New Orleans day 2,

in which Dave is robbed, and when we get to experience some of that famous NO hospitality by being ejected from a pub for no apparent reason.

After Sunday night's Bud, Hand Grenade ("New Orleans' most powerful drink!" - I can vouch for this) and Hurricane-fuelled inebriation, we finally left the hotel around lunchtime to have a walk around. As I was leaving, the phone rang and the housekeeping manager asked if we wanted our room cleaned today; I said yes, and thought no more about it.

An hour or so after heading out, the stifling weather, combined with the challenging NO street perfume, got to me. I left Josh and Dave to it and walked back to the hotel to crash out for a couple of hours in our newly cleaned room. All fine and well until we were getting ready to head out again that night, when Dave announced: "I've had $300 nicked from my bag."

The fuck?

Sometime in the hour or thereabouts that the room was empty, someone had taken the money from Dave's bag. Dave had to wait for New Orleans' finest to turn up to take a statement, and he told Josh and I to get something to eat and we'd meet up later.

We found a nice little restaurant that managed to be authentically local without veering towards touristy or pretentious, and were chatting to the waitress afterwards.

"What's in the gumbo that make it taste the way it does?" I asked. "Is it the okra? I think it's the okra."
"Oh, I can ask the chef for you," she said. "Shall I get him for you?"
"No, no, it's fine- ah."
"Hello," boomed the chef/man mountain.
"Hello. So, er, what's in the gumbo?"
"Okra."
"Thanks."

Josh got a phone call from Dave saying that the cops were at the hotel, and wanted to speak to us. Once we got there, one of them took us outside and got our side of the story, and only then did it occur to me that I was almost certainly their prime suspect - the only one alone in the room for quite some time before Dave discovered the money was missing.

Unfortunately for the housekeeper's cause, I think I came across as non-kleptomaniac and reasonable, despite one of the (ex-military) cops telling Dave to "trust your buddy with your life, but not your money or your wife."

Hopefully it'll be okay; both Dave's insurance company and that of the hotel have been told about it, so he should get the money back. Still pretty off, though, and it put a bit of a damper on the rest of the evening.

We went out again in the same manner as Sunday night and after a few drinks, wandered up the stairs to a bar's balcony overlooking Bourbon Street. We got talking to the enthusiastically leering guys there, and it turned out we'd accidentally crashed a private party with free booze until 4 am.

Result.

Then Dave was thrown out by the bouncers for some imagined slight or misinterpreted comment (we still don't really know why!), with one of them recording the whole throwing-out process on a mini video camera for anti-lawsuit purposes.

"What did I do? Why are you throwing me out?" asked Dave.
"You can't do that," came the reply.
"Do what?"
"You can't do that."

Surreal, annoying, and another nail in the coffin of the evening. A few drinks later and I headed home, still a little the worse for wear after the last night, and just not quite getting into the swing of things.

On the whole, NO just didn't really gel for me. The atmosphere (and I'm not talking about the sundry vile smells wafting around) was more Ibiza than laid back jazz capital of the world, and it felt less like the Big Easy than the Big Hangover. Seeing the street cleaners and café workers (almost all black) sweeping up and hosing away the detritus left by the previous night's partygoers (almost all white) made me feel like I was unwillingly playing out a part in a hundred-year-old, ingrained ritual of thinly-veiled racism. Perhaps I'm being naive about it, but it didn't endear the place to me.

Anyway, we checked out of our hotel (0 x Super 8s, because of the $5 mandatory telephone access charge, even though we didn't need the telephone. Oh, and because of the theft of three hundred dollars from our room) with a minimum of fuss, finally got out of New Orleans with a rather larger amount of fuss, and set out for Houston.