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Review: Escape My Room, New Orleans

9/11/2015

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"PRESS THE BUTTON! DON’T GO THROUGH THAT DOOR! STOP RIGHT THERE!"

A disembodied voice is yelling at us.  We’re not even at the actual thing yet, but Escape My Room is located in a federal building (the Post Office) and if you miss certain signs on the way in, you really annoy the security guards, apparently.

This immediate lack of eagle-eyed-ness does not bode well for our group.

For those of you with even fewer powers of deduction, I’ll spell out for you what we’re doing. Escape My Room is (wait for it) an escape room attraction in downtown New Orleans. Although unique in its design, it is one of thousands of this type of facility, popping up as they are in an urban area near you with impressive regularity.

Escape rooms encompass myriad themes, but share some elements: they are live-action puzzles, whereby players are placed in a locked room and have to navigate a series of clues and tasks to win their escape, usually within a set amount of time.

The security guards thwarted (or pacified, at least), seven of us (you can play this room with 2-7 people) gather in a Victorian parlour replete with curiosities, somewhere between a museum and a rich, elderly hoarder’s house. Costumes are donned from a clothes hamper.

It’s a pleasingly random group formed from a cross-section of friends who don’t really know each other, but have (in my opinion) diverse enough skills to waltz through this, though some hangover levels are worrying. Perhaps the pain will free up a hitherto repressed level of lateral thought? We can only hope.

Our games mistress emerges and tells us more about the world we’re about to enter – the best escape rooms aren’t simply logic problems without context, they involve a narrative universe that gives you more of a sense of purpose. In this case, the meticulous back-story involves a local family, the DeLaportes and a reclusive matriarch.

A few practical rules apply so we don’t wreck the joint, and with that, we’re ushered into the room – even more cluttered and beguiling as the reception area – and given an hour to get out again.

The problem with describing Escape My Room is, of course, that you can’t really describe Escape My Room without revealing huge spoilers. So let’s skirt around the details but try and get a flavour.

First of all, I don’t know how two-person teams who aren’t made up of a civil engineer and a philosophy postgrad with a minor in logic win this game, but they do. As a seven, we’re scattered to the corners of the room, each finding our own threads and some of us flitting between pairs and shouting non-sequiturs like that was any help.

Perhaps pairs just focus more and can more calmly decipher things in order, but we’re scatter-gunning about half a dozen tasks at once. There are decoy trails, clues to be found under and in things, collections of objects to be organised and riddles to be solved.

Voices get raised in good-natured frustration, our mistress nudges us occasionally via an intercom and the rush of euphoria when clues come together and we open a new suitcase or complete a pattern is quite something, especially with the time bearing down on us. There’s a point half way through where we think we’ve actually won in record time, but it’s just moving up a level and there’s much work still to be done.

Throughout, more of the family’s story is revealed as clues are unearthed, and this will stand the company in good stead as they plan to expand into more rooms that add to the universe.

After a particularly frantic last few minutes which include shadows, dancing and a lot of shouting, we somehow sneak under the wire and make it out. You feel pretty good about yourselves, and we agree that the level of difficulty is pitched exactly perfectly between enticingly challenging and rewardingly accessible: nobody wants to waltz out after ten minutes nor do they want to just stare at the first clue, cursing their lack of imagination for an hour.

Delighted, we are snapped for posterity and make our way back down to again confuse ourselves with the post office security doors. I guess sometimes, every room is an escape room if you’re dumb enough. 

ESCAPE MY ROOM WEBSITE_
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Shout to the top

10/6/2015

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The Tennessee Williams Festival takes place in New Orleans every spring, and is a literary celebration of the life of the great writer. It's a nominally academic affair, but culminates in a wonderfully dramatic competition. The Stanley and Stella Shouting Competition has people competing to recreate the famous scene in A Streetcar Named Desire where Stanley Kowalski screams forlornly for Stella to come to him. Marlon Brando gave it his emotional best in the film version. Here's footage of this year's challengers: 
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Free and easy in New Orleans

6/5/2015

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There are cities – yes, you might look shame-faced, New York and London – where it seems like just existing in that geographic space equals financial haemophilia. Money just flows out of you as you stand gawping at the big shapes and shiny colours.  

I’ve lived in London and visited New York enough times to know that these places just effortlessly relieve you of cash. They’re like a wily, sleight-of-hand pickpocket. “Oops! Look at that monument! And I’ll just slip this five pound/dollar note out of your wallet…WHAT? It’s a breathing tax!” 

I think it’s to do with pace and scale – the size of those cities and the speed at which things happen mean that if you’re going to participate in any kind of social life there, on-the-fly decisions constantly have to be made. Cabs suddenly need to be caught, that exhibition looks like a good idea, meals need to be eaten and what am I going to do – NOT order wine, like a CHUMP?  

New Orleans, though – with its manageable size and lolling pace of life – is the perfect breeding ground for free stuff. 

Our main currency is, of course, music. Post-Jazz Fest, those local bands return to their free gigs on Frenchmen Street, and chances are you can buy that upright bass player a beer instead of squinting at them from the depths of the khaki sea. 

The scale of free music is astonishing, from the sweaty dance crevices of BJs Lounge as you haul Monday night ass to King James and the Special Men, to the refined air of the Davenport Lounge as you sip a Martini with an ear cocked to Jeremy Davenport’s beguiling trumpet. Or just walk down Royal Street, where even picking up detergent at Rouses has a street-provided soundtrack. 

Eating is the other constant backdrop to life here, and plates regularly spill over with free food, from the Friday crawfish boils at R Bar to game day buffets at pretty much every neighbourhood pub, locals scooping up the kind of comfort food that the stress of following the Saints usually requires. 

New Orleans isn’t even satisfied with trumping the world’s free parties with Mardi Gras (hush now, Rio, it goes on for weeks here). Festivals push out into the streets every week, celebrating everything from the French Quarter to gumbo, ‘bull’ running to zydeco. Jazz in the Park. Wednesdays at the Square. Every night a dozen places. 

Don’t have money to impress a date? Whisk them around the sculpture park and picnic in the shadow of a Henry Moore, or have Chris Hannah mix you something dynamite at the French 75 Bar (yes, the drinks cost money) and then wander up to the secret Germaine Cazanave Wells Museum. You’re welcome. 

How many free gigs do you think Louis CK – arguably the world’s best comedian– played last year? I suspect that all of them happened in New Orleans over a four-week flurry of excitement that energised the city’s comedy scene. Local comics tear it up for free every single night of the week.  

Parks, mass work-outs, erotic fiction, dance lessons, poetry, yoga, karaoke, swimming, battle re-enactments, brewery tours, social bike rides, horse racing, art, libraries and solid advice from any local you care to ask. You can find it all for free in New Orleans. Save your breathing tax money for a cocktail. They’re usually worth paying for here.
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The newly-updated, second edition of New Orleans For Free - with hundreds of free activities to do in New Orleans - is out now in paperback and on Kindle via Amazon.  
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Krewe de Who? 

21/2/2015

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Mardi Gras happened in New Orleans this week with a suitably reassuring level of predictability, weather that knocked last year's costume-rending Polar Vortex into a cocked hat and ample mountains of Chinese-made, coloured plastic beads for all, whether you showed your boobs or not (spoiler: no-one did). We ourselves did make the funny list of fake participants for your judging pleasure. See: THE TEN MARDI GRAS KREWES YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF. 
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A good town for freaks

13/1/2015

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Just before Christmas, Shandy Pockets sat down with American Horror Story: Freak Show actor Mat Fraser to talk about his love of New Orleans:

If you’ve been watching American Horror Story: Freak Show, you’ll recognise Mat Fraser, the British actor who plays Paul the Illustrated Seal Boy with such relish and élan. Fraser is a long time London resident who now splits his time between the English capital and New York City, where he lives with his wife, the neo-burlesque performer Julie Atlas-Muz.

I’d met Fraser a couple of times at various dens of iniquity around New Orleans, where filming was taking place, and eventually got the chance to chat to him and find out what he made of the city. We’re shooting the breeze in his temporary apartment and I bring up the question of how he’s enjoyed his time here. He leans in, grinning.

“It’s…a very good city for freaks,” he says. Freaks like him and freaks in general -  the layers of satisfaction with this state of affairs are left unsaid, but I get the sense it’s all been working out nicely for him.

“No doubt as people who have lived here a long time will tell you, it’s an extraordinary city,” he says. “I live in New York and London, and they are the best cities to live in for me, but the third place is New Orleans. It has this incredible atmosphere that you really can’t understand or describe unless you’ve been here for some time.”

I tell him I’ve lived here for four years, but have been visiting for 14. When people ask me why I like it so much, I tell them because it’s not like being in America, I say.

“It’s certainly not like living in America,” he says. “It’s like living in a weird bubble. You’ve got all that French and Spanish influence and it’s just crazy with the Creole and the Cajun and everything mixing up and then the free and easy, Big Easy attitude.”

“The fact that, unusually for America, you can walk down the street with booze, for instance. All of those differences make it very special and I’ve utterly fallen in love with its character and I’m as charmed and addicted to the place as anyone.”

Ah, the unconditional love of the first time visitor that I so fonldy remember. I tell him I especially like how you won’t get a Starbucks in the French Quarter and that there won’t ever be a TGI Friday overlooking Jackson Square.

“Yes!” he says. “You don’t have that identikit town look that you get everywhere else. I know Walmart is here, but for the rest of the city, everything just looks completely different to everywhere else. I haven’t seen a Starbucks in months. And it’s great. Why would you need one?”

I’d first seen Fraser at the AllWays Lounge in a show called the Dirty Dime Peep Show. It’s a show that I’m an occasional cast member of – not as one of the edgy neo-burlesque performers that they showcase, but as a pasty white guy telling jokes in between the good stuff. I wondered how he’d hooked up with that crowd.

“Well, I’m part of the international burlesque community and there’s a few people here that I already kind of knew as acquaintances, that I’ve been able to make better friends with,” he says.

“Bella Blue and her Dirty Dime Peep Show is as near to the club that I co-run, Sleaze, back in London. I like the raucous, drunken barroom, political end of burlesque. I like classic burlesque but I do like neo-burlesque more, and it interests me more.”

There’s a lot of burlesque in town, I say. It’s great that the scene can support both the classical scene and more edgy, arty shows like Bella puts on for Dirty Dime.

“My wife Julie is one of the most famous neo-burlesque dancers out there and that’s the kind I’m into,” Fraser says. “That’s why I like the Dirty Dime. And what’s nice about it is that there’s been a kind of marriage of scenes for me. The cast and crew of American Horror Story have been coming down to the show. I know they were recently all psyched that Gerard Butler was at the show but Angela Basset and some of the other stars came along and it’s nice that the two ends of my performance worlds have somehow connected in New Orleans.”

How is it, being locally famous, I wonder? I mean, you’re going to garner a fair amount of attention to begin with because of your appearance, and add to that being one of the stars of a locally-produced TV show. Do you get swamped?

“I’ve been out with some of the more famous stars in the show,” he says. “These are people that are massively famous to everyone here in town. I’ve seen them negotiate fame in terms of drunken tourists coming up to them and telling them that they love them. But I think in general, in New Orleans, everyone is much more laid back about that kind of thing. I’ve had a lot of people coming up to me but they wait until I’m leaving an establishment, not wanting to disturb people.”

Well, that’s polite enough, I say.

“Plus? They ain’t that impressed. And I like that. They’re not bothered.”

So you’ll be coming back?

“I’m already booked for first four weeks in April. I’m going to be doing a big show, co-producing with Bella. And also, you know, my love affair with the Country Club has grown to something quite profound. I think of it as my second home.”

For out-of-towners, this is a casual neighbourhood swimming pool and restaurant that recently – and controversially – had its clothing-optional rule revoked by the city.

“I got some of the good times,” smiles Fraser. “I really hope it gets it clothing-optional status back.”

So do we, Mat. Places like that, after all, are what keep the freaks coming back to New Orleans, and that can only be a good thing.  
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How we used to blog

5/11/2014

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Apologies for Shandy Pockets radio silence, we've been working hard getting ready for our book launch tomorrow for New Orleans Historic Hotels, which, if you're in New Orleans, you should definitely come to!    

To whet your appetite, here's a short excerpt:

In the mid-19th century, peer-review websites were, of course, the stuff of a madman’s dreams, but luckily we have the published diaries of affluent travelers (surely the travel blogs of the day) to give us some insight as to how the older hotels and boarding establishments operated. Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, an English poet and writer, stayed at a hotel called The Verandah in 1849. She  wrote about it in a book which documents her travels in the United States between 1849 and 1850, a book which bears the unswervingly literal title of 'Travels Within the United States During 1849 and 1850'.
  Here’s what Lady Wortley had to report: “We are at a very splendid and comfortable hotel called The Verandah. It reminds me of a Parisian one. The St. Charles is the largest of all the hotels in New Orleans but it is much crowded, and we were recommended to try this, as it is quieter, and thus pleasanter for the ladies.”
  Lady W. goes on to praise the St. Charles at some length, implying that she actually would rather be staying there, then damns the Verandah with faint praise and ends with a complaint about the price: “The attendance at [this hotel] is admirable, and all the arrangements excellent. But the charges are much higher than usual in the States.”
  She then relates a rather tedious story about being harassed by “a little Swede” at dinner (someone from Sweden, not the root vegetable). In any case, she is by and large quite impressed by the place, especially the “airy apartments” as they saved her from “an early termination from these frying- pan temperatures.” She was being dramatic then, of course, but her early termination sadly did come just five years later, when she died of dysentery while traveling in the Ottoman Empire, an unfortunate case of out of the frying pan and onto the pyre.


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New Orleans Historic Hotels

22/10/2014

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As you know, we almost never do lists, but we'll break the rule for a special occasion. To mark the launch of our new book, New Orleans Historic Hotels, here's ten facts you may not know about, well, hotels in New Orleans:

1. The first recognised hotel in NOLA opened in 1799. It was called...drum roll please...The Hotel d'Orleans. Hey guys, we need to name this place something and we open in ten minutes...any ideas?

2. In 1956, Sir Thomas Beecham (at that point the world's most respected classical conductor, essentially he was the Kanye West of classical music conducting) was ejected from the Maison de Ville Hotel by the owner for complaining about the jazz music coming over the wall from the Court of Two Sisters. He should have known better, really.

3. A box containing over a million dollars could be hidden somewhere in the Roosevelt Hotel. As Senator Huey Long lay on his deathbed, Seymour Weiss asked him where something called the ‘Deduct Box’ was, a container containing a vast amount of campaign funds, collected in cash and stored at his Roosevelt Hotel base. “I’ll tell you later, Seymour” said Long, before promptly dying. The box has never been found. Check under the bed next time you're there.

4. The oldest swimming pool in the French Quarter is in the courtyard of the Audubon Cottages on Dauphine Street. Liz Taylor stayed there a lot so she's probably had a dip.

5. Each evening at 10pm, Le Pavillon Hotel serves a complimentary supper feast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to its guests, along with ice-cold milk and hot chocolate. This tradition was started in 1988, when a traveling salesman ordered this very thing at the bar as a symbol of sharing in his daughter’s supper even though she was at home, many miles away. The bartender that night was by chance the general manager of the hotel, and as fellow bar guests began to notice and ordered the same thing, the manager was so touched that he decided to make it a nightly service.

6. Tennessee Williams often claimed he was conceived at the Monteleone Hotel. Truman Capote claimed he was born in the hotel, though the hotel states that he wasn’t and that although his mother lived at the hotel during her pregnancy, she made it safely to the hospital in time for Truman’s birth.

7. Huey Long was a famously divisive character. In June of 1935, the Long camp had allegedly learned from a spy of theirs that a plot to kill Long was being discussed at the Democratic Conference, which was taking place that year at the DeSoto Hotel (now Le Pavillon). The surveillance operation would seem almost comic if it weren’t for the fatal consequences. Long’s aides had planted a staff member of theirs as a hotel insider, setting him up with a job as a desk clerk. This helped them gain access to all the rooms, and they were easily able to smuggle their people into suites neighboring the room where the suspected meeting was to take place. Using a long pole and a recording device, Long’s people snooped on the assassination plot, which they suspected was being hatched by New Orleans mayor Semmes Walmsley, various other high-ranking politicians and Dr. Carl Weiss, Huey Long’s eventual assassin. The hotel was thrust into a controversial limelight as the transcript was made public by Long the next day. Long was shot dead by Carl Weiss in Baton Rouge just thirty-six hours later.

8. The St Charles Hotel - which no longer exists - hosted presidents Taft, McKinley and Roosevelt, and had a dinner service so expensive it was said to be worth over $16,000 when it opened in 1837. Today that would be equivalent to $350,000.

9. Tennessee Williams wrote much of (and completed) A Streetcar Named Desire in Room 9 of the Maison de Ville Hotel.

10. In 2011, the fourth generation of family took over the running of the Monteleone Hotel. It is one of the last family-run grand hotels left in the United States. 
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The wrong side of jazzstory

4/10/2014

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Oh, how New Orleans loves to hate on the hipsters, moving to a city from places and living here with their clothes and their legs like it's the most natural thing in the world. Yet the animosity for their brethren is part of a dance that's as old as time, or at least as old as a 64-year old trombonist, as this newspaper clip proves. It relates the fist use of the word in this city's newspaper of record, as part of the Great Jazz Wars of the 1950s, when progressive jazz musicians took up brass against the be-bop hipster musicians, in a time that historians now call a watershed moment of jazz on jazz violence. Here, Stan Kenton is, perhaps, standing on the wrong side of jazzstory with his stance against be-bop, and name-calling of the "cool, phoney and pseudo" hipsters  - words now reclaimed by hipsters and used freely on the streets of the Bywater.
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Love and Laughter Welcome Here

16/5/2014

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As we build up to our New Orleans special next week, we were thrilled to come across this example of perhaps the most defensive guest policy ever written.

The Historic Creole Lodge in the Marigny is relentlessly specific about what it is, and it doesn't want you as a guest. I mean, it wants you if you're not interested in 'luxuries' such as breakfast.

Their home page, which unfolds in increasingly hysterical language, makes this unmistakably clear (we'll use their bolding, underlining, excessive exclamation marks, etc): "Our area is NOT for modern enthusiasts and we ask you to not book here if you think we are a modern day bed and breakfast because we are NOT!!!!"

Erm, OK.

It seems that the establishment has had a continuous conveyorbelt of guests all expecting modern conveniences. Well, excuse us for turning up but The Creole Lodge has had it with you people and has decided to get mad about it. We'll allow them to state their case with their own brand of Southern charm:

"We welcome all people to our home but beware that you should read before you book a local stay because it may not be what you expect if you are status quo or have an obsessive compulsive disorder and we DO NOT WANT THOSE THOSE UNEDUCATED TRAVELERS STAYING HERE!   Here are 2 recent stories that we want to share with you about uneducated travelers:

1.  We had a teacher to stay here recently who was uneducated about the type of Inn we are and she was distraught because she had high class expectations.  So please read before you book! 

2.  We just had another person stay here who goes by Edward S. who was rude and arrogant and then preceded to degrade us on a travel site.  He "thought" he was staying at a "Bed and Breakfast" but arrived to "no breakfast"!  Needless to say his expectations were not properly aligned.
   Being an educated and informed reader and just reading this site would have saved him from being so disappointed that he wasn't going to get breakfast in bed.......lol  One really has to ask themselves "can anyone get a Bed and Breakfast for $49 a nite especially in New Orleans?"  If you answered yes to this question then do us and yourself a favor and don't even think about booking a stay here!  The owners of this establishment are military field grade officers and Ivy League graduates and we state clearly what type of place the Creole Inn is and the majority of our guests clearly state that also!  All we ask Edward S. is to educate yourself before you tell the public how disappointed you were.  We are here for guests who are nice and want a clean cheaper place to stay and not for arrogant people who have no respect for others."

Yes, 'teacher' (implication: free thinking Communist) and 'Edward S' (occupation unknown but certainly not a military field grade officer), with your unaligned, high class expectations, with your non-Ivy League "thoughts" and access to hotel review websites. FEEL THE WRATH OF THE CREOLE LODGE. We spell NITE however we want.

We especially like: 

The inference of "goes by", like Edward S is the criminal pseudonym of some gentleman con artist who travels the country undermining the hospitality industry.

The tab on the home page that is marked 'Buy Self Help Book' - the link goes nowhere so perhaps it's just a reminder that the owners wrote to themselves.

This glorious message: "If you require the stay of an aristocrat we ask that you kindly stay somewhere else and not with us." Yeah, you aristocrats. With your breakfasts.

The image at the bottom, which simply says: Love and Laughter Welcome Here.

Well, quite.

See it in its full glory.

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An open letter to Miss Carly Ledbetter

14/5/2014

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Yesterday, it came to our attention that one Carly Ledbetter (@ledbettercarly ) had posted in the esteemed Huffington Post, reporting on the world's worst places to holiday, a list that included the Bywater neighbourhood of New Orleans. The list came from a corporate UK gift site with very questionable crime stats attached, but was cheerfully and jokingly presented as news. Read it here if you must. We really tried, but couldn't let the inclusion go unchallenged.

Here, then, is our open letter to fellow travel truth-seeker, Miss Ledbetter.


Dear Carly Ledbetter (and please pass this on to Buyagift.co.uk, it’s clear you have a wonderful working relationship),

Do you like the Beatles?

No, me neither, but I’ve always loved that one quote.

A reporter asks John Lennon, “Is Ringo the best drummer in the world?”

John replies, probably from under a mound of LSD-drenched fur coats and Japanese art students, “He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles.”

The joke here is that Ringo was a terrible drummer. FUNNY, right? That John. What a scamp. No wonder he got shot.

OK, so remedial internet research suggests that exchange NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED, but it’s a convenient mistruth for what I’m about to tell you.

In your recent opus, ’10 Cities That Make For Unpopular Destinations’ (which I liked, even though it was no ‘2D Bags That Make You Look Like A Cartoon’), you endorse a list that puts the Bywater neighbourhood of New Orleans in the top ten worst places to holiday in the world.

Well, to misquote a misquote by John Lennon (and I’m doing a Scouse accent in my head), “Is the Bywater the worst place to holiday in the world? No, Miss Ledbetter, the Bywater isn’t even the worst place to holiday in New Orleans.”

(/Scouse accent)

I know we’re at the end of times and journalism has now been reduced to skimming corporate gift sites who quote phony statistics, and then present them as fake news in hacky lists, the likes of which are now considered ‘source material’ by fine institutions such as the one you work for. 

I’ve worked as a travel journalist since 2000, when we were heartlessly MADE TO GO PLACES and find out things and then write true words down. The internet was driven by steam and selfies took, like, half a day. It was different times.

Now, I’m not saying that the other nine sordid little grief-holes don’t deserve to be on that thrilling list. I have no authority to make a judgement, having not been to any. Apart from Plovdiv, which I found quite charming, although I did stay in the gilded mansion of a mafia boss, so my reference points might be off.

But the other eight. It’s like a graveyard of where the poor go to die (or “live”, I guess you might say). Thank GOD you were joking when you said “Now, we'd like to take you (not literally, of course)” (For me, this is the comedic zenith of the piece, well timed and so piquant!). I agree with you – the thought of going where poor people are “allowed” to live is HILARIOUS.

Like, why would you go to these working class slums where people probably have 2D bags that DON’T make them look like cartoon characters? Losers. I am SO WITH YOU on this.

I’m going to have to pick you up on endorsing the Bywater, though, despite the thorough research you must have done before quoting this list. Just a few oversights, but let’s try and raise the bar, shall we? Neither of us want journalism to become a limbo contest (where the bar gets lower to bad reggae music, IT’S A VISUAL METAPHOR, OF SORTS).

I live near the Bywater and…yeah, your thing? Not so much. They just built a pretty great park there and the cafes sell organic juices and the houses are cute and I haven’t been able to buy weed or coke on a single occasion, despite approaching everyone I suspected of not being able to afford a smart phone.

Solange Knowles (even though she is a violent psychopath and probably contributing to those very crime stats – tell buyagift.co.uk to update their numbers) lives there, as does half of Brooklyn, and not the half that knifes people for loose change, the ones that own tall bikes that run on kale.

 (On an incidental note, we totally have kale, despite newspaper reports to the contrary – man, can NO-ONE get the Bywater right? It doesn’t have kale! It’s like a South African township! I wrote a satirical poem on this very subject, it’s called Kale-less Whisper and it’s actually quite cutting).

I feel this is a serious lapse in an otherwise flawless article.

As a graduate of Eton, I would expect much more from you.

Oh wait, it’s Elon. I don’t know that one but it sounds important. As you were. Man, I need to start introducing myself by saying which university I went to in the first line. People must LOVE IT. Not poor people in these slums, obviously. Real people.

Yours, in solidarity, in truth, in travel,

Paul

WIN A GREAT NEW ORLEANS DRINKING GUIDE (DON'T WORRY, FRENCH QUARTER ONLY)

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