These last two days have probably been my best two since arriving in Louisiana. That is because Amol, a good friend of mine from Duke, came to visit me in New Orleans on Friday! I think that some of the best places in the world and some the best experiences can be made infinitely better if you have the pleasure of spending them with true friends. This was the case with Amol. We spent the night together in the Quarter, having a nice dinner with the other people in New Orleans and then basically just hanging out, talking, and laughing afterward for hours.
One really cool aspect of this weekend was that I realized that, now, I truly do LIVE in New Orleans. When Amol came, he was asking ME where I thought we should go to eat and to hang out. He was asking ME if I knew directions to get from one place to another. He was asking ME where and how the public transportation ran. And most of all, he told ME that I already know a lot more about New Orleans than he ever did. By the end of the summer, I will have been in New Orleans for more time than he has been his whole life, even though he doesn’t live that far away. It felt good to know that, in a strange sense, New Orleans had become my home. I even had a library card with the New Orleans logo on it that I got today to prove it!
This also made me realize that I probably don’t know my own city of Chicago as well as I should. I’ll surely be more familiar with New Orleans than with Chicago by July. I notice now that I have a tendency to like cities more that I am familiar with such as Boston as well. Why not get to know my own city a little better? Maybe that’s something I should keep in mind for later this summer.
On Saturday, we went to Café du Monde to grab some beignets and café au lait while watching street performers in front of Jackson Square. Then, I headed with him to his place in Baton Rouge. While I was there in Baton Rouge, I made some observations:
- LSU is inextricably linked with the people and culture of Louisiana. Of course I always cheered for Illinois basketball and football, but I never felt personally invested in the team. The connection felt by the people here in Louisiana to LSU is so strong that Amol explained to me that he and most of his friends would rather see LSU do well than their own out-of-state colleges. I was surprised by this, but I sort of started to realize that being from Louisiana MEANS that you are a part of LSU even if you don’t ever go to school there. I think this is similar to the feeling of North Carolinians for UNC, although I can’t say for sure having not yet fully experienced that campus. I suppose that’s one big difference between Duke and a lot of public schools (particularly here in the South): many people in North Carolina detest Duke (beyond athletics, too) whereas most people feel that they are one with their state schools like LSU or UNC.
- People from Louisiana tend to hate Louisiana. I know I talked about this in a previous post, but I can’t get over it. Amol once again confirmed this observation that I’ve been making over the last couple weeks. While you try to complement many Louisianans on their city and state, they have a tendency to try to denigrate the place where they live. Still, at the end of the day, you can see that there’s something in each of them that absolutely loves their home at the same time. There’s something that tells them they could never leave even if they wanted to. When you remind them of certain aspects of their city that an outsider notices at first glance but that a native may have become completely acclimated to, they seem to recall what makes this place so great and what keeps the flame burning inside each of them.
- Tying into the above observation, it seems as though people from Louisiana who are NOT from New Orleans may have a tendency to see Hurricane Katrina and its effects differently. To some of them, New Orleans was always a decrepit city, and the storm merely brought its problems to the attention of the nation. To some of them, many of the houses in the city were already severely damaged and falling apart, the city’s roads and sidewalks were already in dire need of extensive maintenance, and NOLA public transportation was always just as terrible and unreliable as ever. The storm, then, only made the city marginally worse than it already was in their minds. It’s funny. I really don’t see it this way. I CAN’T see it this way after talking with some of the people that I’ve met and hearing of their plights.
