the wildlife in the swamp, such as turtles, alligators, armadillos were killed during Hurricane Katrina. The swamp we toured was what he referred to as “ground zero” of the hurricane. But, he said that slowly the animals are repopulating.
Did you know that barely any of an alligators off spring live to adulthood? Birds and bullfrogs eat them as well as animals in the water. We heard one bullfrog – man those are loud.

The most interesting part for me, was when we went into a narrow channel into the swamp, where I took a lot of pictures of the Cypress, whose roots are bound in the water pretty tight. This is why barely any of them were affected by the hurricane.
Also, we saw this blue house up in part of the swamp where there aren’t any channels to get to it. The house used to be on another part of the river, but during Katrina, it was lifted off its foundations and pushed across the river into the foliage/swamp area. A guy named Bob used to live there.

Little tree stubs protruded near the trees, with a little foliage on them. These are called “knees”, which give oxygen to the tree roots, since the trees are submerged under water.