The tri forum has a dedicated thread for the race, but I’m posting this here because it has absolutely nothing to do with the race. I just got home yesterday from my first ever trip to NOLA. I’m 30, consider myself fairly well read and pretty much up to speed on current events. My mom is in the Red Cross disaster relief program and did a 5 week stint down there during Katrina. Having said that, I feel that I was unprepared for what I saw. Here’s my story:
The gf and I arrived to the host hotel on Thursday, walked to the French Quarter, had dinner followed by some beignets and coffee at Cafe Du Monde. The whole time I was thinking “this place looks pretty nice, must not have flooded here.” On the way back to the hotel, we picked up some brochures for tours, etc. Friday we went for a run around the French Quarter, checked in, got our packets, jumped on the tram and went west till we got bored looking at mansions in the Garden District and then hiked back. At this point, I was still impressed with the condition of the city and I was remembering a figure of ~$1+ million per resident being spent to reconstruct the city - and it looked like money well spent at this point - everything looked great. This was further reinforced when I finally looked through some of those tour brochures that we picked up and I realized that Canal Street had actually been under water.
Saturday we decided to go on one of those bus tours, titled the “Katrina/City tour”, which promised to show some of the levees that failed and also give us a full tour of the city that was outside our walking radius, including the city park and an above ground cemetery. The tour didn’t waste time and within 5 minutes we were looking out of our air conditioned bus at folks sitting on their front porches in abject poverty staring back at us. Behind them on their houses were the clearly visible X’s that the National Guard had spray painted to indicate the date of the residence search and how many bodies had been found inside. Part of me felt kind of like a war profiteer, but I reminded myself it was educational. It was shocking to say the least since we were just a couple of minutes away from the french quarter and the tour bus driver was still upbeat about how the city had recovered. By now, I was once again thinking about that $1+ million per resident figure and was trying to figure out where it had all gone since it didn’t appear that these folks/neighborhoods had received much of it. The tour continued on to one of the above ground cemeteries, all the way up to the UNO transition area, then to the city park and finally the mansions in the Garden District, but the images of the 9th Ward were still stuck in my mind.
After the race on Sunday, we caught a cab back to UNO with a couple of locals. Since half the city was blocked off for the race, we received another impromptu tour from the cab driver and the local couple through more neighborhoods that had been flooded - many of which had the X’s still on their doors.
On the car ride home, I talked to my mom some more about what she had seen and listened more closely for the first time in my life. We’re already planning on going back for a non-race vacation, but the dichotomy of the city still sticks with me.
Anyone else have similar experiences or thoughts about the city? (yup, I realize this is one long, pointless ramble, but I just had to write it somewhere - so why not on a forum about life that occasionally discusses triathlons?)
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