BELOW IS A VIDEO I took from the balcony of a cafe I was in. It was a Monday night on a random side street of New Orleans. Isn't that great? A makeshift brass band randomly playing on a city street corner.
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IF WE ARE GOING TO BE FRANK with each other, today was one of the more boring days of our trip. Our Class took a trip up to Baton Rouge to meet with a professor, Craig Colten. He was a very interesting man with a lot of knowledge about not only Baton Rouge but New Orleans as well. The problem for me was that we weren't listening to him lecture about any of the numerous topics I would have been inclined to listen to. No, no, today we got to hear all about levees. For the folks at home who don't know what a levee is let me lay it down for you. It's a small wall that borders the side of a river that is meant to help control flooding. I am sure there is much more to it than that but that is the gist of it. These types of formations can be naturally occurring, just piles of sand and dirt that pile up and stick over time. To be clean, when there is a naturally occurring levee it does not eradicate flooding from the area but instead ends up limiting the flooding to specific flooding seasons. As time has gone on people have begun to manipulate this concept and began making levees of our own. Now, I like to believe that I am at least a somewhat educated woman. However, I do not for the life of me understand why we use levees the way we do! I am sure there is some level of brilliance my mind has missed because from my perspective they just don't make sense. Naturally occurring levees I am totally fine with. They allow for seasons to form and cycles to develop. When we do it, we try to put an absolute stop to said cycle, preventing all flooding from occurring and allowing settlements to.. well, settle. In theory this sounds great, we are are able to manipulate nature into what best suits our needs. In real life though, many times these types of things don't work or have other unexpected negative events. New Orleans is a prime example of these other effects. The city of New Orleans sits at the base of the Mississippi River in a flood area or water shed zone. This means that the whole area was meant to flood. However, as colonies began to settle levees and other devices were put into place to prevent flooding and help make room for population growth. New Orleans now rests well outside its original borders. Most of this area is not only meant to be flooded but is also below sea level. BELOW sea level. I personally don't see the use in levees because all they do is temporarily cover up a problem, they can't prevent all flooding events. And, once the levees fail, the repercussions are worse then ever. I might be missing something important. After looking at the results of our use of levees, especially what happened to New Orleans in 2005, is it really worth the temporary success? NEW ORLEANS IS A CITY OF COLOR, charm and culture. You drive into the french quarter and are immediately hit with vibrant hues of purple, orange and green with every color in between. You look up at houses with beautiful balconies lined with cast iron railings. Columns stand tall outside every other doorway and blue and purple shutters line every window. Old Street cars run parallel on their tracks, still running like new but dating back to the 1920's. When you enter the city of New Orleans you become transported to a new world, where the old an new can come together and create something absolutely beautiful.
CHALLENGE!!!!
How do You day New Oreans? 3 syllables, 2 syllables or 1? Turns out the further south you go, the less syllables people use!! haha AHHHH, HOW I HAVE MISSED long roadtip days of driving for 5 plus hours straight... said no one ever. Well, maybe not ever. but certainly not a phrase that is uttered often. So yes, today is pretty much just a travel day from our hotel in Memphis down to our hotel in Louisiana. We are actually not going to be in the city of New Orleans till the day after tomorrow. But we will still be busy with lecture and other fun activites I'm not going to lie, I'm itching to get into the culture of the deep south. Even just driving through the past couple of days, some trends have become very apparent.
1. Southern hospitality is in fact a thing. People are nice and conversational. We went to a rest stop where they had people to sort of usher us inside to get brochures and free coffee. 2. Afternoon thunderstorms. It seems like every other place I go has thunderstorms for an hour or so in the afternoon. The sky can be clear as the day is long but the skeys will go dark and poor rain without fail. 3. Sunshowers are quite common. Though down here they have a lot of different names for it. My personal favorite is, the devil ia beating his wife. 4. You can't be bad at ordering. ALL southern food is good food. (unhealthy, yeah. But soooo good!!) We hit the Roll and Soul Museum here in Memphis which was really awesome! I highly recommend everyone hits it if they are visiting. It starts you off with a short video about the legends to pass through. Then they give you a head set and you get to walk through the museum, starting at folk music of the early 1900's and progressively get further along till you reach the last room which is today. They have all kinds of artifacts and music clips from all kinds of musicians. My personal favorite was the part about Elvis (of course) They had a section where they played clips of songs he sang and compared them to the original folk version. Hearing the different influences in his voice and the way he sang made his music even more enjoyable for me. I love folk music, so to be able to see the progression of modern music from that was something that was really enjoyable for me Welcome to Memphis, the home of soul music, blues and rock and roll. I personally have never been one to really listen to that kind of music but in a city like this the rhythm is addictive and you can't help but get caught up in these classic tunes. My class started our tour on Beale street, walking past all the music clubs and restaurants. Everybody we passed was so friendly, laughing and talking to us like we were old friends rather than strangers.
The food we ended up eating was unbelievable! I don't feel like I have been talking about food as much as I thought I would but holy cow! You can't order a bad meal in the South. I have decided that is a fact. Everything is so flavorful and rich it makes your mouth sing. Just as a word of caution though, anyone who is particularly health conscious or watching their weight will have a really hard time! Considering that everything is either buttered or fired or sometimes both! Lucky for me, I am not too concerned so I am enjoying every mouthful of this deliciousness! . Something interesting that is relating to the research project my group is doing (the one about Dialects) Sub sandwiches here are called Po Boys. It's a shortened term from the original Poor Boy Sandwiches. I kind of like that name better. Also they taste so much better than the Jimmy Johns and Subways we have up north. Just saying. I noticed that I have a problem. (big shock right?) When you travel you usually come across a variation of good places and bad places. You know those good places, the ones you favor and just fall in love with. The bad places are pretty easy to describe in writing. I find the one or two things I like and just stick to it. But the good places, the places that make me want to celebrate life, those are the ones I get caught up on. When writing, I just don't know where to start and unfortunately for my blogging, I have come across many many good places. One of my favorites being, good ol' St. Louis.
WE ALL KNOW THE DIFFERENT STEREOTYPES of south. Usually they fall under the categorizes of incredibly hospitable to hysterically racist. I don't really know if either is true but no matter what the people are like, southern USA is a beautiful place. We are still working our way down the Mississippi and have spent the better part of today in good ol' St. Louis.
Now, before we started this trip I knew hardly anything about this supposedly great city. I mean, it wasn't Chicago or New York so how great could it be? And let me just say, that I was wrong. As it turns out, I love St. Louis!! Don't get me wrong, it does have quite a few problems. In fact, my class spent most of our prep for the trip learning just how kind of messed up St. Louis is. (Not the best first impression, let me tell you) The biggest one, apparently the population for the city has been drastically declining over the past decade or so. Bad neighborhoods have forced people to flee long time homes to outside suburbs. This mass emigration has left the city looking post apocalyptic in some parts. The streets bare except for littler and rubble crowding the sidewalk and laws. People leaving their once beautiful brick homes to crumble,rot and decay. However, I want to be clear, this apocalyptic parts of the city that I am describing is quickly becoming the exception rather than the norm. People are starting to move back into certain communities and redefine their neighborhoods. We actually got a tour for of one of the neighborhoods and saw two groups that were working on renovations and creating community centers. It was probably one of my all time favorite places I have seen just thanks to the warmth and love people have been making to create a beautiful place to live. Also, to explain the title of this post, EVERYTHING here is red brick here. Every building, the streets, the sidewalks, EVERYTHING! I know what some of you are thinking, whats the big freaking deal? I will tell you, as a photographer obsessed with color and texture, this is a dream come true. Truly, truly, truly, one of the most beautiful and historic looking cities I have seen in a really long time. AWKWARD CONVERSATION I HAD TODAY with some people this morning with a guy who was absolutely amazed by one of the samples we pulled. Unfortunately, it wasnt for swdement sampling reasons like the reat of us. it was bc he just found out that one of the rocks we pulled was a couple million years old. I don't really know if this is common knowledge, I thought it was but I'm going to reiterate just incase there is any confusion. ..
Guys, rocks are old. Rocks arr really old and thats not a big deal. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old. And its just a baby compared to the rest of the universe. So in our sample we just grabbed an ordinarily ordinary rock... sorry. If you already knew this sorry I just spend blog time explaining this. If you didn't then now you do, AND you can now go out to your yard and marvel and a new wonder in life. P.s. If you ever meet another Geographer please please please dont confuse us with geologists. Please. If you care for us at all and dont want to break our hearts... just don't. (Goes the other way too) |
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