Day 0: City of N Orleans

Sunday morning, we rode a streetcar into the flood-damaged parts of town. carpenter said things looked a lot better than they had last year, but we saw a lot of nailed-up plywood, a lot of "FOR SALE" and "FOR LEASE" signs, old orange Xes sprayed by FEMA on houses to mark and number the corpses inside. Dirty streaks at waist height recorded the high water level. The streetcar juddered and clanked along the track, too loud for us to talk to each other, but when it stopped everything was suddenly silent, creepily silent, eerily silent—completely unlike any city street I've been on at 9AM. That lower part of the city seemed empty and expectant, hushed, waiting for its people to come back, waiting for life and music and backyard cookouts to come back.

Our driver, Sue, sighed audibly when we got off. She's sick to death (I am guessing) of privileged tourists coming to gawk at the houses where her friends died, and I am sympathetic—if we'd had hindsight, we probably wouldn't have taken that particular ride. On the other hand, Katrina was a national tragedy, and it seems to me that every citizen has a right to see the scars. I'm not sure what the answer is—I tried to be solemn and respectful, and I said a couple of quiet prayers, and now I'm telling you what I saw, so you know too.

The French Quarter, to our great relief, was much more lively and welcoming, and we resembled sore thumbs much less. I was happily overwhelmed, and could have spent a few more days there, poking into the art galleries and museums and tourist-trap voodoo shops. I struck off on my own down Bourbon Street to find St. Louis Cathedral—a cathedral as built by Disney, overlooking Jackson Square's banana trees and an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson—and then, after taking some photos and advising a British girl not to pet the diseased bird on the fountain, rushed back to the hotel just in time to discover we would be meeting for lunch a block from where I'd just been. (D'oh.) Lunch was beignets—something like a cross between funnel cake and a doughnut, with half a cup of powdered sugar dumped on top—at Café du Monde, followed by muffulettas at a so-so place that was not Central Grocery (closed for renovations).

After lunch, we collected our final member from the airport and headed south along the Bayou Lafourche, to the PMC, where the air conditioning was blessedly potent and there were bedrooms enough for us each to have our own (almost). A baby gecko welcomed Prime to her bathroom (photo beneath the cut). We met Mel, we got BTNEP swag, we shopped for groceries, we went to bed—my alarm was set for 5:30.

If I had to sum up New Orleans with one word, it would be grateful. Strangers on the street, on the elevators, thanked us for coming down. The hotel staff bent over backwards to make our stay pleasant, and were more than usually eager to invite us back. But one word isn't enough—New Orleans is noisy, beautiful, alive, hot, delicious, unsettling, enticing, sultry, vivid. Hot. (Did I say hot?) If you go, and I hope you do, stay at the Comfort Inn & Suites Quality Inn & Suites, which really deserves the plug.

I've posted 49 of my pictures from the first day to Flickr. Sample below the cut. The first photo, above, is the former City Hall Annex on Canal, now being reclaimed by nature. ( Snip. )