May 25, 2007. After having lunch with my aunt’s family in Loganville (which was another hearty Filipino meal of lumpiang shanghai and left-over kare-kare), we headed off to downtown Atlanta. Our first stop was the Georgia Aquarium at Pemberton Place. We parked quite a distance from the aquarium park so we had to walk through the the Centennial Olympic Park, a wide landscaped park in downtown Atlanta built for the centennial Summer Olympic Games in 1996. Pictures from the Centennial Park will be for another blog entry.

By this time my body clock hasn’t adjusted quite well. It was well past noon, the sun was shining brightly and yet I felt so tired and sleepy.

Georgia Aquarium is claimed to be the largest aquarium park in the world. Indeed, the place was quite huge and the individual aquarium exhibits were humongous. As photographed above, the largest one holds hundreds of small fishes and a whale shark. It was quite a serene spectacle.

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May 25, 2007. The first place we went to was the Atlanta Cyclorama in Grant Park, Atlanta. A cyclorama, as the name suggests, is a cylindrical piece of art or backdrop. The Atlanta Cyclorama is, apparently claimed by some as the “world’s largest painting,” and is indeed a very huge piece of art wrapped in a cylindrical chamber. In the middle of this cylindrical chamber is a rotating audience area, which rotates around the cyclorama while a taped narrator discusses the history behind the painting and the various trivia regarding the items depicted in the painting.

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May 24, 2007. From the airport, we were picked up by Tita Nene, my dad’s cousin, whose family has migrated to America, to Loganville, Georgia to be exact. They were our hosts for the duration of our stay in Georgia. We actually got stalled at the airport for a while because one of our luggage got lost in the airport. We were able to retrieve it, thankfully, after half an our of searching the entire baggage claim area.

From the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, we drove off to my aunt’s home in Loganville, which is a little more than an hour away from Atlanta. The house they live in, where we stayed for the few days we were in Georgia, was in a well-paved and landscaped subdivision in the middle of what felt like a very rural area of Georgia, with rolling meadows, white picket fences, small barns and cows grazing on green grass, and a handful of Baptist churches here and there.

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I found this through bloghopping through Vaes9. Lakbayan, a really cool web app that allows a user to briefly tick on the provinces that he’s visited and then produces this map of of visited places in our country. What’s cool is, it divides some large and touristy provinces like Palawan and, say, Oriental Mindoro, into sub-places so that when you say you’ve been to Puerto Princesa or Puerto Galera, you can’t claim to have been to the entire island of Palawan or Mindoro and thus won’t be credited for the whole province. Hehe.

It also uses different shades of blue to signify how much you’ve been to the province. The lightest shade means you’ve just passed through it. As you can see, I’ve passed through a lot of provinces, and stayed in a few here and there, thus a low lakbayan grade.

We just got back home here in the Philippines a few hours ago. I feel quite disoriented. My body clock is a mess, its early morning and I haven’t slept. I feel like I have so much to absorb and get back into out of all the things commitments or duties I’ve delayed and left behind for a while. Like enrollment for example. School starts tomorrow, and I haven’t enrolled yet. Well, that among other things.

That was quite a trip. Eighteen days. From Georgia to New York to the San Franciso bay area of California to Los Angeles and to Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s going to be a long series of blog entries. And here’s where I should begin.

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Hi there folks. This is the first time I am able to access the internet here in the US. It has really bothered me that I have been offline for more than a week and that I am inaccessible by cell phone since I was unable to activate my network’s international roaming service. There is this nagging feeling that something might be happening back home that I am missing or stuff that I have to do but am not able to, and other such worries. It sucks having those feelings and thoughts once in a while, especially when I’m trying to have a good time here.

I don’t intend to start blogging about the trip now. There’s just too much info and pictures, and we’re not done yet. I will probably start them in installment once we get back home in a week.

I am sorry if I won’t be able to reply to emails and comments in a while. I checked on them a few moments back and there’s just too many to answer in such a short time that I am able to go online. I will get back to them , also when we get back home. Hm, well, I also have to take care of my enrollment and other matters I left behind first. See you, all.