Giuseppe Tony Tran in New Orleans, Lousiana

On the fortieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, Vietnamese immigrants and their children gathered alongside Vietnam War veterans to reflect on the dramatic events that forever changed both of their destinies—the siege of South Vietnam’s capital, the evacuation of American soldiers returning home from intractable defeat, the Southeast Asian boat people fleeing communist takeover. In the Vietnamese diaspora, it’s referred to as Ngày Mất Nước, the day we lost our country.

But in New Orleans, the Vietnamese community commemorated forty years since April 30, 1975 a little differently.

“Everywhere else, they were mourning,” said Giuseppe Anthony Tran. “Here, we celebrated forty years of success.”

To hear Tran describe his experiences during those forty years is to witness breathtaking resilience, moxie, and a shining humor wholly unexpected given the circumstances. The combination has worked out quite nicely for the Vietnamese man with an Italian name. It’s kept him alive. It’s taken him from one delta to another, from fields of jasmine rice to fields of Jazzmen rice, a local variety of the aromatic grain that’s advertised as music for your mouth. “It tastes better than jasmine,” Tran said with a laugh.

He was born in the Year of the Dragon, 1964, to a family of rice farmers in Hà Tiên, a beach town at the southernmost tip of Vietnam.

During his childhood, an unexploded shell jutted out from the ground right in front of his house. Every day, the little boy, then known as Toan (Vietnamese for “safe, secure”), would touch the shell with wonder.

Tran didn’t know it would explode one day. “The war became something that was familiar to the people. To the point that we weren’t scared as much.” The soundtrack of “the bombing and the guns and everything” accompanied Tran’s entire childhood spent in wartime, until April 30, 1975, when a tenuous peace was reached.

At the age of 16, like a Vietnamese Huckleberry Finn, Tran decided to flee the country on a raft with eleven other young Vietnamese—total strangers, most of them teenagers. “My mom saved a lot to put me on board,” Tran said, “I would say equivalent to 400 dollars. That’s a lot in Vietnam in the 80s! We were poor as any other citizen.”

He was the youngest of seven siblings, just two years shy of military age. He would either leave the country now, or never have the chance again. “Living under the communists, you get the feeling that you don’t have another day to live,” he said. “Everything is controlled. That’s why I told my parents, I don’t see any future here.”

He left on the night of April 30, 1981, while the communists were celebrating six years since the end of the war.

“Officials and police and everyone in office were getting drunk and having a party. I used that moment to escape on a raft,” Tran said. He didn’t know whether he would ever see his mother again.

The plan was for the tiny, 25-foot raft to transport more than a hundred people to a bigger boat. Docking at the mouth of the Mekong River, a vital channel the color of caramel, they waited for the bigger boat to come and take the passengers away from Vietnam. But no boat ever showed up. As night gathered, so did a crowd of eager escapees. Finally, the twelve pulled anchor and left on the raft.

Tran saw many people pull up in smaller vessels to get onto theirs. “If we waited another second, we would have been overloaded with people,” Tran said. “The minute we started the engine, it made so much damn noise. Like a lawn mower. Officials heard it and started firing at us. On that night, the 30th, we left with eight big holes in the raft. We had to plug the holes with our shirts.”

Tran prayed that the raft would float in one direction: away.

It was everyone’s first time at sea. No one knew how to properly maneuver the raft. There was no compass, no map.

By night, they faced heavy storms. By day, the sun fried their skin into “rice paper,” Tran recalled.

Once in a while, they would see a boat in the distance, but the engine wasn’t strong enough to take them there in time.

Four times, Tran said, Thai pirates came, seeking women and valuables. A little girl, eleven or twelve years old as Tran remembers, was on board the raft. When the pirates first came, Tran knew they would be after her.

“To protect her, I took a big can of engine oil and dumped it on her,” Tran said. “She looked really filthy and so when the pirates looked at her, they said, ‘Just forget it.’”

He started fantasizing about land. “After a day or two on the vast ocean, you don’t see anything but the blue sky and the water. And the waves were so huge, you didn’t think you were going to survive,” he said. A devout Roman Catholic, Tran began reciting the last rites each night before sleeping.

Finally, early on the morning of May 5, 1981, their fifth day at sea, Tran saw a seagull in the open sky. He knew from his childhood spent by the sea that when you see birds, land is near. “I have never experienced that happiness when you see birds on the ocean. It was so wonderful.”

Eventually, they landed at the border between Malaysia and Thailand. Although it was a poor village in the province of Narathiwat, it was not Vietnam.

For a month and a half, the twelve combed the beaches, caught any game they could find, begged villagers for food, and climbed fruit trees that Tran said were “high as hell, man! They took hours to climb.”

Once word spread that a group of Vietnamese refugees had arrived in the village, the government of Thailand took them in, placing the group in the Songkhla Refugee Camp. At this point, Tran had no shirt, no shoes, and no money.

UNICEF sheltered the tens of thousands of refugees at Songhkla and supplied them with barely enough food and water. Tran started craving meat and certain comfort foods.

“When you’re hungry, you come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. I dreamed that one day I would fry an egg as big as a blanket,” Tran said. “I would cover myself up and eat at the same time.”

Tran volunteered to work for the UNICEF office. One day when he was cleaning up, he found a magazine.

“I was so happy,” Tran said. “So I grabbed it. Actually I stole it.” In his hands, Tran held an older edition of a Vietnamese magazine from New Orleans.

Tran took the magazine back to his tent to show his friends. As he flipped through the pages, he happened upon the name of his older brother, Tuong, an ordained priest, who had fled Vietnam for the U.S. in 1975. Tran hadn’t heard from him in more than six years. As he held the magazine in his hands, Tran learned that his brother, Tuong Cao Tran, was the editor of Dân Chúa, which he had started in the late ‘70s to connect Vietnamese Catholics living in the U.S.

Not believing his luck (“Recognizing my own brother’s name in the magazine was like hitting a jackpot,” Tran said), he wanted to send his brother a letter, but he had no money for paper, stamps, or a telegram. “So I asked a priest for a small sheet of paper. I wrote, ‘Please help me’ and an address and that’s it.” The priest mailed the letter for him.

Within two months, Tran received a letter from his brother with a $20 bill enclosed. He learned that Tuong had served and helped settle the very first Vietnamese refugees to arrive in Louisiana. Tuong also assured Tran that he would contact their mother to let her know that her youngest son made it to safety.

“It was so huge,” Tran said. “My life started from there.” Wielding the American money with pride, Tran bought “a whole lot” of eggs. That night, for dinner, Tran fried all of the eggs but could eat only a quarter of them. “I couldn’t take it anymore, you know?” Tran laughed. “I choked on the eggs.”

After two years of statelessness, Tran immediately started making plans with his older brother to come to the United States. Tuong, however, was a priest, and wasn’t allowed to take in another person. He asked an Italian-American couple he knew through Catholic Charities to co-sponsor Tran.

Francisco Giovanni and his wife, Evelyn, who resided in Chicago, took Tran in, named him Giuseppe Anthony and put him through high school and college. “That’s why I’m in love with Italy,” Tran said. “I’m an Italian-Vietnamese living in America!”

“Coming to America was like a leap into heaven,” Tran said. Every day, in his new country, Tran took the bus to the library and borrowed an armload of books to read, even though he understood little at first. “Education is something that my parents and godparents wanted for me,” Tran said.

At first, learning English for Tran was the “most troublesome.” One day during his first winter, Tran took a walk around downtown Chicago. As he approached a pedestrian crossing, he couldn’t understand the “DON’T WALK” sign on the crosswalk signal. So he hopped on a bus and immediately asked to be dropped off as soon as the bus crossed the road. Looking back on that episode, Tran guessed that the bus driver probably “cursed me for such a stupid action.”

But he was determined. After Tran graduated from Brother Martin High School in 1984, he joined St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington, Louisiana, and earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. He moved on to Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and trained for the priesthood, which he would leave in order to focus on bringing his family over to the U.S. from Vietnam.

Tran eventually settled in Village de l’Est in New Orleans, a neighborhood known for its Vietnamese community. The river in the “Village of the East” is crowded with lily pads. The soupy air circulates languidly around the signs in Vietnamese for restaurants and grocery stores, attorneys and dentists, Catholic churches and Buddhist temples. Many of the men living there are fishermen or shrimpers by trade. In Village de l’Est, there’s the distinct feeling of quê hương. Homeland.

The immigrant population liked the area, because it so resembled the country they had left: the tight-knit community and the sub-tropical climate, the landforms and the faces, the familiar food and the language spoken.

“The unity is there,” Tran said. “It’s lovely.” He’s been to other Vietnamese communities in Texas and California, but nothing compared to Village de l’Est.

In 2000, Tony Tran went back to Vietnam for the first time in almost twenty years. His mission was to bring his mother back to Louisiana.

On the flight into Tan Son Nhat Airport, Tran noticed the yellow rooftops of Saigon. They looked rusty. The airport’s runway was overgrown with weeds. He found no attachment to the country of his birth.

“When the plane landed, my heart was pounding,” Tran said. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen next.”

He found out that every step to get to his mother was a paying process—bribe an official here, placate an officer there with cold, hard cash. Tran paid a couple authorities $200 each to accompany him on his mission. “They followed me like the FBI,” he said.

He had learned that his family now lived in Biên Hòa, just outside of Saigon. He walked into his mother’s house and surprised her. “It was quite an experience,” Tran recalled. “I’m glad that she didn’t faint!”

At the end of his one-week visit, Tran told his mother that he would do everything in his power to bring her over to the United States. And he did. In 2007, Tran went back to Vietnam again to bring back his father’s remains in a tiny basket that fit into his carry-on luggage.

At the time of the interview, his mother was 94 years old and lived in New Orleans’ West Bank and his father was buried there as well.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.

For the Vietnamese community that had gone through so many experiences of exodus and relocation—from north to south Vietnam, from Vietnam to refugee camps, from those camps to America—Katrina was yet another experience of moving from one place to another.

“The city was shut down,” Tran recalled. “This was not something that happened in Vietnam or in the refugee camps. It happened in New Orleans, in the United States of America.”

It took Tran 28 hours to reach Dallas, Texas from New Orleans. It’s a trip that normally takes eight hours.

As Tran told it, two weeks after the storm, the displaced Vietnamese “came right back and fixed their homes. We shoveled out the mud and picked up. Cleaned up. Came back strong.”

Tran served as the parish coordinator of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. He was a community leader and the assistant to Rev. Dominic Nghiem. His wife, whom he met in 1994 at the library, was a nurse. Together, they had two boys—Mark, a student at Loyola University, and Tri On (Vietnamese for “grateful”), a sophomore in high school.

As for his companions who fled Vietnam with him in 1981, Tran told me one lives in Norway, another in the Netherlands, and the rest live in the United States. The little girl is now a married woman living in California. She called Tran in 1992 and asked him if he remembered her.

There’s a plot of vacant land across the street from the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in Village de l’Est. Tran said the church has just broken ground there to build a cultural center and recreational park on the 28 acres. If all goes according to plan, it will be completed by 2017 and serve as a gathering place for the more than 10,000 Vietnamese living in New Orleans.

Over a meal of Vietnamese food at Ba Mien Restaurant, Tran said, “With my life, I feel I had more than I wished for. Looking back on the journey, everything was a blessing all along.”

On Thanksgiving Day in 2011, Tran found out he had spleen cancer.

“Kind of ridiculous, huh?” he said.

For the first eight months, he underwent “all sorts of treatment, testing, radiation, chemo, medical examinations,” he said, “now I’m on pills.”

Tran said the cancer caused a terrible growth on his skin. “It felt like leprosy. I was so worried,” he said. His doctor told him she had never seen anything like it.

Despite, or maybe because of, his experiences, from war to escape, cancer to Katrina, Tran insisted to me that there is nothing to be afraid of, that there are all sorts of reasons to be happy.

“I try not to take everything seriously,” he said. “It’s a life-changing experience. I’m taking it easy with everything, while I still have another day to live. So what the heck, this is just a little cancer, huh?”

Video and text by Dan Q. Tham

Ben Jaffe, creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band in New Orleans

I am listening to an intense, muscular Ben Jaffe, 40, creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band, talk slowly and thoughtfully about his New Orleans, his brow furrowed, his sprouting Jewfro tied behind his head. But my eyes see Allan and Sandy Jaffe, his father and mother, who moved to New Orleans in 1961 and founded Preservation Hall, as Ben says, “to create a dignified environment where these aging African-American musicians could carry on a tradition that was slowly disappearing without anybody’s notice.”

I arrived in town shortly after, in 1965, to spend my summer days as a law student researching the case of two New Orleans African Americans who had been on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary for 14 years. I spent my nights listening to the Preservation Hall band. Sandy Jaffe, seated at the hall’s front gate with a basket in her lap, charged me only 50 cents.

For that “student rate” I not only heard Allan play tuba with trombonist Jim Robinson, clarinetist George Lewis and other African Americans in their 80s and 90s but I also entered the Jaffes’ French Quarter world of, in Ben’s words, “thinkers and outsiders and poets and musicians and artists and wheeler dealers.”

What a wonderful world it was—bespectacled Bill Russell, 60, ragtime violinist, modernist composer, and leading historian of New Orleans music (who wrote to me on Embalming Fluid Company stationery and fixed friends’ violins for free) and potbellied Larry Borenstein, 46, the art dealer who added jazz performances to his art gallery, created a world market for Pre-Columbian art (don’t ask how he got the art out of Mexico) and encouraged painter Noel Rockmore to document the Preservation Hall musicians.

How does Jaffe explain that world, not the world of boozing and barfing tourists on Bourbon Street, but the racially tolerant, inviting New Orleans of Preservation Hall? He sees New Orleans as a city of French, Spanish, African and Native American culture, food, music and architecture that just happens to be in the Deep South. “We’re really the Northern Caribbean.”

“Our pleasure bar is much higher here than in any other city that I know,” he adds. “We’re very serious about enjoyment.”

Preservation Hall, New Orleans, Louisiana

He grew up in the Quarter, lived two blocks from Preservation Hall and spent his early life listening to—and learning—traditional New Orleans jazz. He became a part of a largely African-American world. He marched six miles in Mardi Gras parades. Following his father’s early death, he started playing tuba in the Preservation Hall band. Now he provides a place for older musicians to mentor youngsters who want to follow in their footsteps.

He also seeks to preserve a community and way of life nourished by the music. “Every time I see another Wal-Mart going up it breaks my heart that it’s chipping away at the soul of America,” he says. “I just use that as a metaphor for everything that’s becoming too big and too much.” He prefers, instead, the New Orleans world of traditional jazz.

The music, he says, “gives us hope. It allows us to mourn. It’s a way for us to celebrate and to honor people. And that’s what’s important to me, those traditions.” He describes people from other countries coming to New Orleans and hoping to find in the city and its music the meaning of life.

Those who stay, he says, realize “it’s not one thing.” He recalls the experience of pianist Marie Wantanabe. The first time she experienced New Orleans musicians playing in a funeral procession it was as a tourist, the second time as a performer, the third time as a mourner for someone she knew. “When you’ve gone from birth to death is when you’ve become a part of our community,” Jaffe says.

The way of life of his New Orleans, he suggests, should spread across the world. “If everybody would dance a little bit more, and sing a little more, and celebrate life—not Bourbon Street celebration, Preservation Hall celebration—if they would celebrate the way we celebrate, the way we honor people with our music, the way we celebrate at funerals, the way we’re able to mourn people, it just would be a better place for everyone.”

Loren Ghiglione

Video by Dan Q. Tham

The French Quarter, after a rainstorm

We spend another day driving south, today through three Mississippi river towns famous in part for their connection to the life of Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) as a steamboat pilot—what he called “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on earth.”

I especially enjoy Greenville, not for its plantation-era Twain history but for a charmingly strange shrine made from a discarded school bus, cinderblocks, stray lumber and a country-store-turned-home, all painted pink, yellow, red, white and blue. The Rev. H. D. Dennis, a Baptist preacher who is closing in on 100, created this “House of Prayer for All People.” “Respect and love one another,” he says. “We’re all the same in God’s eyes.”

The aroma inside my head from the culinary carnival that awaits us in New Orleans focuses me on food. In Greenville, I walk through the kitchen (that’s the entrance) to eat a heaping portion of shrimp at dilapidated Doe’s Eat Place; in Vicksburg, at Rusty’s, seated under a 15-ft. photo mural of the city’s waterfront in 1910, I lunch on fried green tomatoes with hollandaise and crab sauce; in Natchez, I just buy a can of peanut brittle and lead-foot it in the direction of New Orleans’s beignets, Bananas Foster, and red beans and rice.

Trencherman Twain wrote of a $10, four-hour, French-restaurant luncheon—sheepshead fish, oysters, shrimp, game birds—that he had consumed in New Orleans with his riverboat pilot buddies. My dream is to dine on the same kind of fish, sheepshead, that he had eaten in New Orleans more than 150 years ago. So I head for Antoine’s, a French Quarter institution operated by the fifth generation of the family that opened the restaurant in 1841.

But the woman behind the reservation desk makes clear that I’m not going to be served such trash fish at Antoine’s. Fortunately, Michael Kavanaugh, manager of the Hermes Bar at Antoine’s, overhears the conversation. A Twain enthusiast, he points in the direction of the nearby Hermann-Grima House, an 1831 mansion where classes in 19th-century cooking are offered in the courtyard.

He sends us off with a paraphrase of a Twain quote about the local Mississippi River’s muddy, mulatto complexion: “If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink.”

We find the Hermann-Grima House closed for the weekend. Luck intervenes. A woman, who later identifies herself as Dr. Arwen Podesta, a psychiatrist on the Tulane University faculty, stops in front of the house and whips out her cellphone. Suddenly, like magic, another woman appears from behind the Hermann-Grima courtyard door. She is the woman of my foodie dreams, Elizabeth Pearce, whose business card reads “Culinary Historian, Consultant & Guide.”

We strike a deal. The three of us—Twain trippers Alyssa, Dan and Loren—will play attentive listeners during a two-hour photo shoot designed to promote Pearce’s Cocktail Walking Tour in the French Quarter. In return, she will buy the food—and help us cook—a Twain fish feast the way it was prepared in his era. But where, Pearce asks, are the fish recipes I want her to use?

I recall Andrew Beahrs’ book, Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens. It includes a chapter on the preparation of his favorite New Orleans fish. I scour Kitchen Witch and other French Quarter bookshops. No success. Joe Clark, a 40-year librarian behind the information desk at the city’s main library, says none of the city’s libraries has a copy.

Clark and I spend 20 minutes trying to find Beahrs’ New Orleans chapter online. A library customer interrupts our search to tell Clark the library’s first-floor men’s urinal is overflowing. Clark insists that my PP syndrome will lead to success. He is not talking about urine but his slogan: Persistence pays. Sure enough, I find a copy of Beahrs’ book at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum gift shop.

Pearce says it will take us two hours to prepare and cook two Twain fish dishes over an oak fire. It takes us closer to three hours. Observing the speed at which I’m peeling and pulling the heads off of the fresh shrimp Pearce helps and tells me to leave the shrimp deveining to her.

The sheepsheads of Twain’s day are unavailable and not especially coveted. Only 20 percent of the bony sheepshead is usable meat. So Pearce has bought a drum, a kind of fish that we saw being caught the previous day in Bayou Bienvenue.

Elizabeth Pearce

For the baked drum fish, Pearce adapts a recipe for sheepshead from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book that requires one large onion, thyme, cracker crumbs, a half bottle of white wine, flour, butter, six fresh tomatoes, a mound of mushrooms, two dozen Lake Shrimp and salt and pepper.

But my favorite is the boiled drum, also from a The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book recipe for sheepshead. I suspect the secret is in the quart of cream, the yolks of four eggs and butter, a mixture that would make even a rubber tire edible.

While we cook, eat, wash dishes and say farewells, Pearce answers our endless questions, despite her sore throat. She grew up in nearby Covington, attended Louisiana State University and has always lived in the New Orleans area, except for going to university in Italy and teaching English in Spain. She has no favorite comfort-food dish that she cooks at home: “I clean out the refrigerator a lot.”

The hearth at the Hermann-Grima House

But she has a favorite place, New Orleans, especially at Mardi Gras: “Mardi Gras is my high holy day. I can’t stand Christmas.” For Pearce, Carnival is about the costuming and the hospitality,as well as the fact that there’s not obligation to buy gifts. She doesn’t see New Orleans as a den of booze, beads and bordellos, but as a city of art and food and drink and music and, yes, the kind of fun that exists everywhere but is usually hidden. “Life,” she says, “is about pleasure, not anger.” She describes another favorite time in New Orleans, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, when the Black Men of Labor, who promote traditional New Orleans jazz, and participants in “Southern Decadence,” the gay Mardi Gras, both parade. The different parades intersect, and thousands of different people mingle. “We’re all here and everybody is having a good time,” Pearce says. “There is a tolerance. You can’t be a total bigot.”

Loren Ghiglione

After visiting the Lower Ninth Ward and seeing for ourselves the devastation that Hurricane Katrina caused in the area, we stopped at the Bayou Bienvenue, hoping to find a vantage point from which to film the area. What we found instead was the adorable scene of a grandfather and his grandson fishing in the bayou. Having gone eight days without a single catch, the grandfather attributed the drum fish he finally caught to the presence of the video camera. A couple days later, Team Twain would prepare drum fish, 19th Century-style, at the Hermann-Grima House in New Orlean’s French Quarter.

Video by Dan Q. Tham

New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon felt like a sacred and salacious holiday. With the weather in complicity, we sinned over hot chocolate and beignets at Café du Monde and I quickly learned that breathing is ill-advised during the consumption of these French doughnuts. One accidental exhalation through the nostrils and a plume of white powder flies through the air like pollen and lands on your travel companions with an understated grace. The line to the famous Café du Monde was long, and rightly so. For less than three bucks, you get three warm and decadent beignets, basically deep-fried dough topped with powdered sugar. Despite the length of the line, there was enough going on in the French Quarter to keep your senses occupied. A man coated in silver belting renditions of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” Artists lining the Place d’Armes and shoo the prying eyes of my video camera away from their work. Fortunetellers, shoe-shiners, Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, a devil and nun duo (“She’s mad because she don’t get ‘nun’,” Satan would say with a grin to onlookers)—they all assembled like jesters in the court of New Orleans’ oldest and most hallowed ground. The cream-colored St. Louis Cathedral oversees the processions like an unimpressed regent. On this day, it felt like Hurricane Katrina was biblical history.

We continued through the Quarter and I would stop every fifteen feet or so to film the ironwork or a hobo or an electric violin performance or the neon-lit goings-on of a divey jazz club. Loren was looking for a 2010 book by Andrew Beahrs called “Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens” to find a recipe for one of Twain’s lavish meals in New Orleans. When he was living in New Orleans as a trencherman, Mark Twain ate baked sheepshead and fried croakers. Don’t worry; I didn’t really know what those names meant either. We later found out that croakers are basically bait fish and sheepshead is a very, very bony Gulf fish “that could be elevated by the right hand.” Despite the unsavory imagery the fish names bring up, we were anxious to dine as Clemens had dined, to experience 19th Century New Orleans through our stomachs.

Loren left us to our own devices on Bourbon Street and headed off for the public library to find this book, while Alyssa and I visited Marie Laveau’s Voodoo Shop. I’ve seen Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog.” I know the huge role voodoo and witchcraft play in the history of this city. We spent a surprisingly long time in the voodoo shop, charmed into a state of hypnosis by the shrunken heads and Wiccan shrines and noxious odors coming from incense sticks that would help with everything from fertility to the viability of your business. We left the shop with two grotesque New Orleans voodoo dolls, crafted by “a local practitioner,” promising protection. From what?

Before meeting up with Loren for lunch at Napoleon House, Bonaparte’s intended New Orleans abode, the two of us wandered to the banks of the Mississippi, Twain’s first and greatest love. Between the hideous steamboat calliope music barraging our ears, the brown and brackish waters of the river, weary after traversing the country, and the unending streams of tourists gawking at the Hare Krishna parade on Decatur Street, I thought back to our simple days in Hannibal, Missouri, when the water was clearer and the only sounds were those of flora and fauna and of our boat cutting through the water. We’ve come a long way. Allegro III, our dirty steed, has already gone about 7,000 miles. Today marks the beginning of our eighth week on the road. Holy crap! as they say in Utah.

At Napoleon’s, Alyssa downed a shot of Bourbon (on tape) for medicinal purposes and I had a wonderful tuna salad stuffed inside an avocado. I also relieved myself in the trough/urinal in the men’s room at Napoleon’s that brought me back to Berghain in Berlin and everywhere in India. I am happy that the common thread of my extensive and lucky travels these past five months is trough-urinals.

After lunch, you will not believe that we ended up running into the culinary historian of the Hermann-Grima House and piquing her interest in our project and in preparing the sheepshead and croakers. Elizabeth Pearce offered us a deal: she would prepare the Twain feast for us on Tuesday if we took part in a photoshoot for her New Orleans cocktail tour, during which she told us the fascinating story of New Orleans through the ingredients of the local concoction Sazerac. It was a tough decision and it took a lot of sacrifice, but we agreed to the torture of learning about this incredible city while wielding specialty cocktails. This was, far and away, the worst day we’ve had so far on the Twain trip. I hope a day like this doesn’t happen ever again.

Dan Q. Tham