We drove down directly after work to the sprawl that is Atlanta and fittingly, stayed the night in one of sprawl centers called the Perimeter. The first order of business was to check out a gamer bar called “Battle and Brew.” It was hopping for being in the middle of strip-mall. People were geeking out on the computer towers playing WOW, LOL, Smite, or some type of Mmorpg, (wth.roflol). I drank the elixir of the Dark Blood of the Overload in Darkness (Rum and Ginger beer) and played Chuthlu Flux, before calling it a night.
In the morning, we MARTA’ed down to the central tourist spot. Immediately, we were kinda confused by the MARTA setup. Its pretty different from New York. We got grift’ed by some guy saying we could just use one card. Then when we got downtown, each person needed their own card to exit the station.
Anyways we made to World of Coke and awaited our indoctrination. We beat a lot of the crowds, but it was still crowded and had to wait in lines to be overly subjected to corporate propaganda, such as:
– Movie to make you feel good, and the coke is associated only with happiness.
– Friendly Cuddly polar bear pictures
– Walk through a history lesson/marketing scheme to find vault that holds the coke secret recipe.
– A cool mini bottling plant, (which makes the bottles you get at the end)
– Pop art of Coke
– 4D adventure of discovering the happiness of coke.
– Tasting many flavors of Coke across the world (Beverly was tasty)
Next we bought tickets and waited in line with the hordes of people for the Georgia Aquarium. We managed to see all the little critters and fishies. I wondered how many photos were being taken of the same fish, and never to be viewed again, especially the hours of video being recorded on people’s phones. The dolphin show was very “different”. I wasn’t expecting a magical-dolphin-god-musical show. My favorite part of the aquarium was the large tank, which contained all the whale sharks. We counted four of them. It was really cool to see them cruise around with the big Manta Rays.
We left after completing all the sights, and stopped for Korean tacos and wings in little Korea north of the city. Fun and fast, we crossed Atlanta off the list.
