New Orleans, Part 1
I suppose since i have a lot of down time due to my class being cancelled this morning, I would begin writing up my trip to New Orleans.
We flew out of LaGuardia Airport on the morning of Sunday, January 7. There were 15 of us who went. Two faculty members: Rocco, an English Professor and Brother Joe, a math Professor. There were 13 students: Myself, Katie (one of my best friends), Nicole, Claudia, Dennis (hereafter referred to only as Den-Den), Jon, Chris, Sean, Pat, Liz, Josh, Pete, and Fabienne. When we left New York, it was a bit chilly.
The plane we took was really small. To board it, we had to get on a bus that drove across the tarmac, and then walk up the steps to the plane. I don't think that most of us had ever boarded a plane like that before, so when we realized that we had first go outside to get to the plane, we were very confused. I had been on line right before Nicole, and I think I was nervously laughing because the whole thing was weird. Plus I get nervous when flying.The flight was about 3 hours, but I think we gained an hour with the time difference and when we got to New Orleans it was somewhat warmer, and much more humid.
There was some sort of stupid screw up, and about half of our groups luggage didn't arrive on time. All of my luggage was there, but some people didn't really have anything. For some reason, there was a weight issue on our plane, so a bunch of luggage was put on another plane. But that plane was going to Atlanta first, and wouldn't get to New Orleans until later. It was pretty stupid.
During the trip, we stayed in what had been a middle school prior to the disaster. It was right off of Elysian Fields Avenue. I wish I know what the name of the neighborhood was. We stayed in a gym with about 150 other people. At first we were somewhat wary of this arrangement, but we got over it. There were people there from all over the country, including a huge group from Green Bay who had driven down. There were two members of the Green Bay group who were notable. We named them Green Bay and Snorlax. They were notable due to their excessively loud snoring every single night.
Another notable fact about this place is that there were not nearly enough showers for all of the people there. Taking a shower often led to panic, because there were almost always 10 people waiting on line for the shower behind you, and some of them were super obnoxious. My group used to pretty much race for the showers once we got back from working. The boys had it easy, because they were able to more or less strip down right in the gym and they generally had less to carry than the girls.
Sidenote: at one point, the gym we were staying in had been flooded with about 11 feet of water. You could see marks on the backboard of the basketball hoops of where the water had been. It was hard to comprehend.
Driving from the airport to the school we were staying in was something of a surreal experience. We passed street after street of houses that were basically empty. The neighborhood we were staying in felt almost like a ghost town. I knew that many people had not been coming back to the city, but I never grasped what that really meant until I saw it for myself. There were whole strip malls that were completely empty. Everything was eerily quiet and empty. It was just a weird feeling being there.
Almost all of the houses in this area of the city still had the markings on them from nearly a year and a half ago when different groups went in to check out the houses for bodies. The markings generally consisted of the date the house was inspected, something identifying which group went into the house, and the number of bodies found in the house. I personally didn't see any houses that had contained bodies. There were also many houses that were inspected a second time, with notes that said things like, "No dog found" or "1 cat." This started to give me a sense of what people had to leave behind, and what they ultimately lost.
It was shocking because even though the storm and subsequent flood had happened nearly 16 months before, it really didn't feel like that. By the looks of it, it might have happened only one month before. It was just really sad to see.
More to come, later. With pictures!