World of Coke

"Elias Burns sang out, 'The rebel bullet is not yet made that is to kill me.' At that, he jumped up and fell down the same instant with a bullet in his brain. He fell across my lap, and his brains and blood ran into my havversack, spoiling my rations. So I took his." -Private Robert Strong

This quote by an Illinois private during the war gives us a peek at the horror and inhumanity of the battlefield. We began our day at the Museum of Atlanta, which of course consisted mostly of Civil War artifacts. The most remembered part of the morning was seeing two southern farm houses. We took a guided tour of the Smith Family farm, which consisted of not only a farm house, but a slave house, the kitchen, and the smoke house. Unlike a plantation, the Smith farm was a family farm operated by the master and thirteen slaves. The house itself was built by the Robert Smith family in the 1840s and was located outside of Atlanta.

The next house we saw was the Swan House. A post-Civil War plantation house, the Swan House resembled a Victorian castle. The stone frame combined the wonder of history with the enchantment of a fairytale unwritten. Much to my regret, we were unable to take a tour of this house; nevertheless, I fell in love.

"The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history . . . We became a nation only with the Civil War." Robert Penn Warren, Southern writer.

After a long morning of historical research, we moved on to World of Coke! We learned the history of the secret coca-cola recepie from 1886, but of course never the secret itself. Written by Dr. John Pemberton, the local pharmacist of Atlanta invented the favored beverage of people around the world. As they say at Coca-Cola, "I'd like to buy the world a coke."

This is what lead me to fall off the bandwagon. It has been over two years since I had a sip of soda, but the sweet smell of fountain drinks wasn't lost upon me as I entered the "tasting room." Sixty different flavors of coke from five different continents. When I walked into the room I was determined not to let it break me. But then my mother - and yes, I blame this fiasco on her - said I absolutely had to try the German soda because of my good friends with a German foreign exchange student this year. So I did. And this lead to my moral demise as a human being. I tasted them all, and ended up with a stomach ache because of it. I regret nothing. My absolute favorite beverage was a pinneaple flavored drink from Greece. Yum!

Besides, one drink isn't going to kill you, right?