The weekend could begin at dusk on Thursdays at The Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue, where the wide front porch hums with gossip and the air smells faintly sweet, like maraschino cherries. Ice tinkles in sweating glasses of bourbon as the ancient streetcar clanks past under the live oaks, taking the working folks home, taking the tourists no place in particular.

Or maybe it starts later that night at about 10:30 over at Vaughan's Lounge in Bywater, at the corner of Dauphine and Lesseps. Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers are making brass band music, funky New Orleans style, and there are free beans -- white sometimes, red sometimes -- dished up between sets.

But most likely it starts an hour or so later, a few miles away, at the Mid City Lanes, a combination music hall and bowling alley that serves a decent turkey gumbo. Natives just call it the Rock 'n' Bowl.

Thursday is zydeco night, and if you can't dance, at least don't get in the way. On any given night there might be Nathan and the Zydeco Cha-Chas, or Boozoo Chavis, or, if God smiles on you, the sizzling Rosie Ledet, whose fingers fly over her accordion's keys like two birds chasing each other along a white picket fence. People dance and sweat and drink and sweat and go home to Bucktown or Metairie or Kenner feeling as if, by God, they did something.

''I can't claim that the weekend starts here,'' said John Blancher, who owns the Rock 'n' Bowl. ''But it's not far off the truth.''

One thing is for certain. The weekend does not wait for Friday in New Orleans.

Some people even say there really is no weekend here, or, perhaps more accurately, no week between perpetual weekends. It's just livin', dahlin', one long kiss on the lips of excess.

First, you need to decide which New Orleans you are coming to see. There are two distinctly different sides to this old river town, like the black and white halves of the ceramic Mardi Gras masks for sale in T-shirt shops in the French Quarter. On...