In my eternal wisdom, I had scheduled a city bus tour for 9.30am. Luckily for me, although I did not feel great, I did not feel like death either. The tour was exactly what it said on the tin, taking you around the centre of the city and then into the outer city. What the tour lacked in the ability to experience things up close and on foot was made up for by the sheer amount of distance that could be covered and hence more could be seen. One of the main themes of the tour was also taking stock of the damage of Katrina, back in 2005.
I could not speak more highly of the tour guide for the trip (a common theme in the States). He was a local man who had lived all his life in the city. There was not a single detail he didn't know about every building and place in the city, famous or not. He spouted more dates, stories, personal anecdotes and facts than any person I had heard before. It made you feel like you really got to know the city.
At first he took us around the downtown area (passing the Superdome, home to the New Orleans Saints NFL team and the 2013 Superbowl), and then into the historic French Quarter and down into the wealthy Garden Quarter where the average property value was upwards of $3 million. In this area you are not allowed to demolish any home, you can only renovate what you have. This meant that many houses were covered in scaffolding, especially after Katrina as the water reached 10ft in this area (almost all of New Orleans is below sea-level).
After travelling further out of the city, we stopped off at one of the cities famous graveyards. Here we got out of the bus and got a tour around some of the crypts. Although some were pretty, the grandiose style is definitely not my cup of tea (and the fact a crypt would cost you upwards of $100,000). The tour bus then took us to a beautiful park on the outside of the city to take a lunch break. As I was not hungry I headed into the park and managed to take a few photos of the scenery and a small sculpture garden I stumbled across.
The final part of the tour was the most interesting but in the most morbid sense. We travelled into the lower 9th ward, site of the worst flooding during Katrina (13ft of water). Although new houses were being built, there were still the wreak ages of hundreds of others as the people who owned them could not afford to rebuild them (shockingly, the insurance companies did not pay out on many claims as you needed several coverage packages depending on how high the flooding would reach) or even to knock them down (even if you could afford to rebuild, insurance costs about $20,000 per year). The guide explained the many complex rules guiding whose responsibility the houses were, either the individuals or the cities. On the doors of many of the houses were spray-painted signs written by different groups of the National Guard who would write the date they had checked the house, and the numbers of bodies were inside. Officially, about 1800 were reported to have died but many more people are missing and the city does not keep a record of missing persons.
The detestation caused over 100,000 people to permanently leave the city. The tour guide had explained how the population were told that the storm would miss them so when they did discover it was going to hit, it was too late to evacuate. He had managed to leave before the hurricane had made landfall but it took 18 months before he could move back onto his front lawn, and another few years for his house to be rebuilt. Infrastructural damage was so bad that it took the authorities 9 months just to get the street lights working again. I am definitely not doing justice to the events so I urge people to go to the city and to see for themselves.
I was very tired after the tour so I had a nap in my room and waited for plans to emerge in the evening. In the end, it was decided that a group of us (Tim, Mitch, Josh, Tom, and Emily) would head the opposite way from town down Magazine Street to check out a brass band playing in one of the bars. Before going into the bar we had a delicious dinner (I had a Cuban-style pulled pork po'boy). The band themselves were very talented but unfortunately I was not in the same mood as I had been the previous night and I had an early bus trip the next morning. When the band had finished we waited for a taxi outside. It was there we were joined by a young American man who began asking us questions of our views of gun control. After telling him every American was gun crazy and giving him the full spiel about the stupidity of the second amendment, he told us how he owned 23 guns. Think about that for a second. There must have been a time when he thought to himself that 22 guns were insufficient. He was completely vulnerable until the 23rd had been purchased. The reason he owned the guns was that he was scared of the government and he needed to have access to guns so he could start a militia revolution. The mind boggles, it really does. When there are people like this is the world, no wonder I have a serious superiority complex (Jokes! Well actually, only partly. In fact, not at all). It truly sickens me to the core of my being. Fortunately for me, Josh was as equally militantly, liberal as I, so we could share our outrage together. We managed to ditch the retard and get a lift back to the hostel.
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