2 posts tagged “atlanta”
Just getting these off the phone and onto the tubes:
What are your plans for the holiday weekend?
The weekend is about half-over at this point, but here goes...
The mother-in-law and aunt-in-law came to town, so we set aside Friday night, Saturday and Sunday morning for them.
On Friday, we ate at a nearby, locally-owned Italian restaurant. This place is our current fave restaurant, and deserves its own entry at some point. It's been here since the neighborhood's 70s suburbia heyday, largely unchanged, I'm guessing. The food is delicious and plentiful, the staff is friendly and good-looking, and there's enough fake brick on the walls to satisfy even the pickiest old person. Yet there's hardly ever a wait, while just a quarter of a mile away, the corpulent line for the Olive Garden stretches out the door.
The plan for Saturday was to do some dog rescue business in the morning (introducing foster puppies to prospective homes), then eat lunch, and then go to either the Georgia Aquarium or the World of Coke. All went according to plan. We did the World of Coke, since the aquarium didn't have any open reservations online. Watch this space for a blistering post on the Georgia Aquarium in the future.
I would like to be witty and insightul here, but don't have a ton to say about the World of Coke. Basically, it's one of those places you go, just so you can stop thinking, "Gee, I wonder what it's like inside that World of Coke thingy." Not completely lame, but entirely forgettable. You pay $9 to wander through one giant Coke ad for two hours.
There were some good finds, like a 19th century advertisement boasting that Coca-Cola "makes teeth look their cleanest and whitest," but the marketing people had obviously been through to scrub out most of the dirty stuff. I didn't see one mention of cocaine, for example, and New Coke was discretely tucked into about two square feet of display space. According to the World O' Coke, this incident was noteworthy as "an unprecedented display of consumer loyalty," not, as I had naively believed, "a moronic business blunder of biblical proportions."
If I were in charge of this place, I would tilt everything about 20 degrees toward weird and scandalous. Come on, people: we love your stupid beverage and will buy whatever you tell us to. You can afford to admit your dirty past. Heck, I would even make up some stuff to keep everybody entertained. ("Did you know Coca-Cola was the official beverage of the Japanese Internment Camps?")
So, I give it a solid shrugged shoulders. In the old timey soda fountain, the inspirational beverage historian asked the crowd, "Has anyone been to the World of Coke before?" Several people raised their hands. "What a strange thing to do twice in one's life," I pondered, as the hulking, sweaty family beside me pressed me against the wall.
After that, we played with puppies more and ate some Thai food.
This morning, we went to brunch at a new nearby "diner." While "diner" is clearly in this restaurant's name, it's actually a medium-schmancy steak and seafood sort of place. When I go to a diner, I want to see tons of chrome, red sparkly vinyl, laminated menus and toothless, chain-smoking, salt-of-the-earth waitresses. I want the option to both cover and smother everything on the menu, and I want a Jabba-size platter of carbs for five bucks. The food here was very good though, so we'll be back.
Then we played with the puppies some more, sent the relatives on their way and walked Jenkins round the neighborhood. That brings us up the present era.
High-level objectives for the rest of the weekend:
- See "Little Miss Sunshine"
- Watch the Deadwood season finale
- Do some homework
- Clean up more puppy poop
- Enjoy a refreshing Coca-Cola, the world's favorite carbonated beverage
UPDATE: I'm getting reports that I actually already watched the Deadwood finale, last week. So, I'm ahead of the game on my list.
