pound puppy

Tuesday morning (OK, OK, afternoon) I left Jessica’s and hit the open road again. Unfortunately I was tired of driving and I kept making up reasons to stop (“oh, look, there’s a Wal-Mart, I need a dry erase board” or “I wonder if Jack-in-the-Box serves 'cupcake in a shake'?”) and it took me forever to get to New Orleans.

I arrived at around 11. I was intimidated about finding it at night, and about parking, which I knew was going to be difficult. But I found parking right in front of where it was supposed to be, and then couldn’t find the number or really figure out if I was even picking the right gate, but I guessed, and tried my key, and it worked. (My gate is the one under the flag.) So I opened it and there was this long narrow alley leading to the back, where my apartment door was. I didn’t figure out until later that there was a switch you could hit at the one end that would turn a light on over my door. This picture of the apartment and the alley looks much more cheerful at night. At the time, I was kind of spooked, and had to tell myself to just walk, to just keep moving forward and everything would be okay. I got to a doorway in the back of the building and tried another key, and that worked too, which was a relief. I'll post some pictures of the inside later.

The next morning I got up and mostly just worked on doing laundry and settling in. The grocery stores near me are little markets so I actually drove six miles to Metarie, a big suburb of New Orleans, so I could go to a Winn-Dixie with a lot of options and a big parking lot. That's right, I went out of my way to go to a chain. That's what I do. Later for dinner I went to a diner called "Clover Grill" where I worked on arbitration stuff and had a big hamburger that I watched being fried under a hubcap. To keep in the juices. I was later informed that this diner is a big drag queen hangout, but there weren't any there when I was there.

The parking in front of my building is two hours only from 7 to 7. The owner of the apartment told me this could be pushed a bit, so I decided to move my car every three hours, at 10, 1, and 4. This worked fine on Wednesday. But you may have noticed, in the complicated sign shown at left, a tiny little marker indicating street cleaning hours. If you did notice that, then good for you, because you probably wouldn't have come out at 10 am on Thursday and found your parking spot looking like this:


In New Orleans the nice areas are right next to the terrible areas. I'm living in the historic French Quarter, which is pretty nice and fairly safe. But two blocks up from the river from me is Rampart Street, and the Faubourg Treme, where if you walked outside and found your car missing it wouldn't be because it was towed. The owner of this apartment left a note telling me not to be tempted by the St. Louis Cemetries located in Treme, even though they're cool looking, because you will get killed in there. So I was pretty excited to see that the Claiborne Auto Pound, where the mean people took poor little Isaac, was on the other side of Treme, and that Google Maps thought it seemed like a good idea to take the path through the cemeteries to get there.


I decided just to walk down Bourbon St. all the way to Canal and then up to Claiborne and walk over. I was a little nervous about the Claiborne leg of the trip but I felt like if it looked really scary I could just stop and get a cab.

So I didn't carry a bag, and dressed scrappy looking, and set off. I took a picture of Canal Street with my phone and sent it to my mom so she wouldn't worry. But then when I got to Claiborne, it looked a little shady. The sidewalk bordered the walled cemetery on one side, which reminded me of going to visit Vicenzo on the east side of Termini Station last year. A old white guy rolled down his window and asked me where I was going in a disbelieving voice. But I just put on my best Napoli face and kept going, and found Isaac looking scared and alone (you can see the tops of the mausoleums behind her,) and bailed her out with $125. There was an option to rent a parking space for $200 with the apartment which I had turned down... so this went a long way towards not saving me any money on that decision. Now if I can just remember to move next Thursday.