So here we are, our first full day in Atlanta and we have quite a bit of things to do today, with the main attraction being the Nier Concert in the evening and a few stops at food places and the coke world museum in the morning. Let’s see how that all played out today.

We begin our first full day in Atlanta looking outside the window of out hotel. Pretty good view of the city, or at least part of it. Atlanta is a city that is filled with green spaces and trees and shit fully integrated with very large roads and highways. Indeed, the main highway going into and out of the city goes directly in the middle of the city which is kind of interesting. While our hotel is still without a second roll out bed, I have more or less accepted that it will never come despite asking the lobby people several times and them always saying they will try to do something. I know they won’t; mannn.

We decided to have breakfast at this relatively new looking place in the area. Apparently this is a chain that has several locations in Atlanta cool.

The inside is pretty nice and new, it appears like they only opened a few months ago based off google reviews and the number of reviews, all highly rated tho. This one guy with his laptop and shoes really stands out. The place had a large piano inside so that’s interesting.

I ordered a breakfast combo of grits, eggs and pork sausage. You could choose another protein and egg style. I haven’t really ha good grits before and I can probably say that this sampling has probably been the best grits that I’ve ever had, you can tell it has loads of butter and other stuff in it, it’s almost like a sauce/gravy with how smooth and silky it is. The combo was supposed to have toast but for some reason they gave me a biscuit, noice, a mistake but not like I am complaining about it.

My sister ordered home-style biscuits and gravy. Pretty good gravy and the biscuits are good too, taste the trinity of onion, bell pepper and celery at full force here. Good shit. The prices are a bit more expensive than let’s say waffle house but it’s quality is better I’d say along with the seating ambience, worth it.

After our breakfast we headed to the coke world museum and it was pretty busy. I had brought tickets ahead of time but we were still late because we were enjoying our breakfast but that’s ok, no problem letting us in late regardless. Once they let you in, they have like a pre entry room with a lot of artifacts and screens with a person telling everyone a brief history of coke and etc. It kind of reminded me of a Disney theme park experience or something, hmm.

Once you get inside they have an open area where you can free from visit a number of exhibits such as this one that shows history and photos of stuff relating to coke and it’s impact in history/ads/marketing stuff.

Another exhibit they had was more history but through the lens of people trying to find the recipe of coke and various people/companies trying to bootleg it. It kind of felt like Mr crabs from sponge-bob square pants hyping how secure the recipe for the crabby patty is in that episode and then never telling you what it is even though they said they would. Fraudsters!

One of the more interesting areas is this space which allowed you to craft your own coke flavor using touch screens and it spits out a pre formulated recipe that they already made that roughly aligned with what you designed that you can try later on in the exhibit, for example, Spiced 2, Citrus 4, Fruity 1 etc

They also had an area where you can sample some ‘classic’ coke flavors such as the legendary “New Coke” that was launched in the 80’s that replaced regular coke that was so bad and caused an uproar by customers they they forced to company to re-introduce coke as “Coca-Cola Classic”. New Coke, honestly taste like a better version of Pepsi, while not bad, get boring fast compared to classic Coke. I enjoyed tasting this piece of coke marketing history. They also had Tab which I don’t think they make anymore which tastes like a presidents choice cola or bootleg no name brand cola, weird. And lastly a new unnamed drink just called 23, it tasted pretty fruity, non-cola like as it can be seen in my cup now. Not bad, but I can’t be sure of what flavor it supposed to be.

Probably the most interesting area is the place where you can sample different regional flavors of soft drinks produced by coke, from all countries around the world. Some of these drinks I have never seen before and some were pretty good, most notably some korean one that tasted like carbonated lychee juice. Noice.

These dispensers are the ones you can use to taste the flavor that you crafted earlier, although pre-mixed. Not bad, the one I made was pretty good.

Oh boy what a great sight at the end of our visit, a very large gift store having all sorts of merch and branded goods. Brought lots of shit here, hell yea boi.

After shopping at the coke store for way too long, we ended going back to our hotel to drop off our merch and check out if our roll out bed had come. It had not, I give up basically at this point. After a brief rest we ended out again for a late lunch at a nearby fast food place known for in Atlanta known as The Varsity. As a point of reference, we could this this place outside from our hotel window.

The place itself was pretty busy, which is surprising since we got our food at around 3pm. Overall pretty solid and decently priced chili burger, chili dogs and fries/onion rings. Not pictured however is how I got scammed with my cherry coke with my cup containing no shit like 70% crushed ice, mann. Other than this, this fast food shit was pretty solid. The pies were good too, although I have had better elsewhere.

After our lunch we headed to check out the Fox Theater, the location of the Nier concert and line up for early merch sales, which start at 4:30pm. It should be noted that the time of the concert is 7:30pm and the time is now like 3:30pm.

Despite technically being 4 hours before the actual concert, there were people such as ourselves waiting in line for the pre-merch sales already at 3:30pm. A number of the people in the line were in cosplay and such which is cool. This guy from the theatre was walking the line showing the prices for the merch, noice. Gonna buy lots of shit.

The photo of the line just before us buying our own merch at the front of the theater. The bunch of dudes behind us were sharing stories of where they came from and other games that they play, the Asian guy said he lives like 2 blocks away from here while the guy on the far left says he came from North Carolina for this concert. Hmm, interesting.

After successfully buying hundreds of dollars worth of Nier merch, we ended up going back to the hotel to drop stuff off and just rest before going back to the theater for the concert. It was easy going in and the inside of this place is really something, really cool and beautiful like an Arabian castle or facade.

Almost like 15 minutes before start time and the place has really filled in quite nicely. While the show did not completely sell out, you couldn’t really tell, I think there was only a handful of empty seats.

Since we went back to the hotel, we decided to wear the shirts we just brought for the concerts lol. Noice. Proof of existence.

This last image is the conductor, composer, main vocalists and the guy in the mask, the creator of the Nier series, Yoko Taro thanking the audience after the concert was done, noice. Overall I must say that this concert was totally worth making the trip here to Atlanta, totally worth it; the experience was incredible as well as the visuals and story that they told in the concert, it wasn’t just a concert, it was a story and a show, an extension/retrospect in some regard to Nier Automata and the first game, Nier Replicant. Would do again, highly recommended if you are a fan of the games or even anime. I hope the FF7 Rebirth concert in Toronto is just as high production and well produced/polished as it’s the same conductor running the orchestra. Good shit.

After weaving through the large crowds we decided to go to JR Crickets, a local dive place that is famous by locals for it’s lemon pepper wings and ribs. It just so happens to be also one of the few places in the city other than waffle house that opens pretty late still, I think up to 2am.

We were pretty tired so decided to do take out instead of eating inside, it’s very much a dive place and kind of small and ghetto but I guess that’s part of the charm. The owners and operators I think are all black, most of the customers were also too, interesting.

After a short wait we got our order and we took it back to our hotel to eat. Above is our first order, 10 wet lemon pepper wings with hot sauce that come with fries and 5 fried shrimp.

Our second order was 10 wings lemon pepper dry type, fries and 3 ribs. I wasn’t expecting much when they said 3 ribs but was surprised how big they were lol. Amazing!

The last picture above is the fries and dry lemon pepper wings. Overall, I am very impressed by our orders, each of the meals cost like $20 each which I think is an incredible deal even if in USD considering the size of those ribs. The wings itself were very good, the shrimp were very good too but those ribs tho, they were absolutely delicious, they were large sweet, grilled and you can tell they were slow cooked in a real smoker because they were smoky, good shit. Me and my sister were thoroughly impressed with this places and it’s wing/rib game, good shit, worth it.

And that ends our first full day in Atlanta, I think today was a great success, we saw coke stuff, brought coke stuff and brought Nier merch and saw the Nier concert, all the while having 3 very unhealthy fat ass meals today but they were so good, especially the last ribs and wings. Good shit. With that said, the main objective of our trip is complete, everything after this is already bonus+, noiceee.

Well then, let’s see how things go tomorrow.