my second weekend in atlanta!

[atlanta weekend report]

posted by catherine / July 02, 2006 /

saturday morning jeanie and i went to the apparently world-renowned dekalb market to do some grocery shopping and some gawking. first we stopped off in the town of decatur, which i embarrassingly continue to pronounce "deck ah tour" when it really is "deh cate ur" - strike one for my southern blending in. the town itself was very cute, with lots of shops and restaurants and uberfriendly people strolling about. we stopped off at the atlanta bread company where i fueled my coffee addictoin and inhaled a chocolate croissant. yum. some antique-store browsing later, we headed to the dekalb market.

wow. the dekalb market. it is like my own personal version of heaven. it combines all the best parts of trader joe's, whole foods, awesome farmers markets, AND GOD. unfortunately, my camera battery died three photos in, otherwise i would have regaled you with photo upon photo of the billions of international spices, breads, pastas, producer, oils, beers, wines, freaky live fish and more. as of now, you will have to do with this npr story about the place and some random dude's grocery store list of things he bought there, which i find oddly fascinating. and my paltry photos of the outing. anyway, it was amazing. and i am going back soon with a fully-charged camera to overload my flickr page.

saturday evening we out to osteria, a casual italian place in virginia highland that i can now highly recommend. i had a light arugula and lemon salad and a smoked prosciutto pizza. along with much wine. so, always good.

the eating continued! and continued some more! sunday morning was spent at radial, apparently voted a few times by creative loafing as best breakfast in atlanta. i had brown sugar and walnut pancakes, which were a delight.

post-brunch, we all headed over to the beautiful fernbank museum of natural history. but we weren't really there to be educated - we were there to EAT ALL THE CHOCOLATE. the museum has had an exhibit on the history of chocolate for a while now, and apparently every sunday they accompany it with tastings of all sorts of delicious chocolate products. i ate truffles, chocolate-dipped strawberries, a healthy-sized scoop of ice cream, and more. plus i learned that spain was greedy about chocolate. more photos here. jeanie, a flickr convert, also has a few here.

we also spent a lot of time driving around atlanta, so i saw some gorgeous neighborhoods whose names i can't remember, plus the campus of emory, which was lovely. i mean, i am biased forever since uva has the most beautiful campus of all, but emory was nice. you know, alright.

later in the afternoon, i took in a matinee of the devil wears prada, which i saw mostly due to my aforementioned unexplainable obsession with adrian grenier, who has a small role. i actually thought it was adorable, well-paced and funny. i've never thought much about anne hathaway, but she's a very sympathetic character, even though she does look a little ridiculous in some of those patricia field getups. but still, fun flick. i saw the movie at atlantic station, which...how best to describe. atlantic station is like if reston town center and tyson's corner had a deformed child, except that deformed child was on steroids and also wore popped polo collars.

other than that, though, atlanta grows on me. if you've got other suggestions for things i must absolutely do in town, by all means, leave them in the comments!