The NOLA Trip: Leaving Potomac

Okay. Before I start getting into the craziness of New Orleans, I guess I should outline how we got there.

To be perfectly honest, I’m no longer certain whose idea it was to make New Orleans our destination. Andy and I had been talking for some time about making a road trip, possibly in order to celebrate our first year of legal drinking.

The usual places were brought up and quickly dismissed. New York’s too familiar. Vancouver’s too cold. San Francisco’s too far. Las Vegas is too tacky. And then somebody brought up New Orleans. The food, man. Bourbon street jazz. Cemeteries and voodoo and streetcars and liquor. Man oh man.

Being trapped as I was in the urban hell of Seoul during the planning stages of the trip, I guess I may be forgiven for spending such a ridiculous amount of time researching restaurants and bars and jazz clubs.

As it happened, I just barely made it to the States in time. I was on a waiting list for a program in which volunteers escort infant orphans to adoptive parents abroad. My flight came through just in time, and I made it to Dulles International only the day before our trip.

Man what a trip that was. 23 hours in Northworst Airline purgatory, clutching a baby who had just starting getting her teeth.

The day of, I woke up at 6 in the morning, partly because of the jet lag, but mostly because of the intense excitement. I was a bit dismayed to find that my back was hurting pretty severely because of the combined effects of the flight and a little problem I was having with spinal disc pressure. I took a handful of Tylenol, showered luxuriously, and started to pack, a rather ridiculous process of pulling things from my suitcase and stuffing them back into a smaller travel case.

Later in the morning, Andy and Mahmood arrived. Man oh man. I hadn’t seen them in months. It’s been pointed out countless times by better writers than yours truly, but there really is nothing like seeing old friends. I was grinning like a maniac when I opened the door for them.

I’ve probably written something about this before, but Andy and Mahmood, at first glance, are just too perfect. You could have picked them out of a movie or varying fashion magazines.

Andy, in his disheveled goofiness, was and still is an embodiment of apple-pie Americanism, in its most positive sense. I’m talking about the kind of quality that Abercrombie and Fitch try so desperately and artificially to convey. In high school, I once commented on his love of Rage Against the Machine: "What possible reason could you have to rage against the machine?" A friend standing next to us agreed. "Andy, you're the poster boy for the machine. You're what the machine wants everyone to be."

"Shut up," said Andy.

Mahmood, as anyone who knows him will testify, looks precisely like the intelligent law/history student who you just know will end up with an internship at the Heritage Foundation, accompanied by a great deal of admiration disguised as disgusted mockery from his ‘liberal’ friends (And for the record, yes, he did end up with an internship at the Heritage Foundation).

We sat down for some breakfast and respective sections of the Washington Post. Then we finally piled into the car with luggage and fresh banana brownies (courtesy of my sister). Giggling like schoolgirls we drove off to pick up Lauro.

We found him in front of his dentist’s office, impeccably well-dressed and well-groomed. I would soon find that Lauro always appears this way. On multiple occasions, we would wake up bleary-eyed and puffy-faced with hangovers of the most shit-faced variety, only to find Lauro looking more or less perfect. You’d think he dry cleaned and ironed his t-shirt and boxers in his sleep.

I hadn’t met Lauro before the first day of our trip, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that we hit it off more or less immediately. I didn’t give this much thought at the time, but in retrospect, it was extremely lucky. You can start bitching and sniping at your best friend after only a day together, so a week-long road trip with a complete stranger would have been excruciating. Fortunately, Lauro and I were strangers for maybe all of two minutes.

The four of us first drove to a Starbucks for some much-needed caffeine. One of the million things I love about the States is the huge serving sizes of coffee. Believe it or not, Starbucks in Korea serves three sizes: short, tall, and grande. So it was, pathetic as it may sound, a minor thrill for me when we walked out with a wealth of coffee in venti cups.

That’s when the trip really began, I guess. We got onto the freeway pretty quickly, and I popped in one the many CDs I had burned for the trip, with songs organized by category, ie Speeding Ticket Rock, Acoustic, Chill, Martini Lounge, Frat Party, W Party, GQ Rock etc. I’m such a male Bridget Jones it’s really kind of disgusting.

It was a beautiful winter day, the kind where the sun is out and the sky looks really high, and the cold outside is really just a great foil to the warmth inside the car. It was, I think, a pretty good preview of all the great things to come.

We were sipping strong coffee, there wasn’t too much traffic on 495, and Buena Vista Social Club was playing on the stereo.



More later.