We spent almost a week in New Orleans,

staying in the Quarterhouse on Chartres Street. The place was palatial! We had a comically over-decorated (cf. gilt-framed oil painting of a violin-playing monkey dressed in 19th century costume complete with pince-nez spectacles) two bedroom apartment to ourselves, and it was way beyond anything we could have afforded by ourselves. Mad props must go to Ash's parents for giving us their unused time there.

We spent a good portion of the week just wandering around the French Quarter, soaking up the atmosphere while trying to avoid inhaling any of it. The eye-watering eau de Rue Bourbon was still in full malevolent bloom, lying somewhere evil between putrefying crawfish and stale vomit, although away from the Canal Street end (frat central) it mercifully decreased to background levels.

The quarter was quiet during the week, and if anything was more welcoming than last time I was here. We pottered around museums, gawked at some of the landmarks and emerged blinking (and weaving slightly) into the afternoon light after stopping for the occasional restorative Hurricane. In the evenings we stuffed ourselves silly with gumbo or some other death-by-protein banquet, got elegantly wasted to a greater or lesser degree in a suitable establishment and generally revelled in our genteel Southern surroundings. We talked to a friendly off-duty U.S. soldier who bemoaned the difficulty of getting stoned on base, listened to some jazz (nice!) in Preservation Hall, and propped up the bar in a dingy sports pub near the edge of the quarter while Ash coached me on the rules of baseball.

One afternoon we drove out to the Garden District, independently recommended to us by a few different people. It didn't seem to be much more than an affluent residential area comprised of grand old mansions, but we ambled around for an hour or so, marvelling at the gnarled old trees cracking the pavement slabs with their roots and shadowing the upper stories of the houses. If we'd been there after dark it would have been prime horror film material. A few of the houses were still in the process of having storm damage repaired, but like the French Quarter, there wasn't much evidence left of last year's hurricane.

The tourist map of the city we'd picked up (in one of the handy welcome centres sited where the interstates cross state lines) showed a suggested driving tour route including the quarter, so we decided to follow it home. After a single wrong turn off a broad tree-lined avenue, we were suddenly on the wrong side of the tracks. The houses were wooden bungalows with peeling paint, household debris littered the yards, rusty cars cannibalised for spares lay immobile in the driveways and the streets were full of people with no jobs to go to. It was instantly depressing and oppressive, and it was obvious that most of the people sitting on their faded porches were watching us as we rolled by in our ridiculous lifestyle car - I wouldn't have blamed them if they'd jumped to the conclusion (however wrongly) that we were doing a DIY disaster tour and taken a justifiably dim view of it. We found our way out and headed home.

All this sounds a bit down on the city, but the reality is that I think overall we got a far better idea of what it would be like to actually live there. We saw some of the seamier sides of it; we spent a night out in Faubourg Marigny, an area populated by locals as opposed to the tourists; we saw the bohemian neighbourhoods around Magazine and Tchoupitoulas Streets, and in visiting them all we saw that for the most part, it's just like any other city. An enjoyable one for all that!