Today is my first day in New Orleans. Until 2005, the city was probably best known as a party town, a place where people drank in the streets and anything went. After Katrina, the city was probably known mostly as a flood zone. The reality is now somewhere in between. The oldest neighborhoods, the ones that tourists mostly stick to, were above sea level and have mostly recovered. The newer, and poorer, neighborhoods were below sea level, and are still far from normal. New Orleans is a vital place, a mixture of French, Spanish, Caribbean, and Anglo cultures seen nowhere else on earth. I couldn’t do this trip and miss it. Thanks to other events on the schedule, I ended up having to see it as one concentrated blitz. I didn’t mind much, because I figured
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