New Orleans

You can go to New Orleans, as I did, and stay in a French Quarter B&B (http://www.bananacourtyard.com/) and wander about the quarter, eat good food, hear good music, even spend a morning riding your bike through city park and not come up against the reality of the Katrina flood. New Orleans is beautiful and vibrant and to see the damage, to understand the magnitude, you have to make an effort.
On the morning I left I went on a van tour (http://toursbyisabelle.com/) that opened my eyes. You know I think of myself as well informed but really I didn't understand what happened there. The reality is you drive by levees with new cement walls and you look out onto - in the 9th ward - a vast almost empty swath of land. In St Bernard parish you see brick houses, the big ones refurbished and occupied, the small ones empty and gutted. Two and a half years after the flood a cessna still sat atop a garage roof. People are still living in their front yards in trailers. And East New Orleans. We were driving back to the quarter along the highway passing apartment complex after complex, strip mall after strip mall all vacant, all gutted. I hadn't realized this until I saw a roof with a hole in it and then looked harder; miles and miles of empty destroyed buildings.
And where are the people? My guide, born and raised in the city, made it through the storm and subsequent flooding with minimal damage but after his wife read a newspaper article about the levees she insisted that they move. They moved 40 miles out of the city. His brothers' house was in St Bernard parish and is uninhabitable, his nephews the same. Both are living elsewhere and hoping to hold onto their lots - "ride out the times". His family had arrived in New Orleans in 1902 from Italy and now are scattered throughout the region.
I decided to go to New Orleans and spend a few days because it seemed to be the one place I knew I wouldn't begrudge spending money. And I didn't. I don't have any insight or answers about the city but I do have this: go there, spend your money, have a great time, and write Washington to remind the powers that while the waters have receeded the needs of the city and the people have not.