New Orleans....amazing city

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DAY 22
Scott woke me up at 11.30am so we could get ready for our City Tour of New Orleans, he’d been up a few hours already as he had a few less drinks than us the night before. We headed down for some lunch downstairs before waiting for our pickup. Bus arrived a little late, just after 2pm and after a few more hotel picks we started the tour. We went through the French quarter, garden district, business district, warehouse district, St Louis II cemetery, City Park and the 9th ward where the worst Levee broke during hurricane Katrina. The tour guide was really good and gave us lots of interesting information along the way. One of the funny stories was that all buildings in New Orleans can’t really be built above 55 stories tall as they need to drill down pylons like 70 feet under ground until they hit rock to support it. Donald Trump had planned to build a 76 story building in the cbd but since Katrina it has been put on hold. Our guide said that if it goes ahead it may be known as the leaning tower of trump! We saw a lot of museums and art galleries in the warehouse district and had a lot of statues pointed out to us. Another interesting thing, is that as we knew New Orleans was build on Swamp land, and as a result there is a whole area where the city sits below sea level - therefore when it floods, the water doesn’t flow back out to sea or the river, it needs to be pumped out as it just sits there. The city has a whole series of levee walls build around it to try and stop the flooding. One of the main areas that didn’t flood during Katrina was the French Quarter as it is build on the highest ground in New Orleans. In the garden district, we saw a lot of beautiful old houses - including one owned by Anne Rice and some famous Saints football player. We also got told that despite their being a casino in New Orleans and slot machines everywhere, that gambling is actually illegal in Louisiana. The way they get around that is by calling it gaming rather than gambling and they can have their casino!
Next stop was St Louis III Cemetery where all of the bodies are buried above ground in tombs. Many people are buried in family plots. The way they do it, is that when someone dies the casket is placed in the tomb on the top shelf where it is sealed up and shut for 1 year and 1 day out of respect and to allow time for it to decay. After that time, they open up the tomb, remove the casket, scatter the bones at the bottom of the tomb ready for the next family member to die. The coffin is then discarded as they can’t be used twice. If a family member dies before 1 year and 1 day, their coffin needs to be placed in a “holding area” until that time is up as the tombs don’t fit 2 coffins in them at a time. All of the cemeteries in New Orleans are above ground, as during the early days they did bury people 6 feet under, and by the river. As the soil is so soft, when there was flooding they had coffins floating down the river! Any cemeteries that do bury people, now need to have a plaque on the coffin with what cemetery it is from and who is buried in it. The also have to have concrete placed on top of them to keep it down.
We then went to City Park, which is the 3rd biggest park in the country - bigger than central park even. It has 4 golf courses, tennis courts, sculpture park, lakes and its huge!! We only stopped there for about 20min but it was beautiful. We saw some Canadian geese and also a Nutria which is basically a water rat. It was sitting by the banks of the lake, and just after we got some photos it swam back in the lake making a path through all the gunk! I saw a squirrel too, but Scott didn’t.
From here, we started to make our way to the 9th ward which was the worst hit area for flooding when Katrina hit. As we were driving around our guide was letting us know how many feet of water each area was under. When the hurricane had passed through New Orleans more than 80% of the city was under water. It was interesting to see that so many places on main roads still had the writing on them that was left in spray paint by the search agencies. Not sure if i managed to get any photos of them, but generally they had drawn a cross on each house they searched - on the left of the cross was the agency that searched the house, the top of the cross was the date searched, the right of the cross was either a number which corresponded to the number of dead found or NE which meant not entered. We drove across some of the canals, industrial channels and drainage channels that flooded and broke their levees and also saw the pumping stations that failed. The levee walls around the 9th ward have been rebuilt and made 3 feet taller and stronger than their predecessors which were only 10 feet tall. The main cause of the flooding in the 9th ward was due to the concrete levee wall breaking, which is right behind this community. The thing that i had to keep remembering was that it is 5 years on from Katrina, and there are so many families who have not returned and who have not rebuilt. There were many houses we drove past that had collapsed or were in the process of collapsing. The fire department puts signs out the front of those houses that are on the verge of collapsing - a cross if it is going to collapse and 1 diagonal line if the floor is unsafe to stand on. This helps them to know which houses are safe to enter. In New Orleans there are about 10,000 houses that are waiting to be demolished. When we entered the 9th ward, there is a monument out the front on the corner of the intersection, which shows how high the water got to at various points throughout the hurricane and the height of which most houses were. It is a pretty easy visual to see how bad the houses would have flooded. Brad Pitt has apparently done a lot of work in working with families and architects to rebuild energy efficient houses that are built to withstand floods. Most houses are built up on stilts, with escape hatches in the roof so people can climb up in case of flood. Some of the houses are built so that if it floods again the houses won’t get swept away down the street, but rock back and forth on concrete. Our guide pointed out about a dozen or more houses that Brad Pitt helped rebuild and he also works with the families to try and secure 0% mortgages. There are still a lot of vacant blocks that are covered with weeds with the only thing remaining of the houses that were on them being the concrete steps to the door. Some of the houses that have been rebuilt, have left the steps there as a memory of what once was. When we left 9th ward, we drove back over the bridge and saw the water behind the 9th ward. On the water, was a few barges. The guide pointed out that when the levee broke one of these barges ended up in the 9th ward demolishing houses and ended up resting on top of a school bus - just horrific to think of.
This was the end of our tour, and we then got dropped off at the French Market. We walked through it and checked out some shops along the way. Didn’t buy anything, but had fun looking. After a quick stop in our room, we met Colin and Shona downstairs to go out for dinner. We ended up just outside Jacksons Square at a place called Muriels bistro. This was the first place where i actually found some vegetarian food that wasn’t deep fried or a salad! They also served regular serving sizes not massive amounts! We ended up all having entree and main and shared a desert. I had wild mushroom spring rolls with dipping sauce for entree (Americans call this an Appetizer). For main i had a roast veggie stack (Americans call this entree) and for dessert i shared a chocolate brownie with peanut butter gelati with Scott. It was all delicious. We washed it down with a nice bottle of red and a cocktail to start.
After dinner we headed down to Bourbon Street for a last beer before we had to leave New Orleans. We were trying to find another place that played some good blues/jazz music but on a Friday night this was proving a little harder as most places had rock/pop as it is probably one of their busiest nights of the week. We ended up back at the House of Blues where we had been the night before. There was a different band there but they were just as good as the band from the previous day. We all got some drinks and watched them play. They had guest singers that came up and sang a few songs each. It was nice to see one guest singer was female and she sang some good songs too. After 2 beers and the band going on a break we had to call it a night as Scott and I were headed out of New Orleans in the morning. We got back to the hotel and called it a night at about 11.30pm. It would have been very easy to make it another big one - but as we were driving the next day couldn’t do it. That said, it was nice to have a good meal, good wine, good company and good music.

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Comments

[Mum]

New Orleans is amazing
Chocolate brownie with peanut butter gelati!!!! Could only be America. I knew the peanut butter would keep recurring!!! New Orleans is quite amazing. What an absolute disaster area still. Wonder if it would be as bad if it had been a different class of people living there, so the story goes. Maybe things would have been fixed up better. You must be acquiring lots of extra "stuff" during your travels. Look forward to your next blog. Luv Mum