Until I came to New Orleans, I'd pretty much thought that there wasn't anything very funny that could happen to me in the U.S.

The first day was pretty pleasant. We arrived late. Our hotel room was at the St. Marie Hotel - we were able to get a giant suite with a lovely wrought iron balcony overlooking a quiet side street. Bourbon street was within view.

The second day started off great. We did a walking tour of the French quarter with the National Park Service (highly recommended - Ranger Danny Forbis was great, very knowledgeable).

After that we had a nice lunch and ran to meet up with a "Cemetery and Voodoo" tour with Historic New Orleans. We'd been reading in our 2001 guidebooks that the St. Louis cemetery should be visited only with a tour group because of problems with crime AND because the said tour company would provide some interesting background on the art and denizens of the cemetery. However, this tour was so crummy I'd recommend that anyone else save $30 and just buy a five dollar guidebook at the Nat'l Park visitor center in the city and be your own tour guid. Basically, the tour involved spending a total of 15 minutes in the cemetery. Very, very rushed. Barely enough time to take any photos. Our "guide" chose to spend the rest of the "tour" explaining jazz and touring some boring church. The voodoo part of the tour was dropping us off at a Voodoo cultural center.

Ah, the Voodoo Cultural Center and Priestess Miriam. Our tour guide hastily brought us into the teeny store and then said goodbye. Miriam came out and said some incoherent things and led us to a back room. I ended up sitting right next to her. She rambled on about something for 5 minutes before turning to me and saying "Did you understand what I was saying?". I answered her honestly - No, I was looking around the room and not listening. This started off another 5 minute rambling on about how the source of all problems is not paying attention.

She quieted down and then turned to me again - "What is your nationality".

"American".

"No, your nationality. You look Asian, maybe Jewish".

OK, she caught me. "My mother is Japanese"

She then picked up some weird plastic dragon toy (Jason later told me it was a Gozilla enemy called Ghidra") and pretended to attack me with it. "It's Ghidra, I have 22 of these"