New Orleans

So again it seems as if I have the dubious(?) honor of following up Eamonn with a blog post. I am not attempting to be a one-upper but perhaps rather a late opening act for him.

I too had a slight loss of balance the other night (read a nose dive (or two)) – [do parentheses within other parentheses work in a sentence or should I use brackets? n/m] – as part of a fantastic field trip with my civil engineering class to New Orleans. More on the learning experience in a moment. As part of the trip, we spent two nights out on the town on Bourbon Street. Never have I seen such smut and debauchery and yet never have I had so much fun. (Weird how those go hand in hand). However, I was merely an observer and not a partaker in this filth. Bourbon Street is filled with bars and places of ill repute to say the least. The former being the source of the fun and the latter being the subject of observation and slight trepidation. Each night as we walked around in groups of varying sizes, bouncers and hypemen would approach us on the street to beg and plead with us to enter their establishment. We experienced the lights and sounds of New Orleans, soaked up the culture, literally and figuratively, danced, and listened to live bands perform for most of the night, before heading back to our hotel for a good night of sleep prior to beginning our 17+ hour day the next morning. (Now for you aunts and young cousins out there, you can do the math to figure out my age, but before you go condemning me you need to realize that New Orleans has slightly different rules regarding beverage consumption.) To make this long story short and generalize some of the details, in the midst of one of these nights, I suddenly experienced a slight loss of balance on Bourbon Street resulting in a nice shiner on my forehead the next morning.

Now the important details. Three of my civil engineering professors have been consultants in the recovery of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. They have aided in levee reconstruction, hurricane analysis, and remediation of contaminants in the Mississippi River, among other things. As part of an effort to not only educate us in the classroom but also in the ways of social and professional responsibility, our professors took us on this four day, three night field trip of New Orleans and the Mississippi River with University sponsorship and funding. A group of 60+ students and faculty were bussed to Chicago and then flown down to New Orleans. Upon arrival, we immediately embarked on a dinner cruise on the Mississippi River. This was the first meal of my favorite part of the trip – the food. We had catfish, mardi gras pasta, almond chicken, bread pudding and so much more. After this cruise we had our first night on the town. After roughly two hours of sleep, we woke up and went to the Army Corps of Engineers offices and heard a few briefings. Needless to say some people, professors included, dozed off for brief moments of the presentations. Following this, we toured the various canal systems and pump stations that were/are meant to protect New Orleans from flooding. After lunch we visited the Lower 9^th Ward. This was an eye-opening experience. Even with people warning us how much destruction there was, we couldn’t have been prepared for what we saw. There were still cars on roofs, houses in the middle of streets, empty foundations, etc. Houses were marked with a certain pattern by rescuers with one of the markings indicating if bodies were found. Although there were many zeros, there were also a number of ones and twos. The amount of destruction certainly was disheartening but the recovery strides being taken were obvious as well. After this sobering experience, we went to another fantastic restaurant called Jacques-Imo’s. We were served plate after plate of fantastic food: special sausage, eggplant, and crocodile sausage cheesecake, to name a few. And these were just the appetizers; for the main course I settled on a rabbit dish while some of my friends had such things as grouper, duck, boullibaise(sp?) among other things, finished off by bread pudding. After dinner we departed for Vicksburg where we went straight to bed. Seriously. The next day we toured the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. It was an amazing place with the largest supercomputer in the Department of Defense which processes huge amounts of data in a variety of projects. We then toured a series of canals called the Old River Control which regulates Mississippi River water flow and Atchafalaya River water flow to the Gulf. This was a great learning experience Uncle Bill which you probably would be interested in, that is if you and everyone else are still reading. That night we had dinner on a haunted plantation in Louisiana. Once again, the food was stunning. We then drove back to New Orleans for a Bourbon Street remix. Needless to say, it lived up to the standard set the first night. So once again after two more hours of sleep, pushing the week total to about nine hours, we woke up and went on a seven hour boat cruise of the Mississippi. We then hopped on a plane and flew back home. For more details about either the fun or the learning or both, let me know. I would love to tell you about it.

The week didn’t end here for me though. After getting home at 1130pm on Wednesday night, I unpacked and repacked before leaving at 530am Thursday morning for Colorado Springs, CO as part of a field trip with Air Force ROTC to visit some bases as a front for the real reason of going to the Notre Dame-Air Force Academy football game. So in the span of a week I went on two completely free field trips in opposite parts of the country.

As I finish this up, my parents and siblings are driving to South Bend from Chicago for what looks to be another fantastic weekend. So for all you younger cousins out there, work hard in school, get good grades, and consider attending this fine institution of higher learning (and fun).