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I'm sitting in the car with Tanja driving from Pensacola, Florida where we spent the weekend at the beach, back to New Orleans. We passed Orange Beach, the little town where we spent a couple of days in the beach house of a friend's family back in 2003 during our USA vacations with Kristin. Where the beach house once stood, you can now see a kind of beach and some new very big, very ugly hotels. Hurricane Ivan destroyed the house as well as many others the same year Katrina nearly wiped out New Orleans. It was a weird feeling standing in front of what was the driveway of the house before. In fact the hurricanes and especially Katrina are very present in the city of New Orleans. Everybody has stories to tell about Katrina and most of the times they are very sad. You can still see areas in the city with some destroyed houses which have numbers sprayed on the doors and windows which were signs for the police right after the hurricane, so they could see whether there where still people in the house or animals or maybe a gas leak or if it was just an abandoned house. But in most areas everything has been reconstructed. Especially the tourist areas as the French quarter look the same, but that's just because they have not been affected. From the cultural point of view New Orleans apparently struggles to get back to the level of before Katrina. Tanja's roommate told me that only 3 out of 8 theatres reopened and that is why a lot of artists had to leave the city and so had a lot of the Jazz musicians. You can still see some of them playing in the streets but apparently it is not the same anymore. It is a vicious cicle, as they won't come back until they can find work, but the theatres cannot open until they are back. Same with shops, a lot of them closed after the Hurricane because so many people left the city that it wasn't worth it keeping them. people didn't only leave because of their destroyed houses but also because it was dangerous staying as houses got
But anyway the Big Easy is still the place to be if you want to party, and not only during Mardi Gras and that is why the French quarter was full of drunk people on a thursday afternoon and so we had no choice but to do what you have to do in New Orleans and that is strolling through the streets and refresh yourself from the extremely muggy heat with a frozen daiquiri.
As I already said, we went to Pensacola in Florida for the weekend to go to the beach and that was the best decision we could have taken. It was hot and anyway you could not have done much more than lie around somewhere. We even saw rays. That was quite amazing, I never saw any rays and they were pretty close and jumped out of the water so it looked as if they had actual wings.
At night we accidentally discovered that there was the seafood festival going on in Pensacola, so we got pretty good food, some cocktails and live music to finish the weekend.
Ah, I totally forgot to tell you that I also went to my first homecoming dance. Tanja's roomate was running for homecoming king so he had to go to collect votes and we went with him. We had to dress up like in the 80s which was no problem at all with all the practice I got in Oldenburg :). It was a weird party though, bad music, no alcohol and we were far the oldest. But it was worth it, in the end he became homecoming king which I have not quite understood until now what this title is for but apparently it is a huge thing...
I am heading to Miami tomorrow morning where Christian will join me and we will fly out to Lima, Peru on tuesday!!!
- comments
Kristin Wart ihr in der Florabama Bar ???
Theresa die gibts nicht mehr kristin!!!