A woman sits on a city sidewalk, singing “Science Fiction/Double Feature” from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” accompanied by her ukulele. A raggedly dressed young man asks passersby for money “for marijuana. I promise I won’t spend it on food.”
New Orleans: the name evokes the tastes of beignets and jambalaya, the sights of dainty balconies, brightly colored costumes and men walking hand in hand.
New Orleans is about a five-hour drive from Starkville, making it-along with Memphis, Birmingham and Atlanta-one of the cities to which Mississippi State University students can travel easily for a weekend of food, culture and just plain fun.
The quickest way to New Orleans from Starkville is to take U.S. Highway 45 South to Meridian, then get on Interstate 59 and follow it through Hattiesburg to New Orleans. Drivers will be pleased by the gas prices in Hattiesburg and Metairie, La.: $1.99 per gallon in mid-October. Billboards along the road approaching New Orleans advertise politicians and entertainment, but construction ads reign: build your house in six to eight weeks, or rid it of mildew.
The French Quarter looks little different from before Hurricane Katrina, although the cynical slogans on the cheaply made T-shirts have changed: “chocolate city with vanilla flavoring,” one reads.
Once in the city, students have abundant options for food and drinks. According to the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp., fewer than half of the city’s 3,414 restaurants were open as of Oct. 23. In spite of this statistic, a five-minute walk in the Quarter will give you dozens of options for food and more for drinking.
Entertainment options are also good. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Duran Duran, Wu Tang Clan, My Chemical Romance and other big-name bands took the stage at the Voodoo Music Experience at the end of October.
Artists such as Ani DiFranco have graced the city in recent months, and local music is always available.
Art galleries seem to be thriving in the French Quarter, and the NOTMC reported that all the city’s major museums have reopened. So have the Audobon Zoo and the Aquarium of the Americas, according to their Web sites.
New Orleans has another, more compelling side to visit: the areas badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina, including the Ninth Ward and the Gentilly neighborhood. Friends or family members from the area make great guides. Their spare bedrooms, couches and floors are also the cheapest overnight option for college students looking to save, although about two-thirds of the 265 metro-area hotels in business before the storm are open, according to the NOTMC.
Metairie resident Patty Arestegui, who has lived in the New Orleans area for 21 years, drove her niece and four other students through the city in mid-October, showing them where the levee broke, sharing her feelings about the state of the city and explaining the meanings of the numbers and symbols spray-painted on houses.
It’s OK for tourists to visit the devastated sections of the city, she says “during the day. At night time, like I said, it’s just pitch black.”
The creepiest thing about driving through these parts of the city, 14 months after the storm, are the empty houses that surround the occasional occupied dwelling. On one house, a sign reads “Photos with native $1.”
“People don’t see this on the news,” Arestegui says. “It’s just house after house after house.”
Understanding the symbols spray-painted on roofs, doors and walls in the weeks after the storm adds depth to the experience. Each house is marked with a large X, with numbers and words written in each section of the letter. In the top quadrant is the date the house was searched. The sections on the left and the right tell which team searched the house and what hazards-rats or gas leaks-lurk within. The bottom section shows the number of bodies found when the house was searched. Words beside or below the X tell what animals were found inside: dogs, cats, even birds.
An empty-looking public school lists the dates of the first day of school-in 2005. At an abandoned gas station, the price is frozen at $2.38 per gallon. In some ways, this city recalls Pompeii.