New Orleans Jazz Festival Fun

Last Tuesday my boss and I went down to New Orleans to help set up and work at our tent at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. We left Tuesday around noon and arrived in New Orleans around 5 central time. L had bought me a 10 dollar margarita at Chili's while waiting at the airport and it went right to my head. The plane ride down was not fun.
Tuesday night I went with my boss and two co-workers to a seafood restaurant down the street from our hotel. I am not a seafood fan but I told them that I can always find something else to eat. I had a hamburger while I watched the other three eat crawfish and suck the heads. It was gross!
Wednesday we went out to the fairgrounds which is where the festival is being held. Our tent is huge, and we had a lot of product to fill it. At this point in the week we were supposed to have flooring, lights, and fixtures. The flooring was in, but the fixtures were not quite done and we had no lights, so we were already behind schedule.
We spent the entire day working our asses off. There were only about 10 of us, 5 temps that were hired never showed up. I left that night around 9 pm and felt like I was 80 years old. About 8 of us went out to dinner to another seafood restaurant where I had another margarita and passed out at the table.
Thursday was even worse than Wednesday, we worked very hard physically for about 15 hours. When we got back to the hotel I went right to bed even though I was sweaty and dirty. I made sure to have the maids change the sheets on the bed the next day, it wasn't a pretty sight.
Friday was the first day of the festival. We were still not completely ready. Got there at 8 am and had three hours to do whatever we could to look ready. Things were still not in order. It was not fun trying to help guests (customers for the non-retail people out there) find product that had no rhyme or reason to its placement.
Saturday was a bit better, L told me that for all my hard work that I could take an extra day off this week. (Really, it's not that generous, I had just racked up about 20 hours of comp time by Saturday night and don't really need permission to use it, but whatev.) I took a couple of hours and walked around the festival grounds ate some of the local fare (I did not try the cheesy crawfish bread everyone was raving about) and listened to some music.
I have a completely new appreciation for cajun/zydeco music, as well as jazz. The band Calexico was there. That was pretty cool, they have 3 or 4 songs on the Happy Endings soundtrack, so I had heard them before. (Great movie btw, I've got one of the songs Maggie G. sang on my page right now)
Sunday was a very short day. L and I went to the French Quarter for breakfast at Croissant d'Or (didn't want to go to Cafe du Monde) and showed up at the tent around 11. We were leaving for the airport at 1:30, so we did a little bit of work but mostly walked around the festival.
All in all it was a great trip. I got a nice tan :), ate at two AMAZING restaurants (Brennan's and the Commander's Palace) where my two meals alone cost more than I spend in 3 weeks on groceries.
I met some very cool people that work out of our Nashville's stores as well as some temps that we had hired just for this event. I missed going out with them to Bourbon St. on Saturday because I was at the very shee-shee (not sure how you spell that saying, but you get the drift) restaurant with our VP. I was pretty sad about missing out on that fun, but when I got to work on Tuesday I found out that they are sending us back this weekend! So I will definitely be spending one night getting completely plotzed on Bourbon St. I hope I make it back home on Tuesday, my flight leaves at 8 am!