New Orleans post Katrina

I visited New Orleans about a year and a half ago for work. I had to go over for a work conference. It was at the Mariott, but after the meeting each day you could wander down into the French Quarter. Bourbon St is a complete tourist trap full of happy hour bars and seedy strip clubs, but if you go to the end you'll find Frenchman's st. This place is full of jazz clubs that are totally unpretentious. They are a basically the size of milk bars, only serve beer in bottles and have no stage. You grab a Micky's Big Mouth or a Rolling Rock and the band plays on the floor right next to you. One night I saw a young guy playing Sax in dungarees and dreadlocks. He looked like Jean Micheal Basquiate and played like Coltrane. You can drink on the street and walk from club to club until about 3am every night. No wonder they call it the Big Easy. In the morning you can get a cup of filter coffee and bingnets (little donuts in icing sugar) from a place nearby that sits next the the levy of the Mississippi river. On the last night we caught a cab home and it started snowing! The two big black guys driving the cab were so happy and flipped out. Above are some photos around Jackson square just up from Frenchman's. You couldn't really tell there had been a hurricane. They had fixed it all up pretty quickly. Everyone was talking about how bad the economy was though, and on the drive out to the airport you could see all the wrecked houses still waiting to be fixed. America is a tough place. Australia is no longer the egalitarian utopia we used to think it was, but we still have more opportunities than most.