Audioguides La Nouvelle-Orléans

New Orleans sits in a bowl below sea level at the mouth of the Mississippi River, a location that makes it periodically catastrophic and permanently irreplaceable. The French Quarter is not a theme park, even though it can feel like one on a Saturday night on Bourbon Street. Step one block in either direction to Royal Street or Chartres Street and you find the city as it actually is: wrought iron galleries dripping with ferns, corner bars where second-line brass bands practice, and the smell of chicory coffee drifting from the Cafe Du Monde at Jackson Square.

The city's culture is unlike anything in the United States, shaped by French and Spanish colonial rule, by the largest slave market in the country at the Whitney Plantation just upriver, and by the Haitian, African, and Creole influences that combined into a cuisine, a music, and a way of moving through time that no other American city has come close to replicating.

The Garden District on the Uptown side of Canal Street has the antebellum mansions and oak-canopied streets of a different New Orleans, quieter and stranger. Cafe Reconcile on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard serves lunch that is as good as anywhere in the city, run as a job training program for youth from the Seventh Ward.