The Little Big Horns at the Spotted Cat in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Lizzie and I arrived in New Orleans last night around 7pm, and quickly and easily found the house where we'd be staying. Lizzie found Ben and Jim via CouchSurfer, a great website service where people offer their spare rooms/couches/floors/etc to travelers. Ben and Jim were both in their mid-20s and both decently cool people.
Lizzie and I decided that we'd do some exploring of the French Quarter and try to see some live music. Ben gave us very explicit instructions on how to get to and from the French Quarter. We went down to the Quarter and walked past an enormous amount of music clubs, all of whom had free shows. We settled on The Spotted Cat, a bar where The Little Big Horns were playing. They played old-time jitterbug jazz, and the dancing that was taking place was incredible. I felt like we had stepped into the 1930s.
Despite the fun we were having, it was getting late and we decided to call it a night. That's where things started getting sketchy. We made the poor decision to walk back to Ben/Jim's house a different way than they had instructed....and ended up walking through the poorest neighborhoods in the city, in the middle of the night....alone.
We weren't terribly uneasy, but mostly because we just didn't know where we were. Had we known some of the neighborhoods we were walking through, we may have been terrified. At several points, packs of dogs began to approach us, snarling.
About half of the houses in the neighborhood were empty, boarded up, condemned. Grass was overgrown everywhere. Shiny new cars sat in front of dilapidated houses that I can only assume to be drug dens. There were some nicer houses, but many of them were in disrepair.
Eventually we realized we were terribly lost in the middle of the ghetto, and called a cab. Whilst we did this, a young woman approached us in her car and asked if we needed help. We told her the situation, and she immediately told us to get in the car and she would drive us home. Turns out, we were miles away from where we needed to be, and so Lizzie and I are both forever grateful to April for getting us out of that jam. April, if somehow you ever see this: THANK YOU AGAIN.
When we finally got back to Ben/Jim's (along with their third roommate, Troy, who we had not met earlier in the day) at about 3 AM, and told them the names of the streets we had been taking, they told us "YOU WENT WHERE!?!?!" and stressed to us that we had been walking through some of the roughest areas of the city.
Hey, a little adventure never hurt anybody, right?
Later,
Tom
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