Tourists
Posted: 07 Jun 2005, 15:45
No matter where I go, I never consider myself a tourist. I am unfailingly suave in that regard. Or in denial. They both work for me.
Having spent a long weekend in New Orleans, the city of Unreasonable Expectations, I am somewhat dismayed by the hoards of tourists who invade it year round. On Friday, while bookin' down Bourbon Street at breakneck speed on the back of a bicycle, weaving in and out of traffic and drunken frat boys, the sickly sweet smell of vomit and garbage wafted to my nose and I thought, "This place must suck for the people who live here."
Mainly this revelation harkens back to the night before, when I visited the Bywater with a local friend to see trombone-playing legend Kermit Ruffins. Kermit didn't show, but the drunken tourists did, complete with strings of flashing beads weighting their necks. Even though it is so far out of carnival season it's not even funny, and even though they were hanging around, impaired, in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in N.O. proper. They might as well have had "Mug Me" tattooed on their foreheads, and bulging money clips pinned to their shirts. That, as opposed to wearing carnival beads, would have left some of the mystery.
My friend and I had eaten, danced, and were sitting outside where it was cooler, when we were approached by a couple of lawyers or investment bankers or sumpin'. Of course they were wearing beads, and of course they thought that, because they were in New Orleans, any chick who happened to not be tied down already would go back to their hotel for even more Unreasonable Expectations--even a nice girl like me! Just one precarious step above sex tourism, methinks. I don't know...maybe it was the heat, maybe it was their unattractiveness, maybe it was the way the light glinted off the one man's wedding ring as he tried to stroke my arm with the other hand, but we just weren't taking the bait. At which point, being the astute lawyers/hedge funders/mop salesmen they were, they assumed we were gay.
It's because I have short hair, isn't it?
Having spent a long weekend in New Orleans, the city of Unreasonable Expectations, I am somewhat dismayed by the hoards of tourists who invade it year round. On Friday, while bookin' down Bourbon Street at breakneck speed on the back of a bicycle, weaving in and out of traffic and drunken frat boys, the sickly sweet smell of vomit and garbage wafted to my nose and I thought, "This place must suck for the people who live here."
Mainly this revelation harkens back to the night before, when I visited the Bywater with a local friend to see trombone-playing legend Kermit Ruffins. Kermit didn't show, but the drunken tourists did, complete with strings of flashing beads weighting their necks. Even though it is so far out of carnival season it's not even funny, and even though they were hanging around, impaired, in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in N.O. proper. They might as well have had "Mug Me" tattooed on their foreheads, and bulging money clips pinned to their shirts. That, as opposed to wearing carnival beads, would have left some of the mystery.
My friend and I had eaten, danced, and were sitting outside where it was cooler, when we were approached by a couple of lawyers or investment bankers or sumpin'. Of course they were wearing beads, and of course they thought that, because they were in New Orleans, any chick who happened to not be tied down already would go back to their hotel for even more Unreasonable Expectations--even a nice girl like me! Just one precarious step above sex tourism, methinks. I don't know...maybe it was the heat, maybe it was their unattractiveness, maybe it was the way the light glinted off the one man's wedding ring as he tried to stroke my arm with the other hand, but we just weren't taking the bait. At which point, being the astute lawyers/hedge funders/mop salesmen they were, they assumed we were gay.
It's because I have short hair, isn't it?
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Pourquoi? 
