Thursday night

As Mike had a super tasty apple martini at Chartres House before, we figured we could kick off the festivities there. Mike got himself a chocolate martini and I got a coconutty flavored thing that wound up being on the house as they seemed to have run out of the main ingredient. We watched Bush at the republican convention mouthing promises as we drank, as well as keeping abreast of our friend hurricane frances.

Our bartender was named Tim, and was a friendly guy who we seemed to amuse. After the first round, we had a second one of martinis, this time I got a velvet one - which was raspberry flavored and WHEW was it strong. We ordered up some dessert as well. I had a nice helping of pecan pie which in now way was able to absorb the amount of alcohol intake. At some point, Mike ordered a beer, though I don't quite remember when because I was having such a good time.

At one point, there was a brief moment of terror as a large roach waddled across the bar rail, causing me to scream and jump out of my chair. Another patron flicked it back, and eventually I believe it did get its just desserts at the hands of our bartender.

Large roaches, while severely disgusting, are a common thing in NOLA. And it doesn't seem to matter how clean something is, the little bastards are hungry. However, they are easier to deal with than say, scorpions, which are also native, as well as black widows. Fortunately, geckos are local and cute, so when I someday move there, I hope to have a gecko infestation instead.

Anyhow, I was more drunk and amused than disgusted, as were most people who were spending time in New Orleans. One roach was not going to bother me.

We lingered for quite some time, then decided to head on in search for more liquids. We avoided Bourbon entirely, as it's truly the last place I wanted to be while drunk, although it takes a few drinks to be able to deal with that street anyhow. We had taken note of the waves of gay biys arriving, the rainbow balloon arch, the blaring dance music, and the usual bourbon street fare earlier on in the night - complete with annoying locals who try to pick on the stupider tourists with really lame...jokes, I guess you could say and hassle you for money. I had someone ask me if I was a vampire and if I bit him would he live 1000 years. My answer was no. Granted I was wearing a lot of black, but I was not particularly goth or vampiric looking enough to warrant such silly questions.

Anyhow...we wandered down decatur to continue drinking. Coop's was fuller than we liked, so we settled ourselves down at the bar of the Whirling Dervish where we'd danced the previous night. The music was good although we weren't going to be dancing - it was alterna dancey stuff and they played stuff including underworld. We ordered some ciders and decided to pay attention to the weird movies that were playing on the TV. It was an evening of monkeys, as both flicks we saw were involving actors in bad monkey suits. We watched DITA is Distress. Basically a 50's style bondage flick, shot in black and white, with our heroine in an Amelia Earhartt like problem of her plane crashing. The native find her, and tie her up. She writhes for about 10 minutes, looking cute. Then they untie her and she gets kidnapped by a monkey, who ties her up again and vacates- except that now, much of her clothing has disappeared.

She writhes around for ten more minutes. Yeehah. Then she somehow escapes and gets caught by a mad scientist who wants to turn her into a woman with a gorilla head. How sexy. So guess what, she's tied up again, naked this time. The doctor leaves her unattended for 10 minutes so she can writhe around for our amusement.

I definitely needed another cider after that. The other movie we saw was something involving a bear fighting a white gorilla who could talk? or something, and two stupid humans wearing white, so they must have been good.

Basically, Mike and I just got silly drunk and made fun of the movies the whole night. At one point I got up to use the bathroom after realizing my fingers smelled like Bourbon Street, which is not a good thing. I had no idea how that had happened, when Mike told me that it was from me touching the actual bar. Ewww.

I had gotten halfway through my second cider when I realized that I had reached my limit. I let Mike finish it, and we stumbled happily back through the quarter. I had been drinking water all night with my liquid joy, so I was still in a good place, but feeling tired and waterlogged. We didn't stay out as late as we could have, but it was late enough as we were gonna need to sleep off all the fun we'd just had.

We got back to our icy hotel, drank some water and turned in for the night. We slept until almost noon the next day.

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Side story - earlier in the week, we had dessert at Cafe DuMonde one evening, as beignet and milk had sounded good. After sugaring up we passed by the sidewalk astronomy guy who frequently sets his large telescopes up outside DuMonde. He takes donations depending on what you want to see. Apparently, if you ask he will give you a tour of the sky. The moon had just been full and was barely starting to wane, so he gave me a great view of the moon I had always wanted to see. I could craters and seas, and even a large view of it. He also showed us stars that were so far away it had taken 64 years for their light to reach us. the star guy is always a fascinating fellow to visit.