The French Quarter certainly lived up to its reputation while I was in town.<\/p>\n
Monday night, I arrived in New Orleans about 5:30.\u00a0 With nothing to do until the next morning, I threw my bags in the room and hit Bourbon Street.\u00a0 Less than 10 minutes into my adventure, a guy called me over.\u00a0 “Hey big bro, want to see a magic trick?” he said.<\/p>\n
“I know what you are,” I told him.\u00a0 “You’re a panhandler.\u00a0 We have you in Memphis.\u00a0 Go away.”\u00a0 He muttered “aw man” and walked off.\u00a0 I got panhandled three more times that night and had two other bums offer to sell me weed.\u00a0 After that night I apparently had my “game face” on and the panhandlers didn’t even bother me for the rest of the week.<\/p>\n
There were numerous strip clubs, and the girls standing outside used every trick in the book to try to get me to come in.\u00a0 Tuesday I had my “I Love Romanian Girls” shirt on.\u00a0 “We love Romanian girls too!”\u00a0 said a stripper peeking her head out a door.\u00a0 “Come party with us!”\u00a0 There was one club called “Barely Legals” which had 18-year-old girls that looked young for their age – I’m talking real<\/em> young, prepubescent even.\u00a0 I turned down all the invitations.\u00a0 Believe it or not, I’ve never really been one to get excited about strip clubs.<\/p>\n Wednesday night I had a work dinner at Pat O’s on the River.\u00a0 That’s a Pat O’s I didn’t even know existed.\u00a0 It’s for special events only, and it is indeed on the Mississippi River.\u00a0 It was on Decatur Street, about six blocks from the hotel.\u00a0 Most of my co-workers took cabs to Pat O’s.\u00a0 Seriously?\u00a0 Have you people heard of walking?\u00a0 So I went to the dinner, had more fun than I expected, and about 8:30 I started the walk back, down Decatur.<\/p>\n About a block and a half from Canal Street, a drag queen jumped out of a doorway.\u00a0 He had hair extensions, DD-cup fake boobs, and a tight lavender dress that exposed his navel.\u00a0 “Come give daddy a hug!” he said to me, arms outstretched.\u00a0 Giving “daddy” a hug was certainly one possible plan, but instead I went with Plan B, which was “get the hell out of there.”\u00a0 He cussed me all the way to Canal.<\/p>\n (For the record:\u00a0 I have no problem with drag queens being who they are.\u00a0 I just choose not to hug drag queens I don’t know, or call them “daddy.”)<\/p>\n Thursday night, I stopped in a dive bar a couple of blocks off Bourbon.\u00a0 It would not normally have been on my radar, except that a sign said they were selling Abita SOS.\u00a0 SOS stands for Save Our Shore, and 75 cents from the sale of every beer goes toward the effort to clean up the mess BP made in the Gulf.\u00a0 I ordered one, to find that it was $8 for a 22-ounce, 7% ABV beer.\u00a0 “Guess I’ll be here a while,” I thought.<\/p>\n So this chick came up and started chatting with me.\u00a0 I won’t say she was ugly, because she wasn’t, but she… well, I’ll put it this way, she looked like she spent a lot of time in bars.\u00a0 (Then again, I suppose the argument could be made that I<\/em> spend a lot of time in bars.)\u00a0 Anyway, she was extremely friendly – too friendly, it seemed.\u00a0 She asked where I was from, why I was in town, how long I was staying.\u00a0 She asked if I had a cigarette, and I told her I don’t smoke.\u00a0 She chatted for a couple more minutes, then asked, “Well, do you think you could front me the money for a pack of cigarettes?\u00a0 I’ll pay you back.”\u00a0 I told her I didn’t have money, that everything I bought went on my expense account for work.\u00a0 (A lie – I had just pulled out a 10 to pay for the beer.)<\/p>\n She then tried to interest me in the video poker machines.\u00a0 In New Orleans, bars can have video poker machines if they restrict entry to 21 and up.\u00a0 It became clear to me that if I played, it would be a team effort – I’d be putting the money in the machine, and she’d be keeping any winnings.\u00a0 I declined, explaining that I only play real poker, against other players rather than the house.<\/p>\n Then she started asking me questions.\u00a0 “So, what do you like to do?\u00a0 Do you like to have a good time?\u00a0 Do you like to have fun?\u00a0 What do you like to do?”\u00a0 To me, those sounded an awful lot like questions a hooker would ask, to indicate “hey I’m a hooker but I can’t say that in case you’re a cop.”\u00a0 I pulled out my phone and opened the Mail app.\u00a0 “I can’t have fun tonight,” I told her.\u00a0 “I’m on call for work.\u00a0 See, I’m checking my work e-mail right now.”\u00a0 (Another lie – my iPhone isn’t even set up to check work e-mail.)\u00a0 I also moved my wallet to my front pocket.\u00a0 After a few more minutes, she figured I was a waste of her time and left me alone.<\/p>\n Bums, strippers, drag queens, and hookers – I got to see the Quarter in all its glory.\u00a0 And I survived.\u00a0 More posts to come – I’ll probably do one about work, and one about food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The French Quarter certainly lived up to its reputation while I was in town. Monday night, I arrived in New Orleans about 5:30.\u00a0 With nothing to do until the next morning, I threw my bags in the room and hit Bourbon Street.\u00a0 Less than 10 minutes into my adventure, a guy called me over.\u00a0 “Hey … Continue reading “NOLA trip – the street people”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7366"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7366"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7372,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7366\/revisions\/7372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}