Walking Among Old Oaks

We started out the day by getting a Lyft ride to the New Orleans Museum of Art, located in the Lakeview neighborhood of the city. I absolutely adore art museums and must go to some of them in the city that I’m traveling in, so I was really excited to get to NOMA. The morning was still nice and cool, so we headed into City Park and grabbed breakfast at the Morning Cafe. I picked up my second round of cafe au lait and beignets for breakfast–because a girl is allowed to binge, right? 

I took some time to walk around the City Park and I absolutely adored the live oak trees. I’ve grown up around the shoreline in California and I’ve seen so many redwoods, cherry blossoms, and even historic oak trees. Still, my experience with the oak trees, especially the ones in my high school, have been absolutely terrible starting with oak moth worms and their “horror-story-esque” cocoons, ending with little bites all down your legs that stay as scars forever!

But putting aside my history with oak trees, I fell in love with the live oaks in City Park. They hung over and curled their branch in a way that felt like wonderland in the South. While the historic oaks in my high school date back 100 years, which is a huge monument in the West Coast, these oaks have stood for nearly 800 years!

Almost antithetical to these ancient oaks is the modern art museum, NOMA. We headed there as it began to heat up the way it does in Louisiana, making sure to walk through the sculpture garden on our way.

The museum featured some beautiful works from 18th century Venice and 19th century Orientalist artwork to Regina Scully’s Japanese-inspired landscapes. I really enjoyed the Life of Seduction exhibit on Venetian costumes, furnishings, pageantry, and paintings because so much of the history that is depicted with the pageantry of carnivale relates to the culture and street life of New Orleans. The exhibition of Orientalism explored the issues of racism and superficial depictions of Eastern and African cultures, which I think was a really great way to appreciate the art but also confront the history of oppression that does underlie these beautiful works. Afterwards, we grabbed some lunch at Cafe Noma. I ordered the bruschetta with housed cured salmon which made for a lovely, light lunch before heading back to the French Quarter!

XOXO