Georgia Day 1 - Drinks, Delis, and Disease Control
I started today by getting coffee at Golden Drops Cafe in Decatur. My friend Ian, one of the college buddies I stayed with, highly recommended the place. He would have gone with me, but he had two different big papers for his Ph.D program due tomorrow so I kinda got why he might want to stay at home. The cafe completely lived up to Ian's hype. It's a small, cozy place, the pet project of one man from the Dominican Republican who's been making coffee for over 17 years all over the world and dreamed of bringing his passion and his family to the US. Everything about the place is completely hand-crafted and artisanal, but at normal coffee shop prices. The coffee is all imported from one specific farm in El Salvador and roasted to perfection. At Victor, the owner's, suggestion I got an iced Golden Latte (a hint of cinnamon and ginger). I also couldn't resist a chicken empanada handmade by Victor's parents. Victor also gave me a special house salsa which he assured me I would love. Never once during this meal did he lead me astray. Both the coffee and the empanada were perfect, and oddly complimentary to one another. I also loved the ambience created by the little round lamps hanging from the ceiling, presumably the titular golden drops. A less permanent but the nonetheless fun addition to the general setting was group of mothers with tiny babies having some kind of meeting together. It was adorable, but it did make me feel a little self-conscious about watching the new season of Ash Vs. Evil Dead while I was writing. It's a great show, but not exactly appropriate for tiny babies. All in all, I really loved this place and I wish Victor and his family the utmost success. It's always great to see people doing what they love.
After breakfast, I went to the CDC Museum in Atlanta. It's free, but a part of the actual CDC compound which means you will have to go through a security checkpoint to get in, so maybe leave your bombs and guns in the car. I was really excited to get to see the CDC now, because this was right when the new guidelines got passed for what they could and couldn't say in their proposals, so I wanted to give them a little support in this their hour of need.
The big main special exhibit was all about the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014-2016. It was a really fascinating and thorough exhibit that traced the spread of the disease and the response to it from every angle. I really liked how the exhibit celebrated the CDC's role in the eventual containment of the virus while also not shying away from criticisms of their own handling of the situation, citing both the successes and failures as valuable lessons in what to do should something like this happen again. The two biggest mistakes in hindsight were that the rest of the world, CDC included, did not get involved nearly fast enough due to stupid bureaucracies, and that many of the African countries where they had to establish medical centers and outposts probably should have those set up years ago before they became a dire necessity. On the positive, once the CDC got involved they did do some amazing improvisation in developing new tools and practices for managing this horrible outbreak. One of the coolest things to me was that they worked with local religious leaders to develop a way to safely and sanitarily dispose of infected corpses while being respectful of traditional burial rites. Taking into account people's religious practices in whatever region you're working in seems like an easy enough thing to not think of in a medical context, but it was really crucial for managing the outbreak, partially because certain religious traditions like laying hands on a corpse to pray for them ran the risk of actually increasing transmission, and partly because working within people's religious contexts makes it much easier for medical professionals to actually relay information to them through trusted community leaders and more easily gain local support in disease management. It's amazing how every step of society plays a crucial role in effectively managing an outbreak of this magnitude, which becomes especially difficult when you consider that by the time the CDC got involved it had already spread to several different countries with vastly different social customs and access to resources. It's so important to actually have the people of whatever country you're in on board with your management plan, because even with the best of intentions by medical professionals, the fact that they're coming in from outside gives people every reason to be legitimately skeptical until it's proven that the medical and governmental agents are trustworthy. Case in point: a British Agency in one African country (my notes weren't good enough for me to get the specifics) tried to impose a forced quarantine thinking that this would be faster and save more lives, but it actually caused people to panic and riot (I'm sure the Europeans also probably didn't adequately explain why the quarantine was happening, so for all intents and purposes it just looked like people were being rounded up) and this just created more problems on top of the pre-existing outbreak. Meanwhile agencies that worked with communities to create voluntary quarantines had much better reductions in disease transmission.
My favorite thing in this exhibit though was this political cartoon, about the very overblown (and pretty racist honestly) panicking in America about a potential Ebola outbreak here. I remember all that happening then, even if I wasn't aware of all the interesting behind the scenes stuff going, and I thought people were being ridiculous and that time and in hindsight I still think that. I love though that CDC put up a cartoon where a CDC official is saying "We Can't contain the idiocy outbreak" because if that isn't the most wonderfully passive aggressive statement you've ever seen I don't know what is.
The permanent exhibit on the bottom floor was a little walk through the history of the CDC with tons of cool artifacts and case histories of different plans and strategies that agency has employed throughout the years. The agency first started as the Communicable Disease Center during World War II to try to stop the spread of malaria among soldiers. After the war, with government backing and a few million dollars from Coca-Cola (no kidding), they partnered with Emory University and settled into their headquarters in Atlanta. Since then they've been instrumental in tackling so many different public health crises at home and abroad ranging from flu outbreaks to proper nutrition to more social diseases like domestic violence. Reading about them determining the cause of and finding treatments to different new and weird diseases was so interesting. Each study was like a scientific detective story, and it was really satisfying whenever they actually were able to isolate a single cause and eradicate it, such a weird fever that killed 30 people in Philly during the 70s that was eventually traced to being caused by a new bacteria that had developed in a broken hotel air-conditioning system. I was also amazed to learn that Jimmy Carter with his own NGO helped identify and almost entirely eradicate guinea worm, a parasite that been devastating communities across Africa for years and now affects less than 100 people each year! He may have been a disappointing president, but he's gotta be the most incredible post-president ever. And he's a Georgia boy as well!
Again I also give the museum credit for addressing the agency's shortcomings as well as their successes, perhaps most notably the disgusting Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, where the effects of untreated syphilis in almost 400 black men were studied long after a cure had already been discovered and not administered. It's certainly a pretty dark cloud in CDC history, but they chose to learn from it and develop new ethics guidelines to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.
One big part of the exhibit was on the handling of the AID epidemic which sort of straddles the line between a success and a failure depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, nowadays AIDS transmission rates are extremely low in the US and patients are living much longer, but on the other hand we knew for years that it was an epidemic before the government began acting on it. The CDC had classified all major routes of transmission by 1982, but Ronald Reagan did not publicly acknowledge the disease until 1985 and wouldn't let Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issue any public guidelines until 1986. That's at least four years of largely preventable American deaths that were wasted because the majority of those deaths were in the gay population and people didn't care. Reagan is largely canonized in this country, possibly one of our most beloved presidents, but he let this happen and I don't think he ever gets enough criticism for this disgusting mismanagement of a public health crisis. I'm sure my liberal bias is showing a little bit, but I hate how much people act like Reagan could do no wrong. Every president made mistakes big and small (this one is HUGE but i digress), and I think canonization on either side of the aisle is a very dangerous thing to do to these very human historical figures.
On a lighter, less soap-boxy note, my favorite part of the whole museum was easily all the art. The different pamphlets and advertisements to raise awareness and help prevent various health problems also provide a kind of wonderful look at the evolution of American pop art. Norman Rockwell did one CDC newsletter cover, sex ed for hippies mimicked contemporary psychedelic rock posters, and someone in the 90s thought, "You know who can stop AIDS? Whoopi Goldberg". I think this one of the best museums I've been in for making pretty wordy educational components also really fun and interesting to look at.
Right across from the CDC was a little shopping plaza called Emory Point. There were a lot of these signs everywhere so I knew I had to walk around.
The big draw of the plaza though was a restaurant called the General Muir which showed up on just about every Best of Atlanta food list I looked at. Part Jewish Deli and part sit down restaurant, the aesthetic is very upscale and hip but the prices are incredibly reasonable. Because Hanukkah was coming up, they had a lot of special twists on traditional Jewish staples. I couldn't resist the latke poutine, which consisted of a potato pancake (the perfect balance between crispy and fluffy) with cheese curds, house pastrami, and liberal dousing of gravy. It was decadent. It was delicious. I could barely move when I was done with it, but who am I to not get into the holiday spirit even if I am goy? To compliment my tasty lunch, I got a local beer from Creature Comforts Brewing called the Table Beer. It was the perfect lunch beer, light in alcohol high in flavor. My service was also excellent throughout, and my waitress and I bonded over me being from the Boston area because she's a lone Patriots fan awash in Falcons country. I didn't tell her I don't know anything about football (I literally had to google "Atlanta football" to nail that sweet Falcons reference), because I didn't want to spoil her feeling of solidarity. All in all, I can definitely see why this place made so many best of lists.
After lunch, I drove into downtown Atlanta to see one of their staple attractions the World of Coca Cola. Coke was born in the ATL and is still one of the biggest companies there. When something is supposedly a must see, I try not to research it too too much beforehand so I can experience it fresh. so I went into the World of Coca-Cola expecting a kind of museum and maybe a factory tour. Instead it was much more of an immersive experience. A real interesting blend of blatant commercialism, but also genuine sweetness and family fun. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was a few giant bottles of coke designed by different artists. These would be a recurring theme throughout the museum, and it was actually super impressive how many different artists were able to find unique ways for them to express their own creativity through one of the most recognizable symbols in the world.
The museum experience started with a free sample which is always a good way to start anything. This also helped to settle my stomach a little bit after such a massive lunch. From there we walked into a big waiting room packed wall to wall with different international Coca-Cola memorabilia. This room is where we got orientated and we had the layout of the rest of the museum explained to us by a really charismatic employee. He gave us a lot of recommendations for his favorite things to try in the tasting room when we got to it, and also explained that this room had the oldest artifact in it of the whole museum: a very unassuming syrup bowl from the 19th century.
After the orientation, we watched a short sweet video called Moments of Happiness that, while definitely propaganda for coke, also just showed a lot of fun footage of people around the world trying crazy things like sky diving, proposing on a hot air balloon, and trying to make a basket from a top floor in a hotel so it was still pretty enjoyable.
After that we entered the main lobby of the museum where you could take move on to other exhibits or you could take pictures with Coke's Polar Bear Mascot. Something about that costume though made me think I'd rather try my chances with an actual live polar bear.
The first exhibit I went to was all about the early origins and the secret recipe for Coca Cola. I actually liked all the historical stuff where they talked about all the experimentations Old-Timey Pharmacists would do to try to get people coming into their shops and drinking their fountain drinks. I also liked the wall of historical imitators who claimed to have cracked the secret recipe, but time and again could not live up to the real thing. All the secrecy about the recipe seems like it made a ton of sense in the early days, but it just seems a little bit silly now which I think Coke kinda leans into seeing as how the exhibit ends with you visiting a massive metal vault that supposedly contains the recipe. It would be a bit of an overkill if it only contained a small sheet of paper, but I think that's part of the charm. Supposedly only two people in the world at any given time know the recipe which is a fun bit of company folklore. All that stuff interested me much more than the interactive parts of the exhibit, where you'd have to pretend to be a secret agent trying to get to the vault and play little games. The little kids that were there seemed to really love it though, and they probably didn't care about the historical stuff so I guess it kind of evens out demographics wise.
The next exhibit was on the history of Coca-Cola more as a company as it gradually expanded to take over the world. Similarly to the CDC pamphlets, I liked this because I got a kick out of seeing different snap shots of American life and sensibilities through the decades as reflected by changing advertisements. My favorite fact was that Coke had a competition for people to design a distinct bottle, so that you always recognize their product even in the dark. I never noticed before how nothing else is quite shaped like their glass bottles. Those sly bastards.
After that, I got to see the bottling process at a functional mini-factory inside the museum. I'll be honest at this point, I was getting a little bit sleepy so I didn't really read any of the descriptions of what was going on, but it was just kinda fun and a little bit mesmerizing to just watch robots do their thing for a bit. We are living in the future
Next up, I combatted my sleepiness by getting a little caffein boost in the tasting room. They had special soda fountains from every continent (except Australia and Antarctica), and I think I tried at least a small sample of every single one which was both really fun and also a little gross by the end. That being said this was possibly my favorite part of the whole experience because it was so fascinating to see which flavors are popular all over the world. In general, I think the fountain with drinks from Asia won me over the most across the board. My favorite variant in the whole place was an Apple Kiwi Fanta from Thailand (I wouldn't have expected that before hand) with the Melon Frosty Fanta also from Thailand coming in second. From Africa, my favorite was the Stoney Ginger Beer from Tanzania. From Latin America, I was a big fan of the Inca Kola from Peru, and from Europe I liked the Fuze Ice Tea from Georgia (not the Georgia I was currently in). The strangest drink by far was an Italian soda called Beverly which was marketed as a non-alcoholic apertif and kind of just tastes like bitters mix that you use in cocktails. Very odd.
Next up I looked at a small exhibit on modern art approaches to Coca Cola which was kind of fun and also where the majority of those big coke bottles from before were housed.
The last two exhibits were very video focused. One was a small theater where they would play coke commercials from all around the world. I liked this a lot, because if you think American commercials are kind of strange, the addition of a slight language barrier makes everything that much more surreal and bizarre.
Last and also quite least for me was a 4-D movie about a mad scientist trying to determine the secret ingredient for coke. Spoiler alert: All of us were the real secret ingredient all along. (in a corny "we love our customers" way, not in a Soylent Green way). This one was definitely more for the kids, and for any adults going not with young ones, I'd say skip it. Other than that though, I really must say I enjoyed myself more than I was expecting at the World Coca-Cola
After the museum, I got some coffee while I waited to meet up with friends. I went to a nice little cafe called Cafe Lucia. It was a bit more standard than my fancy coffee from the morning, but my barista was really friendly and the bathroom had this massive painting of Barack Obama as a vampire (Baracula) so I was pretty happy with the place.
At the Cafe, I met up with a different friend from college than ones I was staying with. I think a lot of recent college grads are starting to migrate towards Atlanta because there's a lot of cool new business starting up and the cost of living is much lower than most other large cities. My friend Mike, whom I was meeting, was actually one of my first friend's at college because he was also from MA and had a few friends in common with me, so we got to meet up a few times before we even started at little accepted student meet ups. I was so glad when I first met him, because he was another public school kid from a solidly middle class background like me, and I had been terrified that I wasn't going to find any of those at Harvard. He was also the guy I stayed with up in Myrtle Beach during my very first week of this whole weird adventure, so it was really nice to get to meet up with him again.
He took me to see his new apartment now that he's officially a grown up with a real job. He got changed out his work clothes, and we split a quick beer (Sweetwater IPA) before heading out to meet up Katie and Ian (the friends I was staying with). Mike had met both of them before,but didn't know them super well because we had all been in the band together at some point, but Mike had to quit early on because he got into an a Capella group that became too big a commitment to do both. They all re-hit it off though, and it was really nice to be truly surrounded by friends for the first time in a while.
We got dinner a place near where the night's open mic would be called Holeman and Finch Public House. Similar to the General Muir, the aesthetic of the place was super Ritzy, but the prices were more like Ritz Crackers. The waiter said his favorite thing on the menu was the shrimp toast so I felt obligated to try it. I was steered correctly with the shrimp and bacon covered toast completely rocking my tastebuds. The creole sauce it was smothered in was super good, but also much spicier than I am accustomed to shrimp or toast being so I ended up downing a lot of water as well as local lager that I forgot the name of. The meal also opened with one of the best buttery rolls, I have ever had, and I was disappointed by how fast I ate it. Mike also got the shrimp toast, and handled the spiciness a lot better, so perhaps I am a wimp. Ian got a pork belly confit that looked scrumptious, and Katie got some mighty fine looking fish and chips. As fancy as all the meals looked, I have to stress again that everything was under $15. The place also had a really cool bathroom because there was a big sliding door that reminded me of a bank vault. I loved it.
After dinner, we said goodbye to Ian so he could work on his papers, and Katie, Mike, and I went to the Hole in the Wall bar for the night's open mic. We got there a little too early so we killed time at the next door Red Martini Lounge. It was much more of a hip club than I'm used to being in, but there was some promotion with Ciroc where they were giving away free vodka the whole night. I don't really love vodka, but I do love a bargain.
With a nice little vodka buzz, we made our way to the Hole in the Wall. The bar lived up to its name, in that it was very small and unassuming. But like any good hole in the wall place, the drink selection and service were top notch. We had one of the friendliest bartenders I've ever encountered, and he kept us entertained and inebriated the whole night (well actually I stopped drinking fairly early because I was driving the whole crew home, but if I had been able to drink he wouldn't have let me down) He even gave us a few free drinks because he wanted to try out new ideas for cocktails and he needed guinea pigs. It was a blast.
The mic itself was fun, but definitely more of a "for comics" mic. Everyone got 10 minutes, which is nice for comics because you get to try out lots of new stuff, but not necessarily nice for the audience because when you have 10 new minutes of material, it's not all going to be good. I am confident that if every comic there had done the best five minutes of their sets they would have killed, but as it were at ten minutes a pop it was a kind of a long night even though there weren't that many comics.
It didn't help that I got bumped further down the list even though I signed up early because the host didn't recognize my name. That might sound like he did something kinda crummy when I write it out, but really that's actually on me, because it's polite to introduce yourself to the host in a new place, and as soon as I wised up and did that he put me up a lot sooner.
All that being said, there was still a lot of funny going on. Some of my favorite lines from the night:
Mississippiboy (the host and probably my favorite comic of the night)- I'm getting fatter. I know this because I've got girls asking to suck my titties
DJ (didn't catch a last name)- Cross country is one of those sports where no matter how good you get, you're still a virgin.
Inyozee (I can't have spelled that correctly) - I was at a grocery story and I talked to an old lady so long she died... I had to kill her though!
My own set went pretty well given how tired the audience was at that point. I noticed that a lot of the comics before me had tried to used their extended set times to try to work out longer stories, which makes a lot of sense, but it meant there weren't a lot of pure jokes in the night. When there were, like the ones above, they went really well, so I decided when I got up I wouldn't try any long sets and just rattle off short bits. I also had the advantage that all my material was new for this crowd, so I was more able to just do ten minutes of jokes I was pretty confident in. I did try some new things and things I hadn't done in a while, because I had a hunch that the crowd would like them, because they were already digging some of the shorter dirtier jokes I had done. Normally when I do my string of dirty jokes, I put one in the middle that tends to not do as well, but for some reason here It not only did the best of all the dirty jokes, but probably got the best reaction of my whole set. I guess it just really goes to show you that every audience is totally different.
Because it was kinda late by the time I finished, my friends got their last drinks from our friendly bartender. We stayed for one more comic, and then I drove them both home. Considering I only had this one full day in Atlanta before I was heading home for the holidays, I'd say I made the most of it.
Favorite Random Sightings: The Righteous Room; "Food That Pleases"
Regional Observations: I said yesterday that Columbia, SC was a deceptively large city. Atlanta is a very obviously huge city. I hadn't even realized that I hadn't seen a city this big since Richmond. It felt kinda comforting in a weird way being in the bustle of things again.
Albums Listened To: Manifesto by Jug (this is a punk band that I met way back at that music/comedy open mic in Fryeburg, Maine. It's got a kinda folky vibe to it, that I really like. Maybe check out their bandcamp: https://jugpunx.bandcamp.com/); Mantras for Madmen by Harry Manx (weird fun mix of blues and Indian folk music); Marcy Playground by Marcy Playground (just Sex and Candy, because I don't know any other songs by them)
People's Favorite Jokes:
This old couple was celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary and they were trying to figure out what to do. The wife suggested that they go to church and renew their vows. The husband wanted to go to Outback Steakhouse, but they both agreed that no matter what they would have sex that night. So they compromised and had sex out back behind the church.
Songs of the Day:
This is cheating a little bit, but I saw them do this live and I love their cover
