Hello all.
Phew, what a day yesterday. As I said, JonXP and I headed into Atlanta downtown, which is to say we traveled from one city to another, slightly bigger city, via a city. We took the rudimentary-but-gets-the-job-done rail system in, and found ourselves at Five Points, the central station. Just outside is the entrance to the Underground, which is really pretty cool. In the Civil War, Atlanta was burned to the ground by the famous Union General Sherman, as forever immortalized by Gone With The Wind. When the time came to rebuild, instead of clearing out the rubble that was left, they built right over it. The space below the street is now a shopping centre with a lot of the original brickwork still on show. Very interesting, but hellishly difficult to photograph.
From there we traveled on to the CNN International Headquarters, which actually proved to be absolutely fascinating. The tour wasn’t much in the way of content, but what was there was pretty great. After ascending on the world’s longest freestanding escalator into a giant globe, we walked along a little corridor at the back of the studio where a show was going out live that very minute (re: Obama’s healthcare speech). It’s highly surreal to see the back of the anchorman as the autocue scrolls away in front, with the weatherman away to the side. Also, you know how you always see the people on computers in the office behind the anchors, and everyone thinks it’s a fake? Well, it’s not. In fact, I got to see possibly the most Unbearable Person On Earth at one of the desks. A tubby early-thirties chap with long frizzy dark blonde hair and an excruciatingly fastidious manner. Really quite something.
Anyway, after this we visited the Coke museum, but decided not to go in, and then trundled over to Little Five Points, which is a small bohemian enclave lurking a little way from the centre of town, smoking a spliff and trying not to draw attention to itself. Very cool place, reminded me a lot of those weird little areas in London that somehow house thirty different tattoo parlours on one street.
Everywhere has ‘tobacco accessories’ on sale, which is exactly what you think it is. Some of them are really very inventive. We then went to Vortex, which is the skull-adorned place from the previous post. Inside, the objective as I understand it is to eat the food before it eats you, though the decor does its best to distract.
After heading home and sloughing off the city from myself, I headed out once again and joined up with Sara Lynn and Aneurhythmia for the night. We went to a nice place out on the fringes of town, where I could get a good glass of white wine, and then headed to Aneurhythmia’s place for smash bros. and lounging around, and also somewhere to crash. This morning I met Sara’s cat, who is teething, and had the ubiquitous ‘biscuits’, which turned out to be scones. All very tasty. After a brief jaunt in the park, though, it was time to come back here to Jon’s place.
And now we’re off again, to eat copious amounts of barbecue.
Tomorrow is an all-day drive to New Orleans, where I’m staying for the first time in hostel accommodation, so it’ll be a while until you next hear from me. But news shall follow!
‘Til next time.