Telling Time in New Orleans

After the sun goes down in New Orleans

You know what the French Republican Calendar was, right?  After the French Revolution, the Jacobin government implemented an alternate calendar.  It was more rational, more scientific, more poetic.  Each day was divided into ten hours, and each hour was divided into a hundred minutes, those minutes were divided into a hundred seconds, and so on, and so on.  It was like the metric system.

They still kept twelve months, but they changed the names.  Then they only gave them three weeks.  Guess how many days in a week?  Ten.  You needed to work nine days to get the tenth day off.  There's a reason this calendar didn't catch on in New Orleans.  

As I write this, it is 4:24PM, Saturday, May 10, 2014, the 3rd Saturday of Easter.  If New Orleans had adopted the Republican Calendar, it would be 7:70 o'clock, Primidi, 21 Floreal, CCXXII, The Day of Thrift.  If any of this makes sense to you, you're living in the wrong time period.  

Napoleon abolished the Republican calendar before he sold his empire's claims to Louisiana to the U. S.  But, that's not the reason we don't follow Republican Time in New Orleans.  You see, when the French Revolution was going on, and during the French Republic, New Orleans was a part of Spain.  Between 1763 to 1800, New Orleans was a Spanish Colony, albeit one that spoke French.  New Orleans never switched calendars.  It stayed Catholic the whole time.

That doesn't mean the calendar or clock mean the same thing in New Orleans than they do everywhere else.  Things just happen when they happen, according to their own schedule.  Nobody really knows what the phrase, "on time," means.  As they say here, "Laissez les bon temps rouler!"

New Orleans is located in the Central Time Zone, but there's always something going on.  Here is how time passes in New Orleans:  You know how when you're at work and you're really focussed on a project and then some stray thought slips in and before you know it's time to go home and you've just daydreamed the afternoon away.  New Orleans is that daydream.

You'll get used to it once you're here a few days.

A votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.