New Orleans

I made it into New Orleans on a friday evening excited to see the historic French quarter and get a feel for how the city has bounced back after Katrina (conclusion: mixed results. more on that later). I parked in a less crowded area of downtown and tried to navigate to the Mississippi/French quarter and ended up walking a half hour the wrong way before figuring it out. So after about 90 min. I made it to that area - live music filling the streets, bars and restaurants everywhere, and general revelry. I walked around more, got a drink and listened to some live jazz, and ate some overpriced street food. I didn't know where the night was going to take me - I had been trying to reach my college friend David Sugg who has a teaching job in New Orleans, but he had been busy with work and I'd been out of cell service in the bayou, so we hadn't yet connected. I would usually just hit the highway and pull off and sleep in the car at a trucker stop somewhere, but it was just too stinking hot and humid to do that, but motels aren't really in my budget. So as the night was getting long, I was walking back to my car and wondering where to go, and lo and behold Sugg calls. So it was easy going from there - we met up, got my car parked by his apartment, and then it was round two out on the town. We walked allll the way across a portion of the downtown (a couple of hours walking), checking out different nightlife neighborhoods. We found our way back to Sugg's apartment via trolley car at dawn. I'm not sure what exactly I was thinking - I was up for about 24 hrs. straight. But hey, I certainly got a feel for downtown New Orleans.

Sugg's place, and below, part of the lower 9th ward - Sugg took me on a driving tour of both the recovered and not-so-recovered areas of the city. Five years later, lots of condemned houses still stand waiting to be torn down, next to houses that have been rebuilt (or people simply painted over the Katrina "X" on the front implying that it was condemned) and re-inhabited. It was hard to imagine that the streets we were driving down had once been under 12+ ft. of water. Also, the day before when I had first walked to the French quarter, I just happened to walk by the fenced-off, abandoned Charity Hospital. I didn't connect at the time this particular building to the infamous news reports following Katrina, but I had a feeling, which Sugg later confirmed. A sad chapter in our country's history. Speaking of Sugg, he is a teacher at a high school in New Orleans. When he was grading a stack of his students' essays while I was visiting, he showed me one that was immediately burned into my memory. It was written by a ninth grader with terrible grammar and little command of punctuation (if I didn't know beforehand I might have guessed it was by an elementary-schooler) who explained why he loved football (main reason: it kept him off the streets). Maybe I was just projecting onto the essay what I expected to see, but I thought that the half-page of partially legible writing said volumes about the world he's growing up in.

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So, maybe this chapter on my time in New Orleans comes across as a little hypocritical or immature - presuming that I got a taste for the difficulties that city has and continues to face, while spending part of my time out on the town. But I instead think that we celebrated some of the culture that makes New Orleans great, giving local businesses some tourism dollars in the process, and I now find myself rooting for the people making it happen there rather than just feeling sorry for them.