The Strange World of Coke

On my way back to Tampa some colleagues of mine attended a conference in Atlanta.  I met them at the airport and we decided to spend one day just seeing the sites around Atlanta.  We all figured that World of Coke was something we would all find interesting.

Seriously, what is this?

Well, I sorta figured that we would learn a whole lot about the origin of Coke and about John Pemberton.  Nothing could have prepared us for the sheer weirdness of the place.  The opening film was about some strange universe where a giant lipped creature fell in love with a dandelion and they spent the whole fifteen minutes of the movie singing about it.  I truly felt like we were in some sort of twisted Willy Wonka nightmare.

After we partially recovered from the oddness of the opening film we decided to see the infamous Coke vault where the secret formula is kept under heavy security.  It starts out with everyone entering "the vault" and they do all these odd scans of your body and once they clear you to enter you are inundated with all kinds of flashing screens attempting to tell how Coke came about.  Being a person with some major attention issues, I felt like my head was going to explode.

At the end we were all shut up in some circular theatre and told to all gather in the middle.  Another bizarre film played for a couple of  minutes where images of Coke flashed all around us.  It all felt very subliminal and then all of a sudden the screen dropped and smoke filled the room.  Taking up the whole wall was the actual vault.  They encouraged pictures but if you got too close, alarms started going off and a booming voice warned you to get away.

Honestly, it was an interesting experience and I truly enjoyed getting to taste the Cokes from around the world, but I do not think it is one of those places I will be dying to visit again.  By the way, if you go be sure to try the Italian Coke known as Beverly and send me your thoughts.