Big Easy

I'm in New Orleans as part of a winter break school service trip. It's the night before the big college football championship game, featuring the Ohio State Buckeyes and the home-state Louisiana State University Tigers. The streets are a zoo, with thousands of fans and tourists milling about decked out in full team paraphernalia, spontaneously breaking out into team chants. The touts and scalpers are out in full force, and vendors are doing a thriving business selling t-shirts and tchotchkes. New Orleans' liberal alcohol laws mean that open containers of various intoxicating beverages are in the unsteady hands of many. There's currently a trumpet playing a solo from somewhere on the street outside my hotel room, and I can hear it clearly even though we're on the fifteenth floor. Appropriately enough, they just struck up the strains of "When the Saints go Marching In." Once the tourists go home though, New Orleans still has a lot of work to do to get back to where it should be, and that won't be easy.