Atlanta

Atlanta,

Home of Margaret Mitchell, the Braves (a baseball team), CNN and ... Coca-Cola!

Although I had already been to Atlanta when I was 13 or so, it was important to make a stop at Margaret Mitchell's house again. Since then, I had met Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler and was eager to see where those two fantastic characters had been conceived. Margaret Mitchell had an appartment in a large house and apparently referred to it as "the dump". But she nevertheless wrote big chunks of Gone with the Wind there, so I guess bad standards of living don't have a negative effect on brilliant fiction writing! Here's a photo of the dump:

The city of Atlanta seems to be proud to be the home of Gone with the Wind, which can easily be branded as the model of the Southern epic/romance/war novel. I can't thank Juliette enough for having given me that book for my birthday last year!

Now, on a less intellectual - but nonetheless very cultural - note, here's a glimpse of the Coca-cola footprint in the Atlanta landscape:

Not such an inelegant building, might I add, if it weren't for that coke bottled encased in its very own tower. I mean, really?? In this building, there is - of course - a Coca-Cola museum (which we had visited when I was 13, and decided we remembered it well enough) and a huge gift shop. There's also the founder of Coke who is there to greet visitors, or to force them to drink the brown stuff, I'm not exactly sure which:

I guess every civilisation has its own set of inspirational characters...

But this blog entry might be showing Atlanta in a slightly derivative light. It's actually a very enjoyable town, with pretty parks and many valuable cultural institutions. We were there during the Black arts festival and were greeted by a jazz band. I was also struck by the beautiful sculptures scattered around the central part of the city.