A little bit of everything.
Bourbon Street...
is gross. One walk through was enough. Luckily it had rained heavily so a lot of the stench was washed away. It was pretty exciting at night but not really somewhere that is enjoyed soberly. Every step we took someone would be in our face trying to get us to go into their dirty bar. Because their dirty bar is so much better than the dirty bar right next to it, across the street, upstairs, etc. They would whistle at us with referee whistles, push us towards their bars, and give us passes to go on the balcony. I felt like I was part of that Dave Chappelle skit when he walks through the internet and is accosted by "pop-ups." I kinda wanted to do what he then did, punch all the pop ups and yell "POP UP BLOCKER BITCH" but I didn't. Regrets.
Frenchmen Street...
is where you should go if you ever visit here. Live local music. There is a lot going on but it is chill at the same time. We went to the Three muses and the spotted cat. Both of which had great music... a cajun blues style. People were dancing. This one guy was doing the deliverance feet shuffle (from the dueling banjos scene... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tqxzWdKKu8). I loved it, Carla loved it, Julie was tired but still enjoyed it because that's the kind of atmosphere it was.
Katrina...
6 years later... The storm would come up in conversation at some point every day. The Fausts live near the big lake and although the levees there did not breach, the breach on the 17th street canal affected them as well. When the call for evacuation was given they left their house and went to Dr. Faust's hospital, where they were stranded. They paid a man to take them out of the flooded area in the bed of his pick up truck. While on the back of the truck, people were angrily yelling at them, "NO SPECIAL TREATMENT!" Alex had to go to a high school in Dallas for a semester which made getting recruited for tennis very difficult. But lucky for them, their house only had about 6 inches of flooding. They told us stories of people looting in their neighborhood and they described the massive piles of debris with everything from tree branches, to clothes, to refrigerators with month old spoiled food inside. There is still no recycling service, many houses have not been taken down and are simply rotting in place, and there is constant work on the levees. There were even still articles in the local paper about incidents that happened during the storm.
Lower ninth ward...
Had a lot of new "green" homes with solar panel roof tops. They were really nice actually and the coolest part was that each one was very unique. None of them were traditional architecture. There were still a lot of steps leading up to empty lots where homes once stood.
The roads...
Have soooooo many pot holes. It made driving actually kinda fun, like a game because the thing about New Orleans, which I like, is that you could be on a road with really nice high end homes and then walk a block to a parallel road and be in a bad area of town lined with dilapidated homes so when driving through pot holes the last thing we wanted was to get a flat tire on a bad block.
Other...
I played some golf. Shot my career low a 61!!!! Ok. par was only 62. But still...
We walked through the garden district. well the lower end part of it cause we didn't actually see any big homes. Just lots of porch sittin.
Next stop: Houston.
No comments:
Post a Comment