Lost

New Orleans isn’t always the easiest city to get around. Normal directions don’t make as much sense, since it’s shaped like a crescent, so we tend to rely on directions like “Uptown, downtown, lake, and river” instead. Once you get used to it, it’s not so bad, but occasionally, a little confusion may linger, as evidenced by this encounter with a friend last week:

I call a friend (let’s call her PPN) on my cell phone while driving home, knowing she’s close to my house: Hey, what’s up?
PPN: Hey! I’m about two minutes away from your house right now.
Me: Me too, I’ll see you there.

Several minutes later my phone rings again...
PPN: Hey, umm, did you happen to see my car when you were driving home? I can’t find it. And I’m freezing.
Me: No…where are you?
PPN: Pauger and Dauphine?
Me: I don’t think I know where that is. I mean, I know where it is, but I can’t picture it.
PPN: Okay, how about Dauphine and Royal?
Me: I thought they ran parallel to each other.
…After a couple more tries, I ask if she wants me to come get her and help her find her car, which she does. One wrong turn later, I find PPN and we start driving around, slowly, looking for her car...

PPN: I think I’m across Esplanade. I don’t get it; it only took me a minute to get to the restaurant.
Me: These streets are confusing. They all mesh together and it’s like parking in the Bermuda Triangle (it’s actually the Marigny triangle, but seriously, just as confusing).
…We drive across Esplanade and are now in the Quarter, which I seem to remember as a grid…

Me: Wait a second, where did our street go? Seriously, it was supposed to be right here.
PPN: I think I parked on the next one up.
Me: You parked on Bourbon?
PPN: I don’t know, I think they started merging at some point.
Me: Wait, the streets don’t merge over here, they merge over on that side.
PPN (pointing): Isn’t Uptown that way?
Me (also pointing): No, it’s that way. (Both of us start laughing, since we’ve just spent ten minutes driving around trying to find a car in the wrong neighborhood.)

We finally find the car, after driving down a few more streets, with my friend hanging her arm out of the window repeatedly hitting her alarm button. It's a little embarassing, really, since I actually live all of one minute away from the spot where we eventually found her car. Seriously though, can I help it if the street I'm looking for keeps disappearing?