I’m just back from five days in New Orleans, city of my dreams since I was 12 years old and first read about the home of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. (Yes, I was a strange child.) I’ve been drawn to the city ever since, though the reasons have changed. Friends who visited the city pre-Katrina described a place that was more Caribbean or European in flavor than anywhere else in the US. They called it both "a den of sin" and a city of sublime decaying beauty. I was just planning a trip to see for myself when Hurricane Katrina hit, and I thought NO was gone for good. But despite flooding and storm damage that displaced hundreds of thousands of people, two years later New Orleans is on its way back. And last week I got a chance to support the local economy….

I found that New Orleans is all that I had heard and more: The fragrance of exotic perfume, chicory coffee and fresh beignets, with an occasional whiff of roach spray and wood smoke thrown in for balance. The yeasty smell of spilt beer and hasty sex in the doorways of Bourbon Street, and the frankensense and flax soap of St Louis Cathedral. The stately mansions of the Garden District, and rows of FEMA trailers behind chainlink fences topped with razor wire. Tireless community activists with Jesus in their eyes, and local politicians whose level of corruption would make Chicago cronies blush. After five days I knew it would take more than a lifetime to really know NOLA, but I can tell you a bit about the one little piece of it that I got to know best.

I got up early on Thursday morning and had the French Quarter all to myself. St Louis Cathedral, between St Ann Street and St Peter Street is peaceful and welcoming before the vendors and street performers descend on Jackson Square. The classic tourist shot (above) makes it look something like Disneyland, and later in the day, that’s an apt comparison. But at 9 am on a weekday the Square is quiet and green and meditative, and it feels very Spanish.

There was a church on the site of St Louis Cathedral since 1719, but this, the third structure, was completed in 1794, after two fires (one in 1788 and one in 1794) destroyed almost all of the city’s original French architecture. (Hence, most of the buildings in the French Quarter are actually Spanish). St Louis succumbed to extensive remodeling in 1851, and subsequent renovations after a bombing in 1906 and a hurricane in 1915, but it’s still a beautiful space with vaulted ceilings and an impressive main altar.