This week we are on an Elderhostel to Lafayette Louisiana, centering on the music festival that is going on in the center of town. But, being an Elderhostel, we are getting much, much more. We are getting a full course in Cajun history and culture.

• We learned to dance the Cajun two-step and went dancing at Mulatte's in Breaux Bridge.
• A trip to a rice/crawfish plantation taught us about the rotation of these two disparate crops, followed by a crawfish boil where we learned the Cajun way of peeling crawfish tails. For one who will not cook lobster at home because of the tug on my heartstrings every time I see a banded lobster in a grocery store tank, let me say that crawfish aquaculture is very humane. The rice paddies are a happy habitat, and they are out of the traps and into the pots in less than an hour.
• An elderly Cajun woman demonstrated traditional crafts with tales of her girlhood - one of 18 children, she slept 6 to a bed and her brothers all bunked upstairs in the "garconiere". We saw the outside stairways to the garconieres on typical Cajun cottages at Vermillionville, the Louisiana Rural Life Museum and the Evangeline park.
• At the Jean LaFitte Center, we learned the history of the Cajuns, of their expulsion from Nova Scotia, the 10 years of wandering and eventual resettlement in Louisiana. A dance troupe gave us demonstrations of the traditional dances of the original Acadiennes.
• We toured an accordion factory, and were treated to a performance by a family Cajun band. A creole musician came to the hotel to demonstrate his music and talk about the old time musicians -- Dennis McGee and Amede Ardoin for example, and the evolution into Zydaco, which incorporates a lot of R&B into the music.
• And the music festival - which featured groups from all over the French speaking world. There was a Dixieland jazz band from Paris, with a girl singer who sounded just like Ella, and sang in unaccented American English. Her announcing, however was very accented. A Swedish bluegrass group featured the nykleharpa, a cross between a guitar and an autoharp. When asked what it was called in English, he said, "nykleharpa" - and in French? "nykleharpa". It is unique to Sweden.
  Pictured are Jane Vidrine and Ann Savoy, half of the group Magnolia Sisters. Ann came to Lafayette as a graduate student and interviewed all the great Cajun musicians and stayed to marry Marc Savoy, one of the best Accordion players in the region. Our introduction to Cajun music came when Ann and Marc Savoy, along with fiddler Michael Doucette, played in Pittsburgh for an early Calliope concert.