In addition to exciting professional strides, I have my three-year consulting project to thank for some of my favorite friends. Sean and Jeff live in Atlanta, Jennifer lives in Portland (Oregon), and I live in Salt Lake City; but for the past three years we've been all over the country together. In January, Sean invited Jennifer and I to his institution to do consulting blahblah work...so we of course added vacation days onto our trip. This also means we crashed Sean and Jeff's living room. That means I literally had to be restrained from rolling around on the painted cement floors and licking the exposed brick walls. Oh my, how I love lofts. At any rate, there was a lot of Rock Band, a lot of amazing food, and a lot of amazing art. I wish I could tell you there were a lot of amazing photographs, but I wasn't quite on my photo game this trip. But here are a few I enjoy:
Turn left at The Big Chicken. Just down the street from The Big Chicken. Around the corner from The Big Chicken. Meet me at The Big Chicken. You get the idea: This campy landmark was our Marietta touchstone.
Atlanta is most definitely a foodie paradise (and no, I'm not referring to the ginormous KFC used purely for directional purposes). Unfortunately, as previously confessed, I wasn't as good about taking food photos as I usually am. Alas, I can't share with you the orgasmic truffle mac n' cheese that lives on only in memory. I can't begin to describe the pork that fell off the bone onto my plate in the Two urban licks revamped warehouse (yup, I ate pork....it was THAT good!). And I can't induce fits of sloppy screen-licking with photos of my brunch at The Flying Biscuit (shout out to fellow Indigo Girls fanatics!). However, I can offer a glance at the signage. Now come on, that's an awesome consolation prize, am I right?
In addition to eating ourselves into a coma, we indulged our artsy side. We poked around in an awesome artist collective called Donna Van Gogh's. I purchased a piece by local folk artist Kirk Stansbury that now hangs in my hallway and brings me smiles every day. Someday I'll remember to post a photo of it here. In short: it's a painting on recycled plywood of an upright acoustic guitar, "Make ya own music" scribbled across the top of the board. It's joyful...as is the DVG facade.
We also visited The High Museum of Art. It was fortunate happenstance that we were there at the same time as China's Terracotta Army (hyperlink leads to great article and informative video...I'm saying it's worth clicking, in other words). Reading about these soldiers in Art History texts or loosely studying them in a Philosophy of War course does not begin to do justice to the experience of seeing them live. It was incredible. The detail on these life-size carvings is staggering. As I understand it, there are a certain number of molds for the bodies, but each and every head/face is uniquely hand-cast. Unreal...particularly when you consider the sheer number of soldiers!
No, this is not my photo. I stole it from a Google image search, actually lifted it off a blog that also stole it from some unknown primary source. Sorry...shhhhh. This shows a teeny tiny fraction of the soldiers unearthed in China. Amazing.
