Atlanta: The city at our feet

Back in 2010, when we first visited The United States, our friend’s brother, who lived in Atlanta, decided to give us the opportunity of visiting his city. We were staying in NYC and this allowed us to see how people live in the South.

After spending few days in the Georgian capital and visiting many of the local attractions, he took us to Westin Peachtree Plaza, from where we could have a ‘birds’ eye view‘ over the city. The day started well, with us visiting the Georgia Aquarium and the Coca-Cola Museum, and was to end on a .. higher note, pardon the pun.

It’s still unclear to me what streets we walked to get to our destination, but it’s irrelevant, we arrived at the tall building and he showed us the way into the lobby. We took the elevator, after paying 5 bucks/person (way cheaper than Empire State Building or Top of the Rock in NYC) and entered the big restaurant in the top, which rotates slowly so that tourists/clients can also enjoy the view.

We immediately noticed Stone Mountain, an amazing place we visited the day before (and which, as all other attractions, will have a separate article with some pictures), and recalled the great time we had there, even if the summer temperatures were absolutely shocking for us (or maybe the humidity, which was more than we ever experienced in our lives).

191 Peachtree Tower, which should be towers, if you ask me, since they’re twins. My pic is lousy, so it’s not easy to see that we’re talking here about 2 ‘tops’ not one. Anyway, beautiful building, one of our favourites in Atlanta.

SunTrust Plaza is yet another building that’s easy to notice and remember. You can also see the extensive green areas in the city, which we absolutely loved. There are some amazing parks there and we were clearly impressed. In the far left Bank of America Plaza ‘scratches’ the skies with its weird top. I called the building the crayon, for obvious reasons.

One thing that really blew us away in Atlanta was the huge network of wide highways. We’re used to having 3-4 lanes (the most) in a direction (in Europe), here I counted 7-9 easily. We made good use of the GPS, while driving through the city, otherwise we’d still be trying to figure out a way home.

The Olympic Park was easy to see from above, with its sprinklers used a lot by kids. It was scorching hot, so a good reason to play in the water.

We entered the US few months ago, expecting to see some great places and meet amazing people. I can clearly say it exceeded our expectations. Atlanta, even if we stayed there for few days, impressed us with all its attractions and it’s surely on our list to visit again, should we have the chance in the future.