Day 16: Charlotte, NC to Atlanta, GA

Outline: Charlotte, NC to Atlanta, GA

Didn't get moving till 11. What else is new?

I did, however, make excellent time, getting down to Atlanta in a bit over 3 hours (the spirit of 85 south lives on, whether a California highway or a federal interstate). The first stop was the home of my Rimtu Mama and Rena Mami.

Aside: For those of you not in the know, Mama/Mami are generic terms in Bangla for a male/female relative one generation older than yourself, related through your mother; in this case, we're talking about my mother's cousin, which in the perfectly useless English formal system, would be my first cousin once removed.

In any case, I hadn't seen Rimtu Mama and his family in years, so it was nice to catch up with them over some tea and pastries. I also got to meet the kids (another set of second cousins, hooray!), who I don't think I had seen before. Somehow I neglected to take pictures of the kids, so you all will have to content yourself with a picture of the adults:

After that I headed off to Emory to visit my cousin Aliyya. As the gracious host, the first thing she did was take me on a tour of the Emory main campus. It's laid out in sort of a strange fashion, with the Emory hospital right in the center of campus, rather than at the outside or on a separate campus entirely, as with many other schools. It's interestingly morbid, then, that Emory's unofficial mascot is a skeleton named Dooley. There's a pretty cool statue of him near the main quad:

Very dashing. After concluding the campus tour, we went out to get a pre-dinner snack since I hadn't had any real lunch (though I did have a late breakfast). We headed to a place called Flip Burger Boutique, an establishment featuring hyper-modern decor,  fancy burgers....and milkshakes made with liquid nitrogen. Since neither of us had been there before, we sampled various things on the menu. Our waiter informed us that the nutella + burnt marshmallow and krispy kreme milkshakes were the most popular, so those were the first order. The first one was excellent indeed. The second one blew my mind; I wasn't quite sure what a krispy kreme milkshake would be - but it ended up tasting just like eating a krispy kreme donut (except cold and milkshakey). Neither of us actually had the ability to finish the KK shake (too full), but it was amazing that such a thing could even be done.

 

(Aliyya admires the nutella and krispy kreme shakes)

The main courses were a pair of burgers and a side of fried okra. This being the south, I ordered the "Southern" burger - a country-fried patty with pickles, pimiento cheddar, and green tomato ketchup. The burger was quite good, and the okra was excellent (Aliyya's tuna burger received mixed reviews). 

 

(The Southern burger)

 

(The tuna burger and okra)

After not-quite-dinner, we continued with the tour of Atlanta, driving by the Georgia Aquarium, the Coke Experience, and the CNN Center before coming in to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site:

 

 

Unfortunately, the visitor center and exhibit were already closed by the time we got there, so we walked around seeing the various sights at the site, including the burial place of both Dr. King and his wife, a statue of Gandhi, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King was preacher:

 

Finally, we headed back to Emory and, after a short break, to dinner proper, at a Turkish restaurant named Cafe Istanbul. Quick review: the service was so slow as to be almost nonexistent, but the food was pretty good, and we got to see a dance-off between a belly dancer and one of the customers - at 10pm on a Sunday evening. Hotlanta indeed.

Tomorrow: Atlanta, GA to Nashville, TN (via Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL)