Journey Through the Inner City

I've been needing to visit my bank for awhile now. The nearest one is downtown, about 3 miles from where I live. At first I was just gonna ride my bike, but evidently there's some pretty shady neighborhoods between here and there. Today a lovely girl informed me that there's a shuttle that runs like every half hour between here and the Tulane med school downtown. I checked this shizzle out on Google Earth (the coolest program in the world) and lo and behold, the shuttle stop was only a couple blocks from my bank. Bam!

So I hop on the shuttle, which is a gigantic tour bus. It even says TOUR NEW ORLEANS! in huge letters on the side. Seeing the bus got me in a touristey kind of mood so I whipped out my camera and just started furiously taking pictures out the window. Unfortunately most of them are mostly a reflection of the flash, but a couple turned out okay. There are some ruuude churches around here, I'll have to walk around and get some decent pictures someday.

Anyway, after a short bus ride I got out in the middle of downtown New Orleans. By myself. Chill out, Mom. If I had gotten mugged or beat down or something I probably would have mentioned it in a flash forward earlier in the narrative. So I find the bank and did my bank stuff, then came back to where I remembered the bus stopping. I took a few pictures of the skyscrapers and stuff, but I was mostly concerned with not getting lost and ending up in some dark alley with a couple of crackheads.

Like I said, I got back to where I thought the bus was and sat down on this bench. If you'll look to the picture you'll notice that one of the arms was ripped off and like twisted around by some brute. I saw all kinds of interesting people. A guy was walking down the street rapping to himself about how ... well I can't really reproduce any of his rhymes on a family friendly site like mine. Suffice it to say that he had a high opinion of his fighting and women chasing skills. I noticed a lot of people here smoke cigarettes that smell really sweet and incensey. I don't know if that's a southern thing or what.

While I was sitting around watching people, I see the bus I'm supposed to be on pull up to the curb... 2 blocks down the street. So I jump up and start running. My sudden movement caused a medical student to raise his eyebrows at me. Thanks to my incredible athleticism I managed to dodge several hobos, jump over a park bench, spin around a delivery guy and parkour over a UPS van to get into the bus. It was either that or I just kind of ran down the sidewalk, I'm not sure. It all happened so fast. Anyway I got on the bus and had a safe and sane journey home.