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Sep 18, 2004

About the short trip to Marietta

Marietta, it is located north east of Atlanta. We usually go to the northern Marietta, where The Jacksons live. Janice once told me that downtown Marietta is pretty with an old square park and little shops.
So, we decided to go there yesterday. It's not very far. Actually, we did not know the exact way to the downtown. Abdes drove to his usual route to Harry's Marietta, where he usually send some stuffs to Genji Sushi. Then....hey, we found that big chicken building...the landmark of Marietta. It's the KFC building.
After a couple of miles...kira-kira bbrp kilometer lah.... we started to see some ol' buildings. Then, we found the square park. It is unique.... Similar to Athens, where University of Georgia located (northwest of Atlanta). But this is better (according to me), because the shops are well located around the park. We saw a Slovakian restaurant, Turkish resto, Australian Bakery, Tea Room, Tropical bar and cafe, fine Chinese restaurant, Italian homemade icecream, Marietta pizza....lots of unique cafe! That's what we wanted! We're tired going to the malls or strip malls, just to find the same food...well, they're franchised, make lots of $$, that's why they're everywhere.
We decided to go to the park first. There's an old lil' train, where kids can climb on it. There's a slide on the backside. Cool... Of course, Getar loved it so much. Then we walked around, we found an old theatre, as you can see in the picture. Maybe we should come again to see one of the shows. At the west side of the park, we found an old building... it said it's the Marietta Gone With The Wind Building. We took some pictures from the front side. The lady who worked there, offered to take picture of the three of us. Yes, sure!! Thanks! The tag line is nice: Where Hollywood Meets Marietta. We wanted to come inside. Hmm..the admission fees are expensive (to us!). It's $7 per adult. No, thanks. But that lady was so nice, she invited us to have a look around the gift shop. OK. As usual, as in any other gift shops, we tried to search for something cute, memorable and CHEAP!! he..he..he.. I found magnet fridge, with a marquee of the movie. Cool.... We asked the lady where we should go to have something to eat. She suggested us the William Rae's, Hemmingway's or Australian Bakery.
We walked again to the north side... William Rae's, the food didn't meet our expectation (he..he..he..). Turkish, we're afraid we would be disappointed with the strange taste (yeah, another reason!). Getar wanted ice cream...ok. We had to go to the ATM, because we found out that the italian ice cream parlor did not take check card.
After drilling the whole cash from the machine (he..he..he..), we decided to have some food at the Australian Bakery. Yum... so many cakes and pastries were displayed. As we're not familiar with western foods, it took quite some time to place our order. Alright then, Abdes ordered Down Under (beef steak sandwich), I ordered Koala Veggie Sandwich (like a koala, only veggies inside, plus cheese). We ordered spinach quiche for Getar. And yes, sure...I ordered Lamington cake...to remind myself about my childhood in Sydney, Oz. We had a chat with the owner, an Oz man from Darwin. He opened the cafe 2.5 years ago. He had never gone to Bali...poor him...but his sisters and friends will go to my home island in the next two weeks, he said. The food was great, the bakery was yummy. But we have to prepare our tummy for the italian ice cream. We walked across the park to the icecream parlor.
"Hello again!" the icecream man said, as we had been there half an hour ago just to show our check card :) The wall had a huge drawing of a train, which Getar really loved. The icecream was really tasteful, yet it cannot beat the taste of Icecream Pisa in Jakarta.
When we waited for Getar played (again) on the train at the square park, one of the parents approached us to have chat. Hey, that's rare. Usually, the bule (indonesians called white people as 'bule') ignored us, or just smiled and 'how y'all doing' line. He was friendly, asked about Indonesia, Bali, our language, ethnicity. He asked whether Indonesians are similar to Chinese, because his neighbour is a Malaysian Chinese. Well, as in any other places, the Chinese are everywhere...no offensive, though.
We went home around 5pm, take a shot of the big chicken on the way home. Before heading home, we went to Value Village, our favorite thrift department store!!! Yippee...our best place for shopping, refreshing, to find something trendy, good, high implicit value, with very low explicit cost! We found a really good denim jacket for Getar, Route 66, for only $5. If we had to buy it at JC Penney, it would cost something around $30.
Those are things I love about living in the U.S. Beautiful and clean parks, also thrift stores!!!

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