Cabildo and Pharmacy Museum 
I woke up and peaked my head out the second floor hotel room window to see a very cloudy and blowing rain. Rain just like they predicted. I get ready and put on regular jeans, a sweat shirt, tennis shoes, a jacket and my handy clear poncho. We make our way down to the lobby as a group and make it to the exit of the parking deck to walk to the street car. It looks like a bad dream after the exit. The sky is dark, the rain is coming down in big ugly drops saturating everything, the wind is ripping through the streets, the puddles are everywhere just waiting for one us to make a mistake, it smells just like fresh wet rain, you can hear the wind rushing through the street and I take one step out in the mess and my shoes are soaked. Great. We swiftly make our way through the landmines of puddles to the street car station. Next stop Toulouse for the Cabildo and Pharmacy tour. 

2nd floor of the Cabildo

We walk into the Cabildo and it is an enormous place right next to the Cathedral with white walls, and enormous statement making staircase that goes up three stories and is jam packed with nothing but history of the great city. Each floor is just as interesting as the next with pictures, stories and artifacts. From there we went to lunch at Stanley's which is to the left and catty corner to the St. Louis Cathedral if you are looking at it from the Cathedral. We enjoyed a mouthwatering and stacked high shrimp and oyster po boy that I split with a friend. Another friend got a traditional dish of beans and rice and the other got a beautiful plated bananas foster french toast. We quickly finished up our lunch so we could make it to the Pharmacy Museum. As we look to head outside it begins to pour. You can't see the cement in front of the Cathedral as it looks like a small pond is forming and we will have to travel by boat soon. We walk out from underneath the over hang of Stanleys and I thought I could make it at least two steps this time but just like my luck this morning, I only make it one step and my tennis shoe is full  of ice cold water. My jeans have sucked up the pooling water like a sponge. Thank heavens we don't have to walk too far. 

Looking at the entrance of the Pharmacy

The Pharmacy Museum is tucked back romantically on Chartres street which the locals pronounce "CHAR-TERS." We walk in and there is flanking floor to ceiling old wooden glassed cases filled with antique bottles just as it would have been if I were a customer back in the day. The room seems to be just covered with dark wood everywhere you look. There are glass cases everywhere that are sealed to help preserve its delicate and historical contents. I could really picture patrons coming and going to get their elixirs, concoctions, potions or medicines. We left there after a fun tours full of laughs to take on our free afternoon. 

Before the downpour from Stanleys

The rain was just as they expected. I have real faith in their meteorologist. They called for rain 3 days ago and we got it. Now thats reliability as opposed to our weather which can call for rain the next day and somehow it just misses us? hmmm. Today had a pace that I do better with. It was laid back at both the Cabildo and Pharmacy Museum. I can really feel the difference in my blogging  today as well. I am much more relaxed and the words are flowing easier. I was really afraid of missing something yesterday so I took notes on my phone and today I barely took notes just took pictures hoping looking back on the pictures would help me recall in both journeys. I will see which method aids me in blogging better. The Cabildo was very interesting. Some of the things that stuck out to me the amount of genuine artifacts that had been donated. How cool is that? Tons of things from baskets to handbags had been donated from people in the community. 

The Slave Collar

The thing that stuck out to me the most was on the third floor and it was called a "slave collar."  The slave collar was used to keep an hear on the slaves literally. The detail of the slave collar wrote "The sound of the slave collar made any slave wearing the collar easier to locate. Resourceful slaves silenced the bells by stuffing them with mud." My immediate reaction was a stomach ache. Not only did these slaves live life in ways we cannot begin to imagine then had the ultimate degrading symbol of a collar. I began to tear up and had to move on. Lunch was delicious. My po boy was sinful and the mimosa I paired with it was even better. We then moved on to the Pharmacy Museum which was super cool. It was filled with interesting things that really gave you an image and depicted what it was like then. We had an awesome tour guide who was very funny. He seemed like someone I would hang out with. He was smart, quirky and sassy. One of the interesting things was I was curious if the pharmacy had started there or just placed there. We learned that the pharmacy actually started there and was in fact built in 1823 for Louis Dufilho who was America's first licensed pharmacist. We learned that him and his family lived there and the building contained a lot of things. For example, in the building was the Pharmacy that sold perfumes and cosmetics, voodoo potions, a soda fountain, etc. Upstairs were living quarters and a house call for pregnancy, childbirth and health care in the home. Some interesting facts were shared like how the rich got their medications coated in gold and silver which did not allow the medication to be absorbed rendering it useless. Another fun fact was the evolution of medication administration and how the first apparatus to administer medications did not even contain a needle and patients had to have an incision made before so they could administer the medication. It was very interesting learning all about the Pharmacy. We finished up the tour, took an uber back to our hotel to avoid the rain any further. I am going to take a long nap.