1. Eat at Mother's Restaurant, good food.
Yep.
2. Go to Cafe Du Monde and have a beignet, you might have to dig through the powdered sugar to find the beignet.
Yep. Try some other beignet places too. Cafe du Monde can't be beat for the atmosphere, but there are allegedly better beignet about.
4. If you have imbibe, make sure to ask for you drink in a plastic cup so you can take it and go. Future-SWMBO found the daiquiri bar in the mall on the river walk and throughly enjoyed it.
Definitely. There are few pleasures like drinking and walking. It is bizarre and astonishing to me that we have outlawed it most everywhere. NO is special in this way.
8. Enjoy French Quater, but pre-Katrina it always smelled like urine, don't know if that changed.
I didn't notice it smelling worse than any other city, and I was there during Jazz Fest and then during the weekend of the Rock n Roll Marathon & Half--so chock-ful of people who enjoy peeing in convenient and unconventional places. Maybe I'm just not good at noticing funky smells, but I just remember warm evenings that smelled alternately like swampy water, flowers, and cityfunk.
[Warning: Random babbling about my insane love on NO despite extremely limited exposure follows.]
Enjoy the whole city, not just the French Quarter. I'm building up my mileage in the (probably futile) hope of making it to the race again this year--on foot is a great way to enjoy New Orleans. Don't keep just to the French Quarter. If you don't want to walk, it's drivable too, so long as you don't mind getting lost.
Both of my trips have been post-Katrina. Yes, huge swathes of the city are either substantially gone or substantially down-at-heel. There are some bad areas, but a lot of the areas that look bad aren't, not in the uh, socio-economic sense, they just haven't been gotten to yet. There's a whole lot of shifting and restructuring going on. As far as safety goes, the French Quarter is, realistically speaking, one of the more dangerous areas--lots of drunks acting stupid, lots of predators preying on drunk people.
My first trip--a week of volunteer work at the PD's, I roomed with a fairly astute guy, kind of a party-er, but also pretty street smart and keeps his wits about, and with a typical student type chick. The guy was more or less ok, but nearly got a little too involved in a drunken brawl. The girl got blasted out of her mind every day, behaved horribly, and got her purse stolen. I had no trouble at all. I worked hard and limited my touristing to walking around a lot. A bunch of us did go on a swamp tour in an airboat and that was pretty awesome. The "haunted New Orleans" tour was full of great showmanship and a lot of fun--of course they represent a whole lot of complete bs as established historical fact, which is part of the fun but also a trap for the over-credulous. I despair for the future of the legal profession because after spending an hour explaining how and why I was able to learn, in about ten minutes worth of Googling, that the stories about Delphine LaLaurie are fake, the response I got was "But he said it was true!"
My second trip I was focused on running and had my kiddos with me, so I didn't get out much, but got to run 13.1 miles of the city, and that was NICE. Went to the Audobon Zoo afterwards, which was pretty nice, if you're into that sort of thing. I still want to go to the insectarium--haven't had time on either trip.
The Garden District is a great place to walk. Felipe's Tacqueria is a great place to eat, especially if you aren't into (or can't afford) the gourmet places and tire quickly (like me) of cajun and creole.
I'm still trying to find some way to get myself down there again this winter. Heck, I'm trying to get a job there.
As for Amtrak, I took one trip, years ago. It was a mixed experience. Delightful experience, mostly, but the last leg of the trip there was some scheduling issue and they put everyone bound for Detroit on a bus. That was irritating.
