Day 8 - Peak Tourism
Atlanta
A day exploring the joys of Atlanta today. It started off with some homeless guy spotting our directional confusion and appointing himself as our tour guide. To be fair he was very engaging and well spoken and gave me a detailed lecture on the socio-economic shortcomings of Atlanta. I couldn't help but agree and (much as I am a guest in the country and don't feel particularly inclined to comment), with all that is going on here at the moment I can't help thinking that they would be better fixing the present rather than trying to fix the past. Anyway, our guide then relieved me of slightly more money than I had intended. Ethan said it was the politest mugging ever, but given that we were just about to drop $80 to visit an aquarium, I couldn't really begrudge a homeless guy a meal.
The aquarium is quite spectacular, especially the vast tank with 4 whale sharks in there. They are pretty impressive beasts.
Some of the other denizens were creepier or cuter to various degrees
What? Not another tourist...
Onwards to the Coca-Cola museum. I have to admit, that I couldn't really see the point of this place other than to extract money from people with sugar addictions. Having been there, I don't see any reason to change my view. Ethan has wanted to visit this place for years, particularly the hall where you can try all of the drinks that Coke make around the world. Ironically, his cold meant that he couldn't actually taste most of them. I think that the Indian one that tasted like TCP got through though - probably did his throat some good too! I hadn't realised that they actually had a Coke dispenser on the space shuttle.
Evening was given over to a trip to the baseball to watch Ethan's favourite team the Atlanta Braves. That was quite an experience and the Braves won which was all good.
I was surprised to see that, given the various racial tensions which are bubbling just under the surface here, noone thought twice about the celebration involving a chant and dodgy tomahawk motion of the hand.
https://youtu.be/E-cKlNUcdo0
Go figure.