The whole experience of Hurricane Katrina was so surreal that after five years it seems to me like it never was different. I can\'t even really remember how life was before August 29, 2005. I had just graduated from high school that May and had started my first week of college. It was a very stressful week that left me wishing I could have a do-over. It was hard adjusting to such a different environment. Like the rest of the world I didn\'t have any idea what was ahead of me. Being that I grew up in the South, the fact that a hurricane was headed our way didn\'t really worry me. All I saw was a vacation ahead and some time to collect my thoughts about college. It wasn\'t until my family and I started our journey to Texas that the whole situation started to look more serious to me. I remember sitting in bumper to bumper traffic listening to the radio. The Mayor of New Orleans was on talking about how it was the hurricane of the century and if people wouldn\'t leave they would be killed in the tidal surge that would hit the city. I started to become scared and couldn\'t sleep for the next two days. My father, who is a photographer for channel six, WDSU, was stuck in New Orleans. The whole news crew had decided to leave and didn\'t tell him so he and a few others were left behind to take care of themselves. It took him a few days to get in touch with us but when he did he told us things seemed ok. \r\n Everything changed when I awoke that morning to find that levees had broken and parts of the city were under water. That\'s when the chaos broke out. I remember sitting on the bed in the little hotel seeing the city where I grew up destroyed. It was heartbreaking. I knew then that everything had changed and would never be the same again.\r\n