Summer weather started late this year, but when it hit, it was with a full, Southern vengeance with killer heat and humidity. This last week, it finally started to cool off. In addition to spending time apple-picking on Saturday, I took advantage of the nice weather and went on a long walk on Sunday afternoon.

Atlanta is known for its festivals. Many neighborhoods such as Inman Park have their own festivals. Others are sponsored by breweries such as Sweetwater 420 Festival or by arts organizations and take place in parks around the city. Of course, there are also music festivals such as Shaky Knees, Shaky Boots, Midtown Music Festival, and others.

We skipped the festivals during the heat of the summer this year, but there were two on Sunday that sounded interesting, both within walking distance of our house. I decided to go to Sweet Auburn Music Fest and made the 25-minute trek on foot to check it out. One of the great things about walking to the festival instead of driving is that I noticed little details that I wouldn’t otherwise see.

The most significant building that I saw along the way was Howard Middle School. This building first opened in 1923 as an elementary school for black children. Martin Luther King, Jr went to school here as a child. In 1948, it became Atlanta’s first black high school. It closed in 1976 and remained vacant until 2021 when it reopened as a neighborhood middle school after an extensive renovation and expansion.

Sweet Auburn is an historic neighborhood that was the first black neighborhood to grow in the city after the Civil War. It became a prosperous black business district and was famous around the country. I’ll make a more detailed post about it at a later date.

The Sweet Auburn Music Fest is an annual urban music festival with performances, food, and arts vendors reflecting black culture in Atlanta. When I arrived, a young girl had just taken the stage. She was about 9 years old, wearing shiny gold pants, and belting out gospel music. A man in front of the stage was dancing and saying to everyone who walked by, “That’s my grandbaby up there! That’s my grandbaby!” He was so proud of her.

The festival was smaller than I had expected, only 3 blocks long. However, there were a few hundred people there. Not surprisingly, I only saw about 9 other white people walking around.

I walked through the festival, looking at things for sale, listening to music. As I left, an older lady had taken the stage with her husband and was signing more gospel music. People were dancing and clapping and singing along. It was fun.

I still had some gas in the tank, so to speak, so I decided to walk over to the Old Fourth Ward Arts Festival, about 25 minutes away. On the way, I again saw some interesting things.

The Old Fourth Ward Arts Festival was pretty small, about 30 vendor tents. There were the usual paintings, watercolors, custom t-shirts, ink drawings, homemade dog toys, candles, body butter, essential oils, knitted things. 

Surprisingly, there was only one food tent which served gyros, and there were zero port-a-potties. The festival was held in Historic Old Fourth Ward Park which is across from Ponce City Market, so I guess people could walk across a street, across a large parking lot, and into a massive building to find a bathroom and food alternatives. After strolling through that festival, I did just that and walked over to Ponce City Market to use the bathroom and then connect to the Beltline for the 30-minute walk home. 

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, so the Beltline was pretty busy. I always enjoy that walk as it passes through different neighborhood zones with businesses, residences, and landscape areas along the way.

When I was about halfway home, I came upon a third festival that wasn’t on my radar. We’re in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, and there was a Hispanic Heritage Festival in a large grassy field next to the Old Fourth Ward skate park. There was a stage with Latin American music that made me want to boogie, lots of food booths, and arts and crafts vendors. It was a nice surprise to take a detour through this festival on my way home.

All in all, I think I set a world record by attending three festivals in one afternoon. I covered 4-1/2 miles over the course of 2-1/2 hours. It was fun to see festivals that I hadn’t seen before, and I got to see and appreciate parts of the city at a pedestrian pace. Would do it again! 14 out of 10!

And just because these flowers brought me so much joy, here they are again:

This weekend we drove up to the North Georgia Mountains to go apple picking. This was our fourth year visiting Red Apple Barn Farm in Ellijay. In fact, we like that orchard so much, we went twice last year.

The farm has 19 varieties of apples, and picking season runs roughly from August 15th to October 30th. The varieties include Gala, Honeycrisp, Ludacrisp, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, September Wonder, Suncrisp, Jonagold, Mutzu, Crimson Crisp, Rome Beauty, Cameo, Pritchett Golden, Stayman Winesap, Granny Smith, Fuji, Pink Lady, Arkansas Black, and Yates. The Ludacrisp variety makes me giggle, because the rapper Ludacris lives in Atlanta.

We got up bright and early, actually before sunrise, so we could leave the house around 7 am, stop for breakfast along the way, and get to the farm at 9 am.

We stopped at Waffle House, a Georgia institution with locations all over the place. In fact, we passed 14 of them on our 1-hour and 20-minute drive to Ellijay. The restaurant’s tag line is “Good Food Fast,” and it serves breakfast all day. I’ll write a separate post about Waffle House at another time. We stopped at a Waffle House in Ellijay, and we were in and out of there in 30 minutes.

We arrived at Red Apple Barn at 9:08, so excited to be one of the first visitors to arrive. Turns out the farm’s store opens at 9 am but the u-pick activity doesn’t start until 10 am. So we decided to drive back into Ellijay and walk around the town square. And I’m glad we did! There was a little farmers market going on, so we bought some chicken eggs, duck eggs, and 4 containers of local honey.

Happy with our unexpected purchases, we went back to Red Apple Barn at 10 am. You pay for admission to the farm, and there’s a selection of bags and baskets that you can buy to fill with apples. Then you catch a tractor ride up to the top of the orchard.

At the top of the hill, the tractor drops you off, and there is a info stand where employees tell you what is ready to pick and where to find the different varieties around the property.

We spent a couple of hours walking around, filling our basket and bags. We would taste-test each variety before deciding if we wanted to pick that particular kind. 

During our first trip to the farm in 2024, we discovered Mutzu apples which are huge, the size of softballs, and which are really crisp and delicious. Both last year and this year the Mutzu were disappointing, so we only brought home three of those.

We were also really looking forward to the Pink Ladies. We could fill a whole bag just with Pink Ladies, but again, we were disappointed this year. Those apples fell into two categories: 1) small, green and not ripe, 2) ripe but blighted with some sort of fungus or insect infestation and rotting on the tree. Boo. I was only able to pick four Pink Ladies.

We did find other varieties to fill our bags including Jonagold, September Wonder, Cameo, Enterprise, and others that I can’t remember.

In addition to apple picking, the farm has two cows and two calves that you can feed. They love to eat apples. There are also a couple of children’s play areas, because so many people come with their little kids, as well as a pumpkin patch, u-pick flowers, and various games like cornhole and horse shoes.

When we were done at the top of the hill, we decided to walk back down through the orchards instead of catching a lift on the tractor.

It was a long but productive day. In the end, we came home with 8 or 9 varieties of apples for a total of 30-35 pounds of fruit. This is not our record haul. Last year, since we made two trips north, we harvested 66 pounds of apples. And now the fun begins as we make dried apple rings, applesauce, baked apples, and rustic apple tart or just pick up an apple and enjoy it as a snack.

Fall has officially started here in Atlanta, and we’ve been blessed with a couple of cooler days this week with highs only in the 70s. But that will change next week when the temps creep back into the 80s. Summer heat keeps hanging around.

With the cooler weather, Chad and I have started going for walks after work again. Today was a long walk down the Beltline, and then we cut back through the neighborhood to come home.

The kids are back in school. In fact, they’ve been in school so long already, since August 3rd, that they are already on fall break this week.

Speaking of school, Chad and I are taking an online Intermediate Italian course this fall through a language school in Boston. Our teacher is native Italian and is a professor at Boston University, so she’s a great fit. Plus, there are only two other students in the class, so we get lots of individual attention. If things go well, I might attempt the citizenship language exam in February. Otherwise, I’ll take it in June. (It’s only offered four times a year. It’s also only offered in a few cities in the US, so I’ll have to travel to take the exam, maybe to Miami, maybe to Boston.)

I’m back at work full time, and it’s so nice to be on a regular schedule again. I’m still doing PT exercises, but my shoulder is 98% healed. I’m guessing a few more weeks of PT to work out the final bits of pain, and then I will be back to normal. I’ve decided, however, that I’m going to continue doing several of these exercises for the rest of my life. They are good for maintaining flexibility and building strength, and it will be good for me to keep this up as I get older.

The farmer’s market is having a bumper crop of late summer / early fall produce, so we have been eating lots and lots of vegetables. I’ve been making gazpacho every week. Yum! And this last weekend I made a big pan of ratatouille which is so healthy and delicious.

Our yard is full, almost overgrown after a long summer, and it’s getting ready for fall.

There are lots of late summer flowers blooming around the neighborhood. I love that things bloom for so many months of the year.

And finally, people are starting to put up Halloween decorations. I don’t have any photos of that to share, yet, but I did spy this fun guy on a walk today. This structure is a holding cell circa 1900, located in a park down the block from my house. Back in the day, a policeman, on foot, could arrest someone for something like public drunkenness and lock them in this little compartment until the paddy wagon came around to pick them up and take them to jail. I call this compartment The Drunk Tank. Here is its visitor today:

I first fell in love with dahlias in 2013. We were on a mini-sabbatical in Paris where we had rented an apartment for five weeks. One day, I saw a poster for a mushroom festival in Parc Floral, and I thought, “I bet Chad would enjoy that.” Parc Floral is in the southeast area of Paris on the edge of the city. The mushroom festival was cool, of course, with specimens on display that had been foraged by amateur mushroom gatherers from around the country. Parc Floral had much more to offer, however, including a bonsai tree collection and an international dahlia competition. The dahlias were planted directly in one area of the park, and I was fascinated with all of the different varieties. Chad went back to the park a second time specifically to photograph these flowers. We now have a large print of one of his photos hanging in our house.

This weekend was the annual Georgia Dahlia Show showcasing hundreds of dahlias grown and cultivated by members of the Dahlia Society of Georgia, and it did not disappoint. What is quite astonishing to me is that dahlias come in a great variety of shapes, sizes and colors. It’s hard to believe that some of these flowers are even related to each other.

The dahlia show is a judged competition, and the flowers are organized by variety and size. Categories include Anemone, Waterlily, Pompom, Stellar, Collarette, Orchid, Micro Peony, Micro Waterlily, Mignon Single, Orchette, and Ball. When the category references another type of flower such as Waterlily, Peony, or Orchid, it is because that particular variety of dahlia looks like another type of flower. It really is quite fascinating how different all of the dahlias can look.

I took photos of most of the winners. Here are a few:

Honestly, most of the flowers in the room had a first or second place ribbon, even those not assembled on the winners tables. This somehow made perfect sense to me since I think all dahlias are beautiful and are winners in themselves!

Every summer, the Atlanta Botanical Garden features one particular artist with installations around the property, and it’s always interesting to see the art in the context of the garden environment. This year, the featured artist is Niki de Saint Phalle. Her works on display are full of energy, movement, whimsy, and joy. 

The Niki Charitable Art Foundation has this to say:

Born Catherine Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle in 1930, she was known to family simply as “Niki.” She was, by every measure, a rebel. Raised in an upper-class French-American family with rigid expectations, she eloped at 18 with her childhood friend to escape their control.

In 1953, she suffered a nervous breakdown, and it was during her hospitalization that friends encouraged her to try painting as a path toward healing. That small act of creative recovery changed everything. Though she had once dreamed of acting, Saint Phalle chose art – and art, in turn, chose her. With no formal training, she forged her own path, associating freely with the era’s most experimental artists, writers and composers.

Her art was never quiet. She used bold color, raw emotion and fearless scale to push back against a minimalist art world that had little room for joy, or for women.

She became best known for her “Nanas” – voluptuous, exuberant figures of women rendered in fiberglass, resin, mosaic glass and mirror that seemed to dance rather than stand still. Animals, mythical creatures, totems and sports heroes populated her world as well. One of her greatest life’s works, the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, is a sculptural landscape inspired by tarot cards – a surreal, walk-through universe she spent decades building.

Saint Phalle, who died in 2002, believed that connecting with the natural world was essential to the human spirit, and she created sculpture gardens and outdoor exhibitions across the world to prove it. But here, among the blooms and canopy of the Atlanta Botanical Garden, her work lives on, as joyful as ever.

I was really looking forward to seeing this summer’s installation, and it did not disappoint. I found myself inspecting one sculpture and then spying another across the way and rushing over to it to inspect that one. I originally thought that I would just post a few photos of some representative works of art, but you know what? No. I decided to post every photograph, and I’m pretty sure that I took a picture of every piece of Niki’s art that was on display. Each work of art gave me a sense of wonder and, indeed, a sense of joy.

“I used to think there was a need to provoke, to attack religion, and the generals. And then I understood that there is nothing more shocking than joy.”

-Niki de Saint Phalle, 1968

When I went to the Abbott family reunion, I took advantage of the fact that I was flying into Baltimore and arrived early so I could spend the afternoon at the National Aquarium. I love going to aquariums. The animals are always fun to see, of course, but it’s also interesting to see how the exhibits are designed and how the building architecture is organized to support the visitors’ experience.

The National Aquarium is located on two piers in the Baltimore inner harbor. The aquarium is in a very touristy part of the city, and neighboring attractions include an immersive Titanic exhibit, a WWII submarine that you can tour, paddle boats for rent, and city parks to rest your weary feet. Plus lots of restaurants and bars, of course. 

The area between the two piers of the aquarium is the Harbor Wetland, a recreated salt marsh exhibit constructed directly in the harbor. It recreates a marsh environment like those that existed in Baltimore hundreds of years ago. This new salt marsh is so successful, native species have already moved it and made it their home.

The main entry to the National Aquarium leads you into the Australia: Wild Extremes exhibit. This exhibit is enclosed with glass walls and a glass roof, so it is very light and bright, a real contrast to most aquarium exhibits which don’t have any windows. The exhibit includes crocodiles, turtles, fish, birds, and other reptiles.

The central atrium was the most surprising space to me. It’s 4 or 5 stories tall with ramps criss-crossing the space as you go up, so you can view the pools and tanks from various levels. The coolest thing, though, was the size of some of the animals in the shallow pool on the bottom level. The rays were huge! I’m guessing 4 to 5 feet across. There were also several sharks and plenty of fish swimming around.

My second favorite exhibit was the Upland Tropical Rain Forest. This is another area that is surrounded by glass, so it has lots of sunlight. Plus, the environment is maintained at 80 degrees and humid, so I was sweating in about 30 seconds. However, it was all worth it because I saw sloths in person! We’ve twice been to Panama where sloths are native, but we never saw them in the wild. I was so excited to see two different sloths literally hanging out in this big room.  In addition to the sloths, there are 27 other animal species and 160 plant species in this exhibit. It was super cool.

The Shark Alley exhibit holds 7 species of shark. I also saw a largetooth sawfish which is a species of ray and not a shark. I learned that there are 5 types of sawfish in the world and all are either endangered or critically endangered. 

The Amazon River Forest exhibit contains over 50 species of animals including ripsaw catfish, turtles, tree frogs, and river stingrays.

The Atlantic Coral Reef area has over 1,000 animals. I saw moray eels,  porcupine fish, sea turtles, and so many fish.

The Dolphin Discovery is a huge pool with 6 bottlenose dolphins. I think they give performances throughout the day, but I didn’t catch one. I did see them swimming around in their pool, though.

Here are some other animals that I spied during my visit:

And finally, my favorite type of exhibit is always the jellies. At the National Aquarium, this was originally intended to be a temporary exhibit, but Jellies Invasion became a permanent part of the Aquarium due to its popularity. It contains 8 different species and over 300 animals in total. Species include the blue blubber jelly, upside down jelly, pacific sea nettle, and japanese sea nettle. I can always sit and lose track of time watching jellies float around in their tanks. They are mesmerizing and so peaceful to watch. My heart rate slows down, and every part of me relaxes. It’s such a calming experience, so I’ll close with that for today.

This summer was the biannual Abbott family reunion. Back in 1999, we all got together for my grandfather’s funeral in Minnesota. We realized that the last time we had all been together was for a wedding in 1987, 12 years earlier, and we decided that we should get together for more than just weddings and funerals. We had the first Abbott reunion in 2000, and we’ve been meeting every other summer in various places around the country for a week-long gathering.

This year we went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. We stayed at the Drummer Boy Campground, a lovely, wooded, 95-acre property. The campground has over 450 overnight sites including RV sites, tent sites, and cabins. The property also has a general store, two swimming pools, volleyball and basketball courts, mini-golf, and a playground, and there are laundry facilities for those who are staying longer term. In fact, I was quite surprised to discover that there are RV people who come here year after year and who stay long enough to build structures such as wooden stairs up to their camper doors, wooden platforms and shelters for outdoor eating, and even fences to keep their little dogs corralled. It was quite a lovely place to stay.

Abbott folks arrived on Saturday and Sunday, so our first group activity was Monday. We hired a private tour bus which picked us up at the campground and headed over to Gettysburg National Military Park.

Our first stop was at the visitor center to watch a 15-minute introductory film about the park and the civil war. When we arrived at the visitor center at 8:45, Don said, “Guys, I thought the movie started at 9:00, but it actually starts at 8:45 so hurry into the theater so we can watch the movie.” As we were rushing in, Dean said to me, “These poor people who are already sitting here waiting for the movie to begin were thinking that they were going to have a nice quiet movie, and then our whole group runs in…”

After the movie, we were all ushered into the cyclorama which is a 360-degree painting of the agricultural land and the fighting scene outside of the town of Gettysburg in 1863. A voice-over narration described the day of fighting as spotlights around the room illuminated different parts of the painting that related to the narration. I will admit that it was cooler than I expected. And now I want to go visit the cyclorama in Atlanta that shows the fighting around the city in 1864.

After the cyclorama, we hopped back on the bus with our own private tour guide for a 3-hour tour around the national park. Our guide spouted off so many facts and figures about the battle that I can’t remember any of it, but you can always look it up on Wikipedia if you’re curious to learn more. What I will say is that the park is huge, and we drove around for 3 hours. We stopped a few times to get out and get an up-close look at something with the guide. One thing that surprised me was the vast number of monuments scattered around the park. It seems like every regiment from every state had a monument commemorating their part in the battle. There were statues of various soldiers and generals. There were cannons staged in various locations. 

In the decades after the war, observation towers were built in different areas so people could observe the battleground from above and evaluate and learn from the military strategies that took place below. In fact, students from West Point still come to the park to climb the towers and learn military lessons.

As we toured around the park, I saw lots of wildflowers.

The tour bus drove through Gettysburg itself, so we learned a little about the town along the way. Historic buildings have plaques indicating that they were around during the civil war. Abraham Lincoln visited on the occasion of his historic Gettysburg Address, and the house he stayed in has a plaque. Of course, there are also numerous tourist shops and restaurants that cater to the large volume of visitors that come through the area every year.

After the bus tour, we headed back to the visitor center to look at the exhibits. There were so many items from the war – guns, uniforms, flags, and other exhibits.

There were World Cup soccer games during the week of the reunion, and one afternoon 20 of us went to the Blue and Gray Grille and Pub to watch France play Spain. We took over 5 tables in one area of the restaurant, and people rotated between the tables to socialize during the game. Jennifer brought yellow card and red card bean-bag characters. Scott and Steph had a rivalry going on, and at one point, Scott gave Steph a yellow card, and she gave him a red card in return with her red iced tea glass. We all had a great time, and we made sure to leave our servers huge tips.

I was only at the reunion for part of the week, and there were other activities during the week where I didn’t participate – Blueberry Festival, Yuengling brewery tour, Hershey’s Chocolate World, the group dinner at Dobbin House Tavern, Abbott Olympics.

However, my favorite part of the reunions is always the evening dinners. Each day, a different group of families is in charge of providing dinner for everyone, and we all eat together. It’s a wonderful way to end the day, and it provides an opportunity to sit next to different people each time to catch up on each others’ lives. The daily activities are certainly an opportunity to catch up with people, but there is always the distraction of the activity itself. At dinner, you have each other’s undivided attention, and the time together deepens your relationships.

All in all, it was a wonderful week. It was so great to catch up with everyone after not seeing a lot of those folks since before the pandemic. (I had missed a couple of reunions in the meantime.) As I get older, I better appreciate time with family and the associated memories. 

I’ve reached a point of reflection in my life – amplified by our impending move to Italy – that makes me realize that time can be short, and things are changing. Since my last reunion in 2018, Terri has died and Dan has moved into a care facility. Some members of my generation have gotten busy with jobs and kids and other things going on in their lives, and they no longer come to reunions. I’m guilty of that as well. I considered not going to the reunion this year because I had already spent weeks away from work due to my arm injury. However, I decided that I needed to go and that my company could just deal with it. In the end, I am immensely grateful that I decided to spend a week with family this summer. Deep down I needed that.

I’ve now been going into the office for the last 3 weeks. It’s been interesting to see what has changed in downtown Atlanta.

First of all, there are police officers on every street corner when there is a game being played in Atlanta. I’ve never seen such a police presence in the city, and there haven’t been any issues with the crowds downtown. Good on them.  Of course, there is a lot of representation from law enforcement, the fire department, and EMS around the Fan Fest. I even saw a shade tent for Customs and Border Patrol. Why CBP needs to be in downtown Atlanta is beyond me. But I did learn that the Atlanta Police Department is specifically refusing to work with ICE during the World Cup, which is heartening.

 Perhaps the biggest surprise has been Marta. First of all, Marta was supposed to deploy 224 new train cars last year, then earlier this year the the week before the World Cup started. Nada. We still have the old cars in service, some of which are decades old. I was also quite surprised to see that some Marta stations hadn’t gotten the new turnstiles into service either. The station next to the stadium definitely had the new turnstiles up and running, but Inman Park and Five Points did not. This meant that you could get on the train in Inman Park and get off at Five Point and never pay the fare. Seriously, Marta, you’ve known about the World Cup for 8 years, and you’re missing out on so much revenue. Surely, heads are rolling at Marta.

But, on the Marta plus side, they have been running extra trains on game days. When we went to watch Spain vs Saudi Arabia, the trains were running every 2 minutes, and this was on a Sunday morning when trains typically run every 20 minutes. The stations also had Marta employee volunteers at each station to help visitors with questions.

Also, the renovation of the platform areas at Five Points station got completed. Upstairs there are still a lot of plywood barricades as the renovation is scheduled to continue through 2028. But at least the barricades are branded for the tournament.

In downtown Atlanta, I’ve seen a lot of temporary signage to help visitors figure out where to go. I haven’t seen that many visitors around my office, because Fan Fest and the stadium are about 4 blocks away. But I did see a temporary public toilet in one of the city parks. Additionally, the fountains in the park were cleaned out and are now full of water and running. They had been turned off for a couple of years, probably to conserve water.

The construction in the park is still going on, and it turns out that they are building a dog park. This is interesting because it indicates an anticipation for more people living in the heart of downtown. This is also interesting because I’m surprised that the City allowed this construction to be occurring during the World Cup. There is a moratorium on starting new construction projects during this time (and I know this because my firm has projects downtown), but I guess the City projects are exempt.

One of the funnest and funniest things I’ve discovered has been foreigners sharing their experiences in the USA. I’ve heard about a German guy and a Swedish woman who are (separately, they are not traveling together) documenting their fan experiences. The woman posted a photo of her hand holding a Twinkie and Doritos bag captioned, “I feel like I’m in a movie right now.” The guy posted a picture of a Buc-ees in Alabama and its crazy number of gas pumps and said, “This is a gas station in America.”

Apparently visitors are also obsessed Ranch dressing. Do a google photo search for TSA Ranch dressing and you can see that people are trying to take full bottles of Ranch dressing home in their carry-on bags.

People are also really into Waffle House. Waffle House is a staple in the South. It is open 24 hours a day and serves breakfast and lunch-type stuff, so it’s the perfect place to go when you’ve flown in from another time zone and are jet-lagged and it’s the middle of the night. (Waffle House also has an interesting business philosophy about being a shelter/destination in a weather emergency. Another thing to google, it’s very interesting, and I have friends who have taken advantage of this.) Anyway, Waffle House did themselves a solid and made branded soccer jerseys that I have seen around town. Awesome.

Finally, here are some misc photos that I have snapped over the last 3 weeks:

The Atlanta Fan Fest takes place in Centennial Olympic Park, a park that takes up five city blocks in downtown Atlanta. The park was developed for the 1996 Olympics, and it is now a central tourist destination ringed by the Georgia Aquarium, World of Coca-Cola museum, College Football Hall of Fame, Children’s Museum of Atlanta, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. It is also across the street from the former CNN Center which is currently being redeveloped, and it is a few minutes’ walk from Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the venue for the FIFA games, as well as State Farm Arena, the basketball arena.

Perhaps most importantly for me, Centennial Park is a 5-minute walk from my office. I have an annual pass for Georgia Aquarium, so it’s easy for me to pop over there during my lunch hour or after work to watch the underwater animals. It also meant it was easy for me to walk over there during lunch on my first week back in the office. I wanted to see what the deal was with Fan Fest and see the global visitors in downtown Atlanta.

At the end of that week on Saturday, Chad and I went to Fan Fest to watch the Croatia-Ghana game. We got there at 4pm, the game started at 5pm, and we left at half-time at 6pm because it was so hot.

We did walk all around Fan Fest. All of the corporate sponsors had booths/tents. One thing that was cool was that there were water-bottle-filling stations for free, which was important since it’s July in Georgia. The England game was playing on the biggest screen, and the Croatia games was on the smaller screens.

Then on July 1, we went back to Fan Fest for the USA game. I told Chad that I wanted to watch the American team play in America and watch with a bunch of Americans. Check. For this game, the free tickets for the general admission area were “sold out,” so I splurged and bought tickets to the GA+ area, and I’m so glad I did. The general admission area was packed like sardines, standing-room only. And while our paid area was full, we still had room to move around and sit down during the breaks and we had a perfect central view to the main screen.

The USA won the game that night. And as we walked out, the DJ played “All I Do Is Win” by DJ Khalid and everyone sang along which was perfect.

Through all three of these perspectives of the Fan Fest – walking around during my lunch hour, the free admission, and the GA+ special admission – it’s been amazingly cool to see so many people from around the world. And honestly, the most obnoxious experience was the USA game – the screaming and obscenities and people throwing things, it was disappointing. But I’m glad we’ve been able to experience the World Cup for these weeks in Atlanta.

We bought tickets to one World Cup game in Atlanta. We got them through the lottery last fall, and, at the time, we had no idea which countries would be playing in the game. I was very excited this spring when I learned that Spain would be playing, as they were favored (at the time) to win the tournament.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium was built about 10 years ago, and it is a beautiful stadium.

We’ve been there to watch a few Atlanta United soccer games.

We also got to go on a private tour of the building with some of my Gensler colleagues in 2019. The stadium is used for the Atlanta United soccer team and also for the Atlanta Falcons football team.

Due to FIFA rules, there were some transformations to the stadium for the World Cup. First of all, the US football field size is about 10 yards narrower than a FIFA soccer field, so some of the lower spectator seating was removed to widen the field. Also, FIFA doesn’t allow any commercial branding, so the Mercedes-Benz signage on the facade was covered up, and the stadium is temporarily called Atlanta Stadium. The ban on branding also translated inside where locally branded concession areas were given generic names. Even the branding on things like condiment bottles and restroom soap dispensers had to be covered up. Crazy. 

We went to the game with Chad’s sister, Michele, and our friend Hans and approximately 68,000 other people. It was so much fun to watch the game live and in person and feel the energy of a stadium full of people.

My favorite part, though, was being in a crowd with people from all over the world and speaking a variety of languages. We met Saudi Arabians on the way inside, and some guys from Guatemala sat behind us during the game. It was so cool to be part of a global community event.

After the game, we walked around the area, in the intense summer heat, to check out the pop-up shops in the Gulch area (lame) and to visit the newly renovated former CNN center which so far seems to only be a re-do of the food court (also lame).

We then headed back to Marta for the short ride home. We got home around 4pm and did nothing for the rest of the day, exhausted from the heat. But the experience was totally worth it.