alcoholic buzz from breakfast saw us through.
By the time we returned to dry land we were sober enough to walk in fairly
straight lines to our next destination, the Presbytere museum. This had been
recommended to us on the walking tour as an opportunity to experience Mardi
Gras without the necessity of actually being in town while the festival was
taking place. And presumably without the associated costs and liver damage.
The museum was interesting and fairly colourful. It was also much
more extensive than we had expected, full of rooms containing costumes and
other festival paraphernalia. We took our time looking round several rooms
that were arranged in a loop on the ground floor and then came to a small
theatre area where you could sit and watch film clips of past parades. We sat
and watched these for quite a while, grateful of the seats as we were feeling
the combined effects of an early start, a long walking/standing tour and a
semi-liquid lunch. Around 4.47pm we suddenly heard a warden announce that
the museum would be closing at 5pm. So we dragged ourselves to our feet
and dashed upstairs for a quick look round the rest of the museum.
And that was when we discovered there was more to see upstairs than
in the galleries below. We ended up practically running from room to room
and reading less and less of the exhibition labels - something I as a historian,
museum professional and generally dull person find extremely hard to do. The
rooms did contain a lot of similar stuff, masks, costumes, etc. Nevertheless
we would have liked to spend more time there. One of the last rooms we went
in had dressing up clothes and a 'photo-me' booth. Sadly we had no time to
play dressing up, but Emma did take a photo with me standing behind a cut-