WW II museum in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana: My best friend, Tony Rizarri put us in the Hyatt French Quarter Hotel which is located right in Bourbon St. so at night we walked the most sinful street in Sin City USA! Indeed a night out in the French Quarter means seeing things that you don’t want your kids to see — scantily clad women beckoning you to enter their nightclub. Since it wasn’t a weekend, so there was no cover charge…you could just walk right in.

There’s a place called “Barely Legal Club” owned by Larry Flynt of Hustler magazine side-by-side with Hard Rock Café and this place was packed full on a weekday! A few yards later, you’ll see that Penthouse magazine is also here with pretty sexy ladies all in a row waiting for customers to have fun with. These are places in America you do not see in the open, except perhaps in Las Vegas, America’s other Sin City!

Then there’s something that you can see that is even rarely seen in America…a shop called “Jazz Funeral” selling funerary products. New Orleans is the only place in America where a funeral is an 1800-century horse and carriage complete with a Jazz Band singing all the way to the cemetery. Yes, you can only see these things in New Orleans. They even have guided tours to the cemetery! We took a Hop-on, Hop-off bus tour so we could cover the whole city without walking. Yes, New Orleans is truly a unique city.

Speaking of funerals, I read the New Orleans newspaper “The Times-Picayune” which had a front-page report entitled “Some Folks dying to make a spectacle.” Apparently because people have so much money, when they die, they no longer opt for the usual vigil inside a coffin in the funeral home. Many moneyed people want to be remembered for what they did best. There’s a photo of a Jazz singer who recently died…so for his vigil, he was placed with a band, while his remains complete with a suit and saxophone standing up.

Call it morbid, but this is the new craze in New Orleans, which is called a “Non-Traditional Funeral.” A rich woman who died was placed on a garden sitting in a chair because this was what she used to do and that’s the vigil that her friends and family would see in the funeral home.

Of course the day tours in New Orleans showed its better side. Uniquely styled homes that seem to be better fit in the City of Paris are all here. Of course when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, 85% of New Orleans was flooded because the levees of Lake Ponchartrain broke down. Katrina was the wake-up call for the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) who has since found solutions to prevent flooding in the future. It was raining cats and dogs when we arrived, but there was no flooding in the streets of New Orleans.

Supposedly for this US trip of mine, I wanted to visit the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, but I was a bit disappointed that that plan did not push through. But what do you know; New Orleans gave me a very pleasant surprise when I found out that they had America’s National World War II Museum! The tour bus dropped Tony and me at this facility, which to a World War II buff like me… was like a kid landing in Magic Kingdom!

Tickets were at $22 for adults and it was worth every penny. Right on the ticket booth area, you will already see a flyable C-47 Dakota the military version of the DC-3… hanging together with a British Spitfire. There was also a static display of machine guns, a Flak gun and we paid extra $5 bucks to see a 40-minute 4-D presentation entitled “Beyond all Boundaries” which is the compressed story of World War II from the beginning to the end narrated by Tom Hanks. But I have to complain to Tom Hanks that his presentation failed to mention the Greatest Sea Battle of the War… the Battle of Leyte Gulf…he certainly missed that great part of the World War II story!

When we got into the next building, my jaw dropped! They had a flyable B-17 Super Fortress hanging together with a B-25 Mitchell Bomber, a P51 Mustang and F-4U Chance Vought Corsair, and SBD-3 Dauntless Dive Bomber and an General Motors TBM Avenger torpedo bomber and the nose of a B-24 Consolidated Liberator, the plane that bombed Cebu City in 1944.

On the ground was a Sherman Tank… and it brought back memories of my childhood, when Tony and I were neighbors in Parian, Cebu where a broken Sherman Tank was just a walk from our house and we used to play with it, until someone used it as a toilet and we stopped playing with the tank. For sure someone bought that Sherman tank for scrap!

Americans always have a sense of history. World War II museums today have become a major tourist destination. Indeed, yesterday’s war is today’s tourist destination. A couple of weeks ago, we went to the 9/11 Museum, which has now become America’s must-see tourist destination. I guess this is what makes America a great nation. They don’t forget the wars where their sons and daughters died fighting in battle.

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