Acadiana

• Acadiana bureau
• Published: Dec 30, 2005

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LAFAYETTE -- It takes only a few bites of local food or a note or two of the music to realize you're worlds apart from the rest of the United States.

Tourists venture here to discover the area for themselves. Some never leave. And people who live here after trying other parts of the country will readily admit there's no place like it.

Some are drawn to the food. Boiled crawfish, fried shrimp, jambalaya, blackened redfish, oysters on the half shell, boudin, etouffee, and the list goes on.

Other visitors make the trek for zydeco and Cajun music. Commercial radio stations such as KVPI (92.5 FM) in Ville Platte and KBON (FM 101.1) in Eunice play the indigenous tunes, and public radio station KRVS (88.7) regularly airs local music.

But one of the biggest draws is the friendly nature of the people, who love nothing more than to show a Yankee how to peel and eat a crawfish.

Many still speak French regularly. Even those who are not fluent in Cajun French have a noticeable accent with traces of the language, such as the word "envie" (pronounced on-VEE), which means a strong desire for something, such as an envie for a link of boudin, (boo-DAN) a rice and pork concoction stuffed in a casing.

Someone from middle America might say, "Robert Jr. was such a foolish fellow. He had a proclivity to eat large portions of pork. One day when he parked his automobile beneath the carport and exited his vehicle, he suffered a massive heart attack."

The Cajun version would be, "T-Bob was a big couillon, yeah. He always had an envie for backbone stew. So one day, he parked under the car porch, got down from the car and caught a heart attack."

The uniqueness of the area's culture is celebrated throughout the Acadiana area with numerous festivals. In Lafayette, Downtown Alive!, Festival International and Festivals Acadiens are popular.

Lafayette is the epicenter of the Acadiana area. It is at the intersection of interstates 49 and 10, about an hour from the Gulf of Mexico.

The city draws people from outlying areas for shopping, medical care and education. The Lafayette Economic Development Authority revealed recently that the medical field in Lafayette is the parish's No. 1 employer.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, with 15,993 students, is the third largest university in the state behind LSU and the University of New Orleans.

When the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise opens next year in Lafayette it will host the first six-sided digital virtual reality cube in the world -- along with one of the fastest-available supercomputers.