Deep South is the new awesome

As I mentioned, my younger sister just married a southern gentleman from Mississippi a few weeks ago, so over the weekend my California-bred family made the trek into the wild unknown of the South to become better acquainted with our new in-laws and get a taste for where the newest addition to the family had grown up. Once I got over the radical temperature changes (sweltering humid hot outdoors and frigid over-air-conditioned indoors) I was able to just get a feel for the area and enjoy the southern charms that I had heard so much about.

My dad brought a guide book so that we would have the most efficient vacation ever.

Wait a second. Why on earth are we trusting a guide book that BRAGS about it's number of National Chain Restaurant listings? I did not come all the way to Mississippi just to eat at Arby's. le barf.

I almost changed my mind when I saw that the Church's Fried Chicken chain restaurant's marquee signs tended to rival those of the Baptist church's as far as their entertainment value.


But luckily, the new inlaws are a bunch of foodies and took us to all their favorite New Orleans restaurants. I fell in love with shrimp remoulade, po-boys filled with fried eggplant and red sauce, seafood gumbo, and these tasty beignets doused with powdered sugar and chocolate milk.

Most of my vacation shots are not of the antebellum homes we visited or the wrought iron gates of New Orleans, but rather more embarrassing shots like this one of me pigging out on something:


Besides good eats, there are several other things that I noticed the South takes very seriously:

Jesus.

Cemeteries.

Bugs.
(Like this hairy visitor on the roof of the hotel, or the junebug that crawled on my neck and made me confirm that indeed, i do scream like a girl when in contact with gross crawly buggy things)

Fashion.

Floods and Hurricanes.
Not to end this post on a bad note, but it was amazing to see how much of New Orleans is still in disrepair after Katrina. So many houses are still spraypainted with the X marking how many living and dead were found in each home, and we saw acres of FEMA trailers and many still in use. Still, it was also amazing how many places had been fixed up as well, and to see people getting back on their feet and making New Orleans home again.