Monday, July 24, 2006

Weekend in Nashville

We went to Nashville on Saturday after much mini-golf, good chicken and rice and Hoodwinked on Friday. I will I could tell you how Hoodwinked was, but I fell asleep 15 minutes into it. My body is not made to stay awake past 10:30PM anymore, especially after much mini-go and good chicken and rice.

The trip to Nashville was not only good, but important as we went to see a cousin of ours (like 5th cousin or something, to put it in perspective he went to school with Fidel Castro, that's how old he is) who is battling lung cancer. Like every other Hispanic family, my mom and grandma have predicted his death day many a time now and it is not uncommon for me to get a panicked call to see if I know something because my grandma heard he was skinny or simply hasn't heard from me. I guess the fact that I live in the States makes me immediately knowledgeable of people who live in the States too. I am not sure what the logic is here, but it reminds me of the days when they would call Cuba and speak really loudly because they were calling long distance :)

My mom will be staying one more week, and this rocks!

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Mom is in town... Hooray!

We have been eating well. Sometimes she has cooked and others we have gone out. Regardless, we have eaten well. My babysister has tried tons of new food and everything new she tries she says it is her favorite. I am very impressed by the way she tries new food even without being expected to. She is not a picky eater like I thought. Maybe is the novelty. We took her to eat chocolate fondue and her face was worth $1,000,000.

Yesterday they went on an expedition to the Atlanta Zoo. They took MARTA and it took them about 1.5-2hrs to reach the Zoo. We later went to the laser show at Stone Mountain (if you haven't been in a year or so, you would find that there are some brand new cartoons).

This experience of trying to entertain them during the day without having to be with them has made me realize that there is no good central place were Atlanta tourists can find a list of attractions with attraction reviews and such, geared for the "family visitor" to our great city. And even if there are some guide books and such, it wasn't until they came back and told me so that I knew for example that all Zoo animals seemed to be sleeping in the afternoon or that the MARTA bus takes 30 minutes to come back. And even if that information is available, our great city changes so fast that it is hard to keep up. And even if there is really all that, I am in any case going to start a set of posts with Atlanta attractions, information about them and reviews based on theirs and my experiences. So stay tuned. Also stay tuned for our vacation review.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Lots of work on the Atlanta front

We are hard at work these days. I have been travelling a good bit: twice to Red Bay, AL, twice to Winston-Salem, NC and once to Bloomington, IN. Each trip was a good bit different and although each of these towns is quite a bit different from the city of Atlanta, I am glad I got to visit and get to know parts of the US I would probably not have seen otherwise.

Red Bay has a small town charm, the people I met there were simply great and very hospitable. Winston-Salem had the best food, the people were also very friendly and just plain helpful, here I also got to spend some time with a different team from my company and got to know a little bit of what they do and how we can help each other. Finally, Bloomington was quite pretty. Again, the people here were very hospitable and the town felt like it had all the great food of the city with the looks of the country.

All this travelling always leaves a lot of work sitting at the office and so I spend most of the non-travelling time trying to clean my plate to ready ourselves for our trip to Europe (used to be trip to Rome, but that is a different story). My mom is in town with my baby sister and that is a lot of fun. I will write more on that later though.