Wednesday, October 15, 2008

New Orleans - A Picture Tour

Here's the official picture tour of our side trip down to New Orleans (with a bit of Baton Rouge mixed in)

This is probably the most New Orleans picture we took! Black guy with cane, cap and suit! You don't get anymore iconoclastic then that! (Okay, so we cheated, this was actually in Baton Rouge)

I was expecting Bourbon street to be more scummy...it's nothing next to the red light district in Paris and Amsterdam.

The old state capital of Louisiana (in Baton Rouge); I felt like I had been transported to England.

Rain and churches make the best pictures!

If you're in New Orleans this is the bookstore to check out. It's on Pirate's Alley, right of to the side of that cathedral in the picture above, and it's where Faulkner stayed when he lived in the city. Rumor has it, he would sit drunk on the balcony and throw things at the nuns at the church next door.

French donuts are amazing! Please open a Cafe Du Monde in Orange County....

Outside the National World War II museum...I honestly didn't know we had a WWII museum, but we do and it's in New Orleans.


They had awesome propaganda posters inside the museum...can you imagine having this kind of stuff around the city as part of America's effort to fight the war on terror?!

The highlight of the New Orleans trip...a swamp tour about 30 miles North of the city.

Apparently all that mossy green stuff was not always there; after Katrina the swamp had no way to drain into the lake; they're hoping to have engineers open it back up once they're done making repairs on the city.

The question most people have asked is can you still see the effects of Katrina...this is one example of yes. The population of New Orleans is still not anywhere close to what it was before, and it was pretty common to see homes boarded up and completely abandoned. Anyone you talked to had a story of loss. With any luck more organizations will sponsor conferences in the city, because that's what they need.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow... I've never been to New Orleans but it seems like quite an experience.

Anonymous said...

Not french donuts - beignets.

And the green stuff is not algae it's related to water lilies, I'm pretty sure.

Glad you had fun here. I love my city.

Anonymous said...

And I forgot to say that the Nat'l WW II Museum was originally the D-Day Museum. Located in NOLA because the Higgins Boat factory was here (my grandfather worked there during the war). And Stephen Ambrose was instrumental in it's creation and he was on faculty locally. Later the decision was made to expand it to all of WWII.