{"id":18949,"date":"2012-10-19T15:07:24","date_gmt":"2012-10-19T14:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/?p=18949"},"modified":"2012-10-19T15:07:24","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T14:07:24","slug":"natalia-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/?p=18949","title":{"rendered":"Natalia Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Mardi Gras<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Mardi Gras carnival provided me with the perfect cover. Anything goes. In amongst the flamboyant costumes of birds of paradise, the wild dancers and the gaudy masks, I stumbled almost mindlessly through the swinging crowd, sweating profusely in my too-thick cardigan, in desperate need of a coffee.<br \/>\nOn second thoughts, maybe caffeine wasn&#8217;t the best idea right now. Maybe something a little more soothing. What do I have to do to get a glass of warm milk in the middle of the day in the middle of the city in the middle of a festival?<br \/>\nThe feeling of magical euphoria had long since evaporated, and bad thoughts and images were lurking at the corners of my subconscious. Not even upbeat latin-jazz fusion could save me now.<br \/>\nThe party-goers and the constant stream of mopeds that had been so charming just a few hours previously were now all transformed into dangerous mechanical menaces or potential muggers. I urged my body to speed up, but my legs wouldn&#8217;t move faster than a snail&#8217;s pace. In fact, it was as though the whole world had slowed to almost a stop; every detail was crystal-clear, and moving objects left a ghost-image trail of their progress behind them.<br \/>\nSomeone was being outrageously sick on the street corner. God, I can&#8217;t deal with an ugly image like that right now. Any other time I&#8217;d be laughing. Faces around me were leering or disapproving, like some nightmarish film sequence. Another over-enthusiastic tourist.<br \/>\nAs long as I could get back to my hotel room in one (psychological) piece, everything would be hunky-dory. Just shut the curtains, watch a bit of <em>The Simpsons<\/em> for a couple of hours, maybe have some pizza, until this shit-storm blows over and I&#8217;ll be as right as rain.<br \/>\nMy companion had long since disappeared, probably having the time of his fucking life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mardi Gras The Mardi Gras carnival provided me with the perfect cover. Anything goes. In amongst the flamboyant costumes of birds of paradise, the wild dancers and the gaudy masks, I stumbled almost mindlessly through the swinging crowd, sweating&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/?p=18949\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18949"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18951,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18949\/revisions\/18951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}