Atlanta, with Coca

Stone Mountain – the mountain that appears out of nowhere

There’s something very strange about Stone Mountain: you don’t see it coming. The road runs through the trees and, at some point, an enormous piece of rock simply appears in front of you. Not a mountain range, not hills rising gradually, just a granite mountain sitting in the middle of the forest.

And it’s big. Much bigger than it looks in photos.

Stone Mountain formed more than 300 million years ago and is today surrounded by a park with forest, lakes, and trails. There’s even a roughly one-mile trail leading to the summit. We took the cable car instead.

The cable car climbs right alongside it, and it’s only from there that you really start to grasp the mountain’s size.

At the top, it’s almost all stone, with a few trees that seem to grow directly out of the granite and small pools of water gathered in hollows in the rock. Here and there, plants that have adapted to these conditions appear too – the yellow daisy, characteristic of the area.

And then comes the view. From the summit you can see for miles, and somewhere on the horizon, Atlanta appears. After entering the park barely seeing the mountain at all until it was suddenly right in front of us, it’s a little funny that once you’re up top, you can see almost everything around it.

On the way down, we took the cable car again. It wasn’t the moment to break our streak.

Little Five Points – Atlanta’s less well-behaved side

Little Five Points is a small, colorful, and very… free neighborhood. Record shops, vintage clothing, odd souvenirs, antiques, tattoo parlors, bars, street art, and all kinds of characters. The kind of place where, after a few minutes, you stop wondering whether a particular outfit is a costume or just how that person left the house.

That seems to be exactly what Little Five Points is known for. It’s considered Atlanta’s bohemian, alternative neighborhood, home to more than 100 independent businesses and a long tradition of music and alternative culture.

We caught some live street music too. On a small side street, among shops and patios, a stage had been set up; people wandered by, stopped to listen, ate, drank something, or simply watched everyone else. And honestly, there was plenty to watch. 😄

Little Five Points seems to have a very serious relationship with music. There are independent record stores, theaters and concert venues, and street performances and events are part of the neighborhood’s identity.

And since we couldn’t visit an alternative American neighborhood without testing the food too, we stopped at The Vortex.

The place is hard to miss — its famous entrance is a giant skull — and the inside doesn’t get any more conventional. Even the menu opens with a page titled „Stuff You Really Need to Know,” with an impressive list of rules. One of them is simple: the venue is 21+.

We focused on the important things, though: the burgers. And they arrived exactly as you’d expect from a place like this – big, loaded, served with fries, and with absolutely no intention of being diet food.

So Little Five Points stuck with us as a piece of Atlanta very different from everything we’d seen so far: more colorful, louder, a bit odd, and very relaxed.

Piedmont Park – Atlanta from the edge of the lake

At Piedmont Park, the first surprise came before we even entered the park itself: the parking lot is basically inside the park. A covered, multi-level garage that lets you straight out into the green space.

And it wasn’t just us who thought it was well hidden. The garage has 765 spaces and is built into the slope. Once we stepped out of it, we found a park that seems to be used for absolutely everything. People running, walking, sitting on the grass, meeting up, playing sports. We also passed by the Active Oval, home to a running track, soccer and volleyball fields, and two softball diamonds.

And then there are the houses. Along some of the streets bordering the park, the green space ends and the yards of gorgeous villas begin right away. Porches, columns, manicured gardens – houses we admittedly looked at a bit longer than was probably polite. 😄

But maybe what we loved most was the evening atmosphere. People greeted each other on the paths, joggers kept doing their laps, couples strolled by, there was even someone serenading on the bridge of locks. Some things, apparently, aren’t just in the movies.

In the middle of the park is Lake Clara Meer, a lake landscaped as far back as the 19th century. And from its shore comes one of our favorite images from Atlanta: water and trees in the foreground, the city skyline rising behind them. The park even has a spot officially marked as the Skyline Picture Point, so apparently we weren’t the only ones stopping there for a photo.

I think this is where we saw a different Atlanta than the one in Little Five Points: quieter, greener, and very much lived-in. Not a park you just pass through as a tourist, but one where people genuinely spend their evenings.

World of Coca-Cola – this time, with Coca

Since we were in Atlanta anyway, it was hard to skip World of Coca-Cola. Especially since this time we were joined by our colleague, Oana Coca. Yes. Coca at Coca-Cola. Some coincidences simply have to be used. 😄

The museum feels more like a Coca-Cola experience than a museum in the classic sense. You walk through the brand’s history, old ads and objects, see how the packaging has changed over time, and find Coca-Cola bottles turned into genuine works of art.

And, of course, there’s the secret formula, kept in a vault. Because a recipe everyone already knows wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. But the part we were really waiting for came at the end: Taste It!

There, you can sample more than 100 drinks from the Coca-Cola portfolio, from different corners of the world. Glass in hand, you can go from North America to Asia, Africa, Europe, or Latin America. And we tasted. Methodically, at first. A little of everything. After a few glasses, we started sorting them into categories: „good,” „interesting,” „weird,” and „why would anyone drink this?” We even found Romania: Sprite. Not quite the international revelation we were hoping for, but at least we were represented.

We left with two conclusions: there are far more Coca-Cola drinks in the world than we ever knew about, and if you show up at World of Coca-Cola with Oana Coca, a group photo is mandatory.

Atlanta, beyond the sights

We managed to see the city beyond the tourist attractions. One of the first things we noticed was its diversity. Atlanta has one of the largest Black communities among major American cities, and today about 46% of the city’s population is African American.

But something else caught our attention too, something harder to put into a statistic. In the places we passed through, groups sometimes seemed surprisingly separate. In some of the pricier restaurants we saw mostly white customers, while in fast-food places and other parts of the city the proportions seemed almost reversed. We can’t draw conclusions about an entire city from a few visits, but the difference was visible enough that we noticed it.

In the evening, though, Atlanta changes. Restaurants and bars fill up, music spills out of venues, the streets fill with people, and downtown comes much more alive. At Amalfi, for instance, we were told the wait for a table was nearly two hours. We decided the pizza, however good, could wait for another visit.

Instead, we ended up at Hard Rock Cafe Atlanta. Burgers, guitars, photos, and memorabilia on the walls – exactly the setting you’d expect. Except there was no rock music playing. We checked: yes, we really were at Hard Rock Cafe.

Atlanta also showed us a few things that still feel a bit like the future. On the sidewalk we ran into food-delivery robots, and on the road we saw self-driving cars. Waymo already operates in Atlanta, in partnership with Uber, so an eligible Uber ride might show up with no driver at all.

We also stepped into one of the downtown hotels. Not because we were staying there. The room was $580 a night. We visited the lobby. 😄

Atlanta kept giving us things to look at. This time, in traffic: a truck with a Chucky-style doll strapped to the outside step of the cab. Why was it there? No idea. But we do have the photo.

That’s Atlanta so far, more or less: every time we thought we’d figured it out, something else showed up.

The opinions expressed on this blog are our own and do not reflect the official position of the Fulbright Program, the University of Georgia, or USAMV Bucharest.

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