I wrote an entry a few days ago but didn’t get to post it. Here it is. These are my experiences in New Orleans before the rest of the Knox Crew got here. I spent a few days wandering around the city, catching up on sleep, and building houses for Habitat for Humanity with my mom.

Hi, my name is Ellie. I’m a first-year at Knox. I plan to study some combination of computer science, creative writing, and art.

My first experiences here in New Orleans have been a bit different than everyone else’s; I flew here three days early with my mom because she wanted to do some work with Habitat for Humanity over the weekend. It’s Thursday night as I type this (though I probably won’t post it until later.) I’m staying at the historical Pontchartrain Hotel in the Garden District.

The Garden District is one of the wealthier parts of the city–and it’s on higher ground. Driving through it a year later, you might not guess that it’s a part of the devastated city that the media’s been talking about all year. Sure, there are a few businesses that have shut down, but there are people outside walking their dogs. There are nice restaurants with plenty of customers. The houses here are beautiful, old, enormous. A few parts here and there remind me of being in Paris.

The area around the airport here is the same way: there are Wal-Marts abound, many a spiffy-looking Popeye’s (Southerners like their fried chicken, that’s for sure!), and even some palm trees (coming from Denver, that’s a pretty big deal.) As we were getting onto the highway, my mom joked:

“Oh good, there’s a Taco Bell. I guess that means we’re not in a third world country, huh?”

Between the airport and our hotel, though, my mom and I spent a good couple of hours driving around the city. We got lost over and over again–the highway system is confusing enough, but it seems like some of the necessary sine-age is missing or misleading.

It was incredible to me how my surroundings could go from normal-looking city to completely devastated and back.

I saw a lot of houses and buildings with the infamous X’s spraypainted on the front. (If I’m not mistaken, the four codes in the X are: the team that performed the search and rescue of that house, the date it was performed, the level of flooding, and the number of people found dead.) I didn’t see anything but zero’s for the latter in the neighborhoods we drove through, but many houses had less official spraypaint notes still on the outside: 1 dog found dead here.

Here are my two most memorable interactions with New Orleans residents today:

1) You’ll find a lot of cars here with bumper stickers that say something along the lines of New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home. It reminds me of the American flags and God Bless America’s on everyone’s bumpers after 9/11–but more powerful.

I saw one car on the highway today whose bumpersticker read: New Orleans: Proud to Swim Home.

2) The icemaker on my floor wasn’t working, and I went to hunt for one on another floor, but couldn’t find one. So I went down to the front desk to ask where an ice machine was. The bellhop asked me to wait a minute and disappeared behind a door. I started talking to a woman at the counter who was getting change. She told me New Orleans hasn’t been the same since the storm hit; you used to be able to press the button on the ice machine at the Pontchartrain and ice cubes would come out! I laughed with her. The bellhop returned with a huge bag of store-bought ice. As I was leaving, she said to me:

“But we’re going to get our city back.”