Atlanta Lowdown

Atlanta is a fragmented city. The Atlanta you visit today may have nothing in common with the Atlanta you’ll see tomorrow. The aim of this journal is to show you some of the less publicly known sides of the city.

Atlanta's more famous hot spots (like the über-commercial World of Coke or the all-the-baseball-caps-you-can-wear scene at some of the allegedly authentic blues clubs) can be somewhat depressing to independent travelers. For visitors who prefer to avoid such things, I suggest:

--a show at the Center for Puppetry Arts; they have shows aimed at adults, but their children's performances are plenty sophisticated in their own right

--The lavish orchid house of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens

--The Atlanta Zoo

--The Carter Center, a last bastion of liberalism in the middle of an otherwise bright-red state

--and lots and lots and lots of good restaurants. Really, Atlanta’s major attraction should be as a city to eat in.

Of course, that’s not to say that the more hyped attractions don’t have their charm; the Atlanta Cyclorama, conveniently located next to the zoo, is a particularly bizarre experience.

Quick Tips:

I really advise going to see a show at the Center for Puppetry Arts, even if you think it looks like it's only for kids. If you don't have time for a show, at least look at the museum.

Packing: It rains here year round. And when it's hot outside, they crank up the air conditioners to about 60°F. It's always a good idea to bring a sweater.

Best Way To Get Around:

The best way is by driving. MARTA (rail and bus) may get you there eventually, depending on where you're going, but this is very much a car-based city.

Be aware that the rumors are true; rush hour goes from about 7 to 10am and about 4 to 7pm. This only sounds like a joke. You won't be laughing if you find yourself on I-85 at 5pm on a Thursday afternoon.

Sweet Lime is a hip-yet-friendly little Asian fusion restaurant located in Little Five Points.

The initial attraction at Sweet Lime is the $1 sushi –- that’s $1 per piece of nigiri, or $1.50 for three pieces of a roll. Depending on how hungry you are, a full meal from the $1-sushi menu can set you back $13-$15 per person, but that’s still cheap, compared with most sushi places. These prices are available until 7pm most nights, and all night on Mondays.

Lovely though it is, the $1-sushi menu is not the whole story. Delectable as the cheap California rolls and pieces of wamake nigiri (that’s seaweed salad on rice, if you’re wondering) are, the full sushi menu has far more expansive (and only somewhat more expensive) options: a spicy shrimp roll (six pieces for about $6.50), the taste of which had my partner widening his eyes; a veggie tempura roll ($5); some really fantastic vegetarian kyoza (dumplings, with an unusual molasses-y dipping sauce); and a range of entrées (mostly fish, prices around $12). The appetizers are particularly unusual: there’s a pomegranate salsa ($6), for example, and roti with peanut and honey sauce ($5). We haven’t tried them all yet, but everything we have eaten at Sweet Lime has been great, with a tendency towards the tangy and sweet.

There’s also an exciting martini menu, with prices ranging from $6.50-$8 and flavors like Thai Iced Tea and Georgia Peach. I can’t vouch for the martinis myself, having stuck to the $4 plum wine –- the kind that comes in a jar, complete with plum. Yummy.

The Atlanta Diner is a big silver and pink restaurant on North Druid Hills Road just south of Buford Highway and just north of the entrance ramps to I-85. Unlike almost everywhere else in Atlanta, the diner is open 24 hours. Whenever we’ve been there, it’s been echoingly empty, but I can only assume that must be busy at some point or it wouldn’t still be operating.

At first glance, the Atlanta Diner seems a respectable but unremarkable example of its kind: it has the usual array of 24-hour breakfast options (pancakes, French toast, omelets, etc.) in the usual price ranges ($4 to $7, depending on what you get and how much bacon you get with it) and most of the usual diner entrées, like moussaka and spanakopita, as well as burgers and spaghetti. The diner has more vegetarian options than many such places, as there’s a tasty grilled portabella burger and a veggie Reuben (just a standard veggie burger, but with sauerkraut, cheese, and dressing); both are served with fries for less than $7. My carnivorous partner likes their real corned-beef Reuben. There’s a case full of dryish looking pies and mammoth carrot cakes, but we haven’t tried them.

The interesting thing about the diner is that it seems to be genuinely pan-ethnic. While most diners in the US (...well, in the northeast, where I've been to a lot of diners...) tend to be run by Greeks who offer their own cuisine along with some American and Italian standbys, the Atlanta Diner clearly has roots which extend well beyond Europe. Spaghetti, moussaka, and bacon not withstanding, the waitresses often wear Muslim headscarves, and there's an unusually extensive array of North Indian or Pakistani offerings on the menu, too. These dishes are not strikingly authentic, but they're good; it's impossible to tell, when you're eating a curry and your companion is eating a Reuben, whether either of them is an example of the cook's native cuisine.

In its way, the Atlanta Diner turns out to be an example of both the good and the bad sides of Atlanta pan-ethnicism. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews (read: spanakopita, aloo gobi, and Reubens) coexisting peacefully is a wonderful sight; on the other hand, it would be nice if it were a little less grubby.

The World of Coca-Cola is entirely unlike any other museum I have ever been to in that it is designed to celebrate its subject matter without actually teaching museum-goers anything about it. There isn't all that much to say about Coke from a scientific point of view, and what there is to say, the Coke board keeps rigorously secret in order to safeguard the soda's formula. So, instead of showing you what the plant is like or how carbonization works or anything like that, the World of Coke is actually a very thorough lesson in the history of advertising.

From the moment you step in the shiny red-and-white portal (and it's a long wait to get there on weekends), you are surrounded by Coke promotions. These include a celebratory film showing how Coke has covered the globe, complete with shots of tribesmen in the Sahara drinking Cokes while perched on the backs of camels - the colors of the film are beautiful, and the exoticism is straight out of Orientalism. Cynics may watch the film thinking "is there nowhere left unsullied?" but much of the audience seems to find the film inspiring, an emblem of the inexorable spread of progress and democracy.

The real triumph, however, is in the history of Coke's advertisements. It turns out that Coke more or less invented the modern advertising campaign, and its evolution from the beverage's first decorous foray into marketing in 1886 to the splashy music videos of the 1980s is fascinating to watch, especially as so much of the marketing is explicitly aimed at placing Coke smack in the middle of a "normal" middle-class American lifestyle. As exhibits change over the decades, the vision of what constitutes "normality" changes, but there is invariably a slender blonde woman in fashionable clothes happily offering a coke to her boyfriend somewhere in each display. Sometimes the boyfriend is very present, as with the swimsuit-clad lads of the 1950s, and sometimes he is only implicit, as in the heart-tugging wartime poster of a girl carrying a shopping bag and thinking, "He's coming home!" But the message is constant: Coke is an inseparable part of American love as well as American life.

If all this leaves you thirsty, you're in luck. The exhibit ends with a wall of self-serve soda fountains featuring flavors of Coke and Coke products from around the world. These vary from an amazingly bitter soda sold in Italy to -- I admit -- a very tasty lychee-flavored drink sold in Indonesia. The brave of heart can try combining the flavors, but the taste bud-challenged can admire the chaos as museum-goers jostle for access to the more popular flavors and try to dislodge their shoes from the very sticky floor.

And after all that marketing, the museum lets out -- where else? -- into a gift shop full of Coke glasses, key chains, and red-sweatered polar bears. Resist if you can.

The Carter Center is a large complex set in beautiful grounds housing the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, a museum commemorating Carter's life and presidency, and the center itself, a non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting peace and democracy around the world.

A visit to the Carter Center should start with a walk through the grounds. The center's buildings, all of which look like recently landed UFOs, are set on the top of some lovely rolling hills overlooking two pretty lakes. There's a koi pond containing spectacular fish (rumor has it that they're worth $25,000 each, although it's hard to imagine how you could sell one on the black market) and a sloping Japanese garden. In various places around the grounds there are statues that were given to President Carter to commemorate various good works: these range from a rather comical iron silhouette of an elk, memorializing the creation of some national park in Alaska, to a really moving statue of an old man being led by a young boy, in honor of the Carter Center's work in eradicating river blindness.

The museum, too, is a blend of rather comic politics and real, earnest good works. The exhibits are pretty predictable: information about Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter's childhoods, marriage, and career, culminating in the White House, with exhibits on the various crises’ and achievements during the Carter presidency. These seem to be handled pretty well. Naturally, the museum is not likely to be highly critical of Carter's work, but it doesn't gloss over the problems of the energy or hostage crises. But there's also some fun stuff, including a mock-up of the Oval Office containing a replica of the spectacular carved desk Carter used during his presidency. (The White House still owns the original, which was made out of timber taken from a captured French ship.)

The grounds are lovely and the museum is interesting, but the most appealing and unusual aspect of the Carter Center is not open to tourists. Carter's presidency is long over, but his work goes on, in the form of the Center's many projects promoting sustainable development, health programs, and democratic processes around the world. The center provides mediators to help resolve countries' internal conflicts, sends observers to help ensure fairness in contested elections, and works with medical suppliers to distribute medicine to prevent river blindness and provide treatment for guinea worm (a really loathsome parasite). There's a large internship program, so the enthusiastic young person you run into in the hallway may well be about to fly out to help build the Liberian governmental infrastructure. It's an exciting place.

The Center for Puppetry Arts, located at 1404 Spring St. NW (that's the intersection of Spring St and 18th St.), is entirely true to its name: it is a meeting place for people who are interested in puppetry as a real art form. Sure, this is a good place to take the kids on a weekend afternoon, but it's also a great place to see innovative, inventive, beautiful, and sometimes very disturbing theater. The Center is one of Atlanta's major -- and most unusual -- artistic assets: an exciting, innovative, and best of all, reliable theater for both children and adults.

The Center has a range of attractions. First, because it is always there, is the museum, a small but charming collection of puppet exhibits. These include technical exhibits on how different kinds of puppets work (stick puppets, marionettes, or animatronic puppets, for example); cultural exhibits showing Balinese shadow puppets, African body puppets, and Rajasthani marionettes; and famous puppets, including Muppets and one of the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal. Many of the puppets are very beautiful, and some are a bit creepy; the best exhibits include interactive elements--the best of which I can't describe, as part of the fun is figuring out what the exhibits do. Occasionally, alas, the interactive elements break or malfunction, but even when this is the case the museum remains interesting and beautiful.

But the real point, of course, is the puppetry shows. These range from productions of Sleeping Beauty for the ages 4-10 crowd to adult-only productions of the Tales of Edgar Allen Poe. We've seen some of each, and the production quality has always been very high. The children's shows are lighthearted but smart, and the Poe production (which we saw one Halloween) was brilliant; both of these were produced by the Center's artists in residence. We were slightly disappointed by a traveling production of The Firebird we saw there this winter (while the puppets themselves were up to the usual standard, the script was strangely sententious), but that was an aberration from the Center's otherwise consistently excellent work.

The Center also runs puppet-making workshops and Q&A sessions with the puppeteers; these are definitely worth sticking around for.

The box office can be reached online or at 404-873-3391. Ticket prices vary by show, but are in the range of $14-$18 per adult.