We took our nice, paved sidewalks for granted. We didn’t realize how fortunate we were until we moved to New Orleans.

Good words of wisdom from @GreyPerkins, who blogs on NOLAmusings.com (full post):

A few days after we arrived from Virginia, I started tripping on Uptown sidewalks. My Birkenstock-clad toes were bloodied, bruised, and – in one particularly memorable pedestrian disaster – broken. I tumbled over cliffs on St. Charles, root mass eruptions on Magazine, and even recently paved and deceptively well-maintained stretches of Napoleon.

Now, I’m no athlete, but I’m a fairly sturdy and capable pedestrian. Why, then, was I making toe hamburger just walking around town? Simple.

I was never looking down.

We’ve been here three months, and I still do the tourist shuffle: head tilted up, eyes wide, mouth slightly open in wonder, iPhone in hand ready to snap pictures. There’s something new around each corner, a shifting kaleidoscope of beauty, diversity, rot, and mystery. Every live oak drapes fingers over something else I haven’t seen. And that’s just it. There’s always something I haven’t seen.

So I’ve switched to closed-toe shoes. I skip the sidewalks on the smaller roads and walk on the street, like the locals do. And I try to stay out of traffic when I stop and gawk – but sometimes it’s difficult.

Grey moved to New Orleans last year and has been blogging about her experience. She’s got a funny little story about her tourist interaction on the streetcar.

Read her blog, NOLA Musings, here.