I’m Peachy Today: I’ve got Georgia on my mind!

And no, not საქართველო, but Georgia the state in the United States. Specifically Atlanta.

I’m in Atlanta to visit Pseduo Wife I and her “real husband”. They moved to Hotlanta so that he could pursue higher education—which, quite frankly, is probably the only reason to have anything to do with either Atlanta, or Georgia the state in the United States.

Before this journey I’d never given either a second thought beyond thinking of Atlanta as a place where people change planes—the idea of leaving the airport is as foreign to me as the idea that there’s anything more to the Vatican than closet homosexuals, lots of pedophiles, all headed by a Nazi.

Well, that’s a lie: Atlanta is where the repetitive 24 hours news channel CNN repeats all of its news repetitively in order to fill 1,440 minutes a day with the same news every five minutes or so in case you tuned in now instead of five minutes ago or five minutes from now, or, as I’ve noticed, the same news at 7 am and 7 pm, thus ensuring that you’re always updated on what was said earlier and what will be said later right now.

Atlanta is also home to the greatest gift the south ever gave the north: Coca-Cola.

That’s it.

Wait—I was in Georgia, the state in the United States, with Disenchanted on a spring break trip. What I remember most was the omnipresence of Waffle House and a religious song with lyrics that went something like, “If you die tonight where will you wake in the morning.” I was totally distracted; thankfully Disenchanted was looking out the window of the car and noticed that we needed to stop rapidly.

Anyway, I digress from what I really want to babble about: since I am essentially ignorant about all things Atlanta, once I knew I was going, I decided to find out if there’s a “there” there, if you know what I mean. After starting at the Atlanta Travel Guide, I decided that looking at websites was pointless and I looked for a paper version to order. There wasn’t any until I went to the Explore Georgia website and found a place to order information—and I ordered:

• Georgia’s Official Highway and Transportation Map
• Georgia Travel Guide
• Georgia’s African American Heritage Guide
• Georgia’s Travel Guide for Brits
• Atlanta Street Map and Visitor Guide

These are, in order: vaguely helpful, helpful, interesting, mildly amusing, and useless.

Starting with the last: I really wanted information about Atlanta since that’s where I’m going, but the provided Atlanta Street Map and Visitor Guide, printed by “where maps”, was totally useless and annoying. It’s a large fold out map, with little detail, save for the downtown inset, and riddled with commercial advertisements promoting things that I don’t care about like Hard Rock Café (there’s one in every city) and the inside CNN tour – two things that you’d have to pay me a lot of money to visit.

From there I next picked up the guide to Georgia for Brits—which was mildly amusing. It stood out because it was printed on different sized paper from the other Georgia guides. Ultimately it actually gives a pretty decent history and overview of the state. I found it amusing that in the section on shopping, the writers felt compelled to explain:

Shopping malls (large, enclosed shopping centres) are anchored by a few large department stores and occupied by dozens of smaller speciality retailers.

All-in-all, this was the most interesting of the guides, although it didn’t really help plan my trip to Georgia.

This led me to read the all-state encompassing Georgia Travel Guide which was actually filled with lists of information that helped me pick out a few things that I want to do in Atlanta. You’ll probably hear about some of these over the next few days. The travel guide was, in general pretty good, although it took further reading for me to suddenly realize something: it’s pretty white.

This became acutely obvious to me after I picked up the African American Heritage Guide that was black—and really black. Seriously, I found only one white guy in any of the photos in the guide, including advertisements. That one white guy, I might note, was a re-enactor from Fort Jackson in Savannah—standing next to a black guy, just to ensure that readers of the guide weren’t offended.

As for the map of Georgia?

PseudoWife and I will be using it Monday to go visit something special.