Day 2

September 30, 2007
I got to sleep until 7 a.m. today. What a treat. After a breakfast at my hotel, I went out to catch the St. Charles Street bus into the French Quarter. It was recommended (by my class) that I take some tours so I decided on the cemetery tour. The bus took forever to come, so I sat on the curb outside of a lovely house. It was a pleasant morning, 80ish and muggy. The man who lives in the house let his dogs out ( in the fenced in yard) and then he turned on his sprinkler. The sprinkler reached out onto the sidewalk just feet from where I was sitting. I think he was trying to get rid of me!

Alas, the bus arrived and took me to the French Quarter. On the way down St. Charles I saw lots of trees that were covered in plastic Mardi Gras beads! I walked down Bourbon Street ( not a very nice street in my opinion, rather smelly at that hour). I met up with my tour guide and had a two hour walking tour. There’s a video link about some of the tombs below. She told about the early history of New Orleans, but I already knew all of that from the historian briefings! She told us that until the 20th century people died from many diseases associated with the location of New Orleans ( swampy). Yellow fever, malaria, and many many more. The cemetery was interesting.

After lunch, a lady (that I met on the tour) and I decided to drive into the 9th ward to investigate the damage. Wow. We saw where the Industrial Levee had breached in two places. The street closest to the levee had no houses. Just slabs of concrete remained where houses once stood. There were a few houses being rebuilt, but it was largely houses that were temporarily abandoned. I say temporarily abandoned because often there were spray painted messages on the houses “ Do not bulldoze, I’m coming home”. The houses had some symbols spray painted on them also. You can see them in my pictures. They checked all of the houses looking for bodies and ?? I’m not sure what else the symbols meant. I think they were checking to see if the gas and electricity were off. We drove by a senior high school that had been destroyed. I have a video and some pictures of that too. I went in through a hole in the fence and looked in a window. A table had a gas nozzle (like the one on my black lab table) and I knew it had been a science lab. Further down the road there was a ruined baseball field. If you look closely in one of my pictures you can see a mitt left in the wake of Katrina. Except for minimal rebuilding, it was almost total devastation in the 9th ward. The lady I toured with had a friend who ran an animal rescue operation in the 9th ward right after Katrina. While we worry about the people in a disaster, there are also pets who suffer.

In the evening, the five teachers on this Earthwatch Expedition met up with Rebecca, our liaison here at Tulane University. We went out to a Mediterranean restaurant for supper (yum) and then back to the hotel