New Orleans

Sunday morning, we got up about 7 or so, & the four of us went to Cafe du Monde for breakfast. They serve huge, monstrous beignets, with about a cup of powdered sugar on them. We all knocked off the majority of it onto our plates. Even at the Cafe, there was evidence of lack of staffing. A help wanted sign on the door, and the outside area, which was normally open much earlier, still had the chairs up on the tables, which gave Master enough pause to ask if the place was even open. We'd taken a cab there (Master wanted to get there in a hurry), but walked the few block back to the hotel. He pointed out the park across the street, which i've forgotten the name of. We took a peek into the House of Voodoo, and The Dungeon on the way back to the hotel. Master'd wanted to go to the Dungeon the previous night, but it didn't happen. There was a sign on one shop door that Master took a picture of...('Come Hell or High Water picture')

After catching a couple more hours of sleep, we checked out of the hotel. Master wanted to show us UNO to see the campus. We took a couple wrong turns, as it'd been so long since he'd been there. Even though it was raining heavily, you could tell it was a nice campus. Though the buildings didn't seem damaged, there were still cars in some of the parking lots, left since the storm, many of them with windows or trunks open.

When we were done at the University, we drove around the city for a while, looking at the different neighborhoods. It's been nine months and the whole city is still affected by Katrina. Everywhere, there were downed trees, still leaning into the houses or buildings they'd fallen into. Grass and weeds growing wild in the yards, often over-growing the sidewalks & driveways. Whole blocks of houses gutted, even a church and a couple strip malls gutted. Apartment buildings, as well. In many areas the water-line was still clearly visible on the buildings, leaving marks about nine feet up where it'd peaked. In one tree there were large pieces of roofing still hanging from the branches. Most of the street signs had been blown off, so we didn't even know what streets we were on. Any number of windows and doors broken. Whole neighborhoods with o signs of life, no pets, no cars, just empty.

On so many houses, the signs spray-painted onto them by the National Guard were still there, marking the day they'd gotten to the house, but we couldn't tell what the initials with them meant. MO seemed to mean dead, but there was SP, M, O. Shayla has no idea what they'd meant. Occasionally more details would be given; 'dead dog' painted on one garage, 'attic' on another home. EV seemed to be Evacuated. There were an awful lot of FEMA trailers, all plain white. They seemed lonely, parked in the lawns of houses that were still badly damaged. Many places still didn't have electricity.

Master said that the neighborhoods that we'd gone through hadn't been poor, but well-off. In some places we could see that people had really been working to get things back in order. A man mowing a lawn, piles of debris from the storm by curbs, waiting to be picked up, many houses with no more trace of the water-lines on them. One block, all the houses had been put back into reasonable order, with the exception of one. It hadn't been touched. And a piece of plywood had been set up against a tree in the yard. "This is the only house on the block that isn't cleaned up", and then something about the owner needing to get busy. And underneath it, another piece of wood with 'owner dead' painted upon it. The house itself had 'tear me down, rat-hole' painted upon the side.

We went through one of the major parks in the city. Same as so many other areas, it was over-grown. Brown grass and weeds growing tall and moving onto the pavement. Few signs. Master said that normally that park was kept immaculate. In it was a 'relief camp', full of trailers and tents, people whose homes had been damaged.

Even the areas under the freeway overpasses were full of cars, all of them had been covered by the water. They all had a thick, grayish film over them from the debris and sediments they had soaked in.

Going back to the downtown area we went through one of the older neighborhoods, one that was on higher ground. One of the richer neighborhoods, the houses were huge, many of them three stories. Most of them had little to no sign of damage, just as though nothing happened. On many of the trees along the road were Mardi Gras beads, some having been there for so long that moss and branches had grown around them.

Something that really struck shayla was the sense of age the whole city had. It's a beautiful city, even the parts that aren't all that pretty. We can deny it all we want, but people are always going to be a part of nature, subject to the same order and effects as anything else. It's really given shayla a new respect for nature and its forces.

shayla