Crista is gone

Today, Crista and I drove to Atlanta and visited China Town. Crista was flying out of Atlanta to go and visit Stormie for a week or so-long vaction. Watching movies with on-the-seen shoots at the China Town in LA, I naturally assumed it would be a mysterious place fraught with crime bosses, shipping docks, and creepy old guys with long wispy beards trying to sell you weird pets. Sadly, Atlanta's China Town is only a little shopping center with several (very tasty) restaurants, a courtyard garden with a koi pond, and a few shops.

This did not take up the three or so hours we had planned to squander investigating the shady corners of the Chinese underworld in downtown Atlanta before Crista needed to be at the airport, so we decided to just drive around and go wherever looked like fun. We found the Atlanta Farmers Market. It wasn't huge, and it really looked like a grocery store inside rather than having the expected inordinate truckloads of bok choy, but it was great fun nevertheless. We vowed before entering not to get a cart lest we buy something, but my resolve was broken in less than a minute after seeing a big bag of lychees for $1.99 a pound! Yay! We can't get these at home!

Lychees are a very sweet and fragrant subtropical fruit native to China. They were introduced to the United States sometime in the 1800s; my Dad remembers eating fresh lychees growing up in Florida. They're really cool fruits: they have reddish leathery skins on the outside, but the fruit inside is a pale translucent blah with the consistency of something like a muscadine. They have hard and shiny seeds inside them, being of the same sort of fruit as a peach.

I'm going to try planting a few of the seeds and see whether they will sprout (and then survive) for me. I'd like to bring them with me to college, but they require full sunlight. :(

Crista and I finally broke away from the market with only a few additional purchases and I dropped her off at the airport. I got home around 5:30, so I think I spent about 5 hours on the road today... maybe a little more. Next week on Tuesday, I have been assigned the solemn honor of retrieving her from Atlanta. Perhaps next time we'll infiltrate Atlanta's Thai (food) underworld!