New Orleans II, Part 2

Alright, I need to set the stage here. Do me a favor and click on this link. You hear that? That’s New Orleans music for you. Coming straight from WWOZ, which I've heard is a pretty well regarded radio station around here (don’t quote me on that though; with a grand total of 49 days in this city I’m still a month or two away from getting to call myself an expert on local music and heritage). Anyway, the music is great and the callsign WWOZ stands for Wonderful Wizard of Oz, so there really is no reason for you not to be listening to it right now. Which means we can commence with today’s lesson:

Geography
If you’re anything like me, you just winced at that word. Geography is annoying, complicated and unlike other, more decent sciences such as physics, it's dickish enough to get you ridiculed if you’re not good at it. I don’t like it, is what I’m saying. Anybody who’s ever been with me on a trip to a place that’s not my hometown can attest to that. And for a long time, I’ve quite successfully dealt with this issue like any problem-oriented grown-up would and put all my effort into ignoring it until it went away.

Then came one unflattering moment in February 2013 when I discovered that I’d always misjudged the Mississippi’s flow direction. That’s almost two years after I spent an entire semester in New Orleans in 2011. Not one of my proudest moments. I vowed to remedy that by working on trying to understand New Orleans geography, should I ever get another chance (not knowing I would return to the city in 2016 and actually have to make good on that promise). Which brings us here. Now that you know what got us into this mess (damn you, Mississippi) let’s get this over with:

Maps have something to do with geography, right?

This is New Orleans. Not sure if you’ve ever seen a map of New Orleans before (I certainly hadn’t before I first got here). Not only does it raise questions about how I was ever able to confuse that damn river’s flow direction, it shows some other pretty interesting details as well. For instance, what the hell is that straight line in the middle? Oh that’s just Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the world’s largest continuous bridge over water, no big deal:

Driving north ...

... and looking back towards New Orleans.

38km of pure joy that connect New Orleans with the North Shore communities. The North Shore is home to Fountainbleau State Park, the very popular local Abita brewery and that lovely gentlemen in camouflage I introduced you to in the last post.

The lake itself spans over 1600km2, which means you could fit just about 5 Lake Neusiedls in there (it's also very shallow, only a few meters deep on average). In one of its darker moments, it was the origin of most of the water that flooded the city during Hurricane Katrina, as the storm pushed so much water into the lake that the sub-standard levees couldn’t hold the pressure and broke. The water itself is brakish, somewhat smelly and reportedly houses alligators. This might be not such a bad thing, as UNO and its student dorms are located right at the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain and alcohol induced skinny dipping sounds like a bad idea, even without any alligators.

If we take a closer look at the city itself, it becomes quite clear that UNO is not really at the center of things. I’ve highlighted some of the cool stuff in this section and you’ll notice that there’s a vast stretch of housing that separates us from downtown New Orleans.

Details in no particular order: 1. Algiers, 2. French Quarter (with Bourbon Street), 

3. this is where I play volleyball!, 4. Frenchmen Street, 5. Bywater

This helps, of course, once exam time hits, but mostly it just makes doing fun stuff annoyingly inconvenient. Not too many students here (at least the ones from Innsbruck) have cars, busses leave once or twice an hour (depending on some astrological calculations I don’t understand) and bikes only get you so far. Thankfully, the city center’s gravitational pull is pretty strong and so sooner or later, everybody finds their way into town.

Who could resist that?

Most people who are new to New Orleans will start off by visiting the area around the French Quarter. Very famous, very tourist-y. It's where Bourbon Street is located. This epicenter of sleepless party nights is infamous, expensive and it feels like locals only go there to work or rip off tourists, but you know what you sign up for. It’s the do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-you-pay-for-it part of town - weird and sticky, but at least it’s unapologetically so.

If Bourbon Street is your charming trans aunt with an alcohol problem that keeps stealing money from your piggy bank, then Frenchmen street is your friend's dad who tells stories about the time he was your age. Yes, he has a regular income now, but when he gets out that bass guitar, he still plays it like a damn pro. It’s so much fun to be there, but again - most locals will be on stage. I'm not entirely sure yet how to feel about this. On the one hand, this place is famous for good music, so there will always be an endless supply of fantastic musicians. That again draws insane numbers of tourists, which, of course, is the last thing you want to see, as a tourist. The whole thing is very schizophrenic. There's plenty of great music outside of Frenchmen Street too, of course (Tremé Fall Fest was great!), but at the end it's the easiest way to catch a few live bands, especially if you don't have a car. However, it does feel a little bit strange to be part of an almost entirely white audience in a town that is about 60 percent African American. Makes you feel as if your part of a hard to define problem, and that’s not a particularly good feeling.

Which kind of brings me to St Claude and the Bywater. In our analogy, that area would be your friend’s hipster cousin. It’s where much of the artsy stuff happens right now. College crowd. Often great, sometimes over the top, all of it weird.

Not quite HD, but a good example of what I'm talking about.

I love so much of what’s going on there (how could I not? I’m a 28-year old student from Austria!). But I also didn’t grow up here and saw my neighborhood slowly being turned upside down and made unaffordable by a buch of kids from out of town. Right next to the Bywater is the Lower 9th Ward, which was almost obliterated during Katrina. And now the Upper 9th is falling victim to gentrification. Many of the people who originally came down here to help, fell in love with the city and stayed, bringing all their money, education and artistic sensibilities with them in the process. It's a very unsatisfying situation. I like my problems clear-cut and easy and this is very much not that.

And so I’m sitting here on a bench overlooking the Mississippi, thinking too much about problems people way smarter than me haven’t been able to solve. “What a great use of my time here,” I ponder and melodramatically glance across the river. And do you know what’s across the rive? A neighborhood called Algiers. Algiers, which is really only reachable by ferry and therefore has very little tourism. They call it "New Orleans' best kept secret". I take the ferry and spend a pretty cool day there in the midst of weird gardens, cool cafés, friendly people and fantastic live music at a place called Old Point Bar. I know I have to catch the last ferry at ten, but that’s quite alright. It’s a small price to pay for getting away from slightly distracting musings about annoying things such as tourism, gentrification and most of all, that bastard geography.

Found it!