Some of my fondest memories from my semester in Europe were the many delicious meals that I cooked with a great friend of mine and fellow food lover, Sid the Kid. We lived in the same hall and probably spent a little too much time wandering the nearest markets for the freshest and most interesting foods, and making dinners that were usually accompanied by some delicious French wine and a baguette with some hard to pronounce type of cheese.
That's why I am so glad that we've started a new tradition of Tuesday night cooking here at the new place in the ATL. I was inspired by my sister, who came across probably the greatest cooking site known to man (and woman), smitten kitchen. There's an endless list of recipes, and they are organized either type of fruit/vegetable/meat, season, or country of origin. After pretty much drooling all over my computer after reading some of my sister's posts, I decided that Sid and I had to begin our new Atlanta cooking tradition with one of these recipes.
Since it was nearing the end of May and the summer heat was starting to kick in, we went with something springy but still filling: asparagus, artichoke, and shiitake risotto, and it definitely did not disappoint.
The only change we made to the recipe was the addition of some fresh chicken, feta, and sundried tomato sausage freshly made at the Dekalb Farmers Market, also known as heaven on earth, at least to people who love food.
It's been about a year since I sold my car and started an ongoing experiment to see if I could live, work, and play without owning an automobile in one of the most car-dependent large cities in the US.
Last spring I joined a car-sharing service called zipcar in anticipation of selling my car. I did all the math and realized that using zipcar would be much more cost effective for me in the long run. I barely ever used my car, and when I did, it was for pretty short trips to the grocery store or other nearby places.
Summer of 09 was when I sold my car to a good friend and former Alice in Chains coverband-member from home, Craig. I still had plenty of options for getting around in Atlanta: MARTA trains, buses, my bicycle, bumming rides off my roommates (thanks boys), and zipcar. In the year that has gone by, I have only taken a legitimate MARTA bus (not including the Braves shuttle) once, but I use the trains all the time to get to and from the airport.
Up until September, I rode my bike pretty much everywhere and got fairly knowledgeable about which roads were good for biking, where the bad potholes are, and where drivers were the most courteous and willing to give room to bikers. Peachtree Street, which is basically the main street of Atlanta, has always been one of my favorite roads to ride on because traffic moves pretty slow, there's lots to look at, and drivers usually give you plenty of room. Edgewood is another excellent road for biking, and it connects many of the East Atlanta neighborhoods to downtown.
Then I decided to purchase my 50cc scooter almost on a whim. After going through the HOT summer months mostly on bicycle, I realized that it would be pretty convenient to have some kind of motorized vehicle to get me around without being constantly drenched in sweat. My dreams of zipping around the city on a little scooter became a reality, and I stumbled across a transportation revelation.
My scooter outside our new house in Atlanta.
Scooting is the greatest way POSSIBLE to get around the city of Atlanta!!!
You don't need a license. Or registration. Or insurance. You can park it ANYWHERE without ever having to pay for a spot or going through the oh-so-awkward valet parking exchange. I regularly get about 70 miles per gallon, and sometimes it'll even get 90mpg. It is by far the cheapest and most convenient way of getting around. Also, it has a super convenient basket in the back, which makes it perfect for scootin' on over to the grocery store for some supplies.
There are only a couple small problems. Atlanta is a fairly hilly place, though it's downright flat in comparison to The Paris of Appalachia (my new favorite nickname for Pittsburgh). The scooter tops out at about 40mph on a flat surface. When i'm going up a steep hill, I'm lucky to hit 25. Those car drivers don't appreciate that very much when they're hurrying to get to who-knows-where. Also, it's not the most fun thing to ride in the rain. But neither is a bicycle or motorcycle.
I still love my bicycle and ride it to and from work pretty often. I still use zipcar when I need to pick up some furniture or what not, and I still ride in my roommates' cars when we all want to go out to a bar or the farmers market. But from now on I will always be an advocate for the scooter. After one year, the car-free experiment has been a huge success, thanks to the awesomeness of the scooter, the ingeniousness of the zipcar car-sharing program, the amazing durability of my second-hand mountain bike, and the goodwill of my roommates and friends.
I finally made it back to the United States after spending a semester abroad in France. We finished up with finals by May 5th and my parents came into town for a week-long vacation before going back to the US. We spent a few days in Metz getting me moved out of my apartment, and I had the opportunity to show them around my wonderful host city. After that, we headed down to the French Riviera, or Cote d'Azur, where we stayed in Nice and took a few day trips out to various other towns along the coast. After that we hung out in Paris for a few days before flying back to the states.
One of the most interesting towns that we visited was a place called St Paul de Vence in Southern France. It is an ancient, fully-walled, self-contained village of about 300 residents, and one of the most visited spots in the entire country. Luckily the weather wasn't great on the day that we went, so there were only a few other people visiting. The village was founded in the 9th century, and things haven't changed much since then. It became a favorite hang-out for some of the most famous artists of the 20th century--Matisse, Chagall, Renoir, in addition to actors, film-makers, and other celebrities. Nowadays plenty of contemporary artists still live there and showcase their art in the numerous galleries strewn throughout the village.
To give you an idea of how small the place was, it took maybe 5 minutes to walk from end to end, and that was at a leisurely pace. The art is some of the greatest in the world, so it's almost impossible not to stop and explore the galleries. Even the cobblestones on the streets are laid out in a flower-like pattern. My parents were absolutely floored by the village--they kept saying that it was dream-like, and felt like they were transported back in time. For me, it was incredibly similar to the feeling that I got while exploring the dark, deserted streets of Bruges at night. Some of these European towns are so well preserved that it is almost haunting.
The main street of St. Paul de Vence, lined with art galleries.
Standing at one of the ramparts..the view is incredible in all directions and the village is surrounded by vineyards used to produce its wine.
The cemetary where Marc Chagall is buried, just outside of the village.
The walls and structures within the village
The streets were like this throughout the village. Some had even more elaborate designs with multiple flowers coming out of a vase. It was definitely one of the most unique towns I have ever seen.
A view of the village from outside the walls. The entire town is on a hilltop with the church at the highest point.
This is an adaptation of an essay that I wrote recently that can be looked at as a critique of the modern environmentalist movement and the American viewpoint of wilderness. I take a stance that you might not expect me to take, but that made the paper much more interesting to write.
In his essay called The Trouble with Wilderness, historian Bill Cronon writes, “In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history.” This statement, while seemingly vague, forms the basis of his criticism of the paradigms in American society regarding the natural environment and how the relationship between humans and nature has changed dramatically throughout history. He then goes on to discuss the modern American environmental movement and some of the risks that it can pose if it is perpetrated in the wrong manner.
The statement that wilderness represents a flight from history in its most basic understanding means that in Cronon’s point of view, American wilderness is purely a construct of modern, urban industrial civilization that directly opposes previous historical thoughts about the relationship between man and nature. In the past, humans generally did not have the desire to wander around remote corners of the planet just on the premise of ‘getting away from it all’ or for strictly recreational purposes—they explored mostly for economic and subsistence reasons. Wilderness was a dangerous place to which people only came against their will, which contrasts greatly with the thoughts about wilderness in the nineteenth century brought forth by people like Thoreau and John Muir, who began treating wilderness as a place for self-fulfillment and getting closer to God.
The idea of American wilderness became highly romanticized in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it still retains some of that idealism today. Since the United States was such a vast country with a relatively small population, the romantic ideas of the wide-open, majestic frontier and seemingly endless unexplored territory fueled the American drive to expand westward. The idea of wilderness became intertwined with notions of primitivism and masculinity while contributing to a national renewal. Men who became fearful of the feminizing tendencies of civilization moved their families to wild frontier land and “shed the trappings of civilization, rediscovered their primitive racial energies, reinvented direct democratic institutions, and reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that [became] the source of American democracy and national character” (Cronon 8).
However, by the late nineteenth century, this uniquely American source of identity—the frontier—began to disappear, and the roots of the American environmental movement became prevalent in the form of wilderness preservation. National leaders and representatives of the state such as Theodore Roosevelt, fueled by romantic and nostalgic ideas of the great frontier and masculinity, began creating the vast national parks that Americans appreciate so much today. However, as a result of this forced creation, people’s notions of wilderness changed completely—wilderness went from being a place representative of America’s rugged, rural frontier spirit to a place where well-off urbanites could temporarily partake in recreational activities. American wilderness and national parks turned into a vacation-spot for the wealthy class, evoking notions of elitism and class separation instead of the original intent to recover the frontier ideas of primitivism and rugged masculinity.
Because the United States government mandated the creation of these new national parks, they came with some of the negative side-effects of massive state-imposed projects. For example, many of the national parks and wilderness areas have been the traditional homes for various Native American tribes for thousands of years, but the tribes were forced off of their land for the creation of simulated virgin, uninhabited land. By creating national parks, the US government participated in this an unnatural ordering, which dramatically changed American wilderness from rugged, unpredictable frontier land to false ‘virgin’ land. The traditional hom of indigenous people but had been morphed by the federal government into a playground for the urban elite. Perhaps Cronon puts it best when he says that this ‘uninhabited’ wilderness created by authoritarian high-modernism “reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is” (10).
The process of the authoritarian ‘creation’ of American wilderness has myriad implications for the modern environmentalist movement. Many environmental organizations advocate for the protection of threatened lands across the globe, such as the rainforests in Brazil and Indonesia or the African savannah. However, many of these environmentalists look at these lands from the American perspective of wilderness, which does not necessarily take into account that indigenous people have lived in these areas for thousands of years. According to Cronon, if these environmentalists fight to preserve their ideas of ‘wilderness’ from the native people who utilize the biodiversity for their subsistence and economic benefit, they “run the risk of reproducing the same tragedy—being forceably removed from an ancient home—that befell American Indians” (13).
Another downside for modern environmentalism may be a lack of focus directly related to the idealization of fabricated wilderness. This idealization can lead environmentalists astray from focusing on the issues that directly relate to most people, which usually occur in cities and other places with a relatively high density of human population. A strong focus on uninhabited ‘wilderness’ can lead to a separation between romanticized visions of nature and the real issues that directly impact humans and their surroundings, such as healthy, pollution-free air, clean drinking water, and environmental justice. Cronon does not speak against the premise of environmentalism in his essay, he just warns of the implications that the modern American view of ‘wilderness’ can have on the environmental movement.
Throughout American history, our notion of wilderness has undergone a dramatic change from that of a wild frontier land to an artificial, government-protected land with its indigenous people replaced by wealthy urbanites that bring along with them the modern civilization that they are trying to flee. This is why wilderness represents a flight from history—its meaning and usage transformed with the last of the frontier and the creation of the national park system. In order to respect the real natural world and not just an idealized version, we need to appreciate natural beauty wherever it occurs—from the trees that give us shade while walking along Peachtree Street to the tallest peaks of the Himalayas—wilderness and natural beauty abound all over the world, and humans are undeniably reliant on it for the survival and well-being of our species.
My semester in France is starting to come to an end, which is pretty sad because I've had some great times here in Europe and made a lot of really good friends, but at the same time I'm ready to go back to the states and see my friends and family.
I would be writing more but the last round of tests/projects has been taking over my life for the past week or so, and now it's time to prepare for finals. We got some group pictures the other day with all of the undergrads at GTL. Our group is really small compared to the one that's coming here for the summer--that one is gonna have over 200 people!
Anyways, i'm one of the oldest in the group..most of the undergrads are sophomores and juniors, so a lot of them got to experience legal drinking for the first time when they got to France. I think just about everyone is majoring in some sort of engineering, mostly mechanical and electrical. Everyone goes to Georgia Tech back in the states except for 3 kids from VT, and it seems like most of the GT people are from out of state, which makes sense because we out-of-staters get in-state tuition at GTL.
This is the back side of the GTL building
Heading back to the apartment after class
We had a cheese tasting in our last statistics class, so I have a few more cheeses to add to the list.
Aged Comte Delice Aperobic - This one was amazing..it's an artisanal hard goat cheese that's pretty hard to find. And it's in the shape of ear plugs. Double cream
When I first came to Atlanta back in 2006, Atlantic Station was one of the first things that I saw. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a fairly new development in Atlanta that used to be the site of an old steel mill, but they cleaned it up and now it's a vast area of residential and retail stores, complete with a MASSIVE underground parking deck. If I had to compare it with anything in Pittsburgh, it would probably be the Southside Works.
A plan of Atlantic Station from atlanticstation.com
Atlantic Station has been the subject of a decent amount of debate in some of my classes, especially the city planning class that I took last semester, and I've been hearing a lot of conflicting opinions and ideas about the development since I've been in Atlanta, and only recently have I been starting to form a concrete opinion about it. First off, some more details about the place: since the developers started off with basically a barren wasteland, they could plan Atlantic Station as they wanted, with no real geographical boundaries besides the home park neighborhood to the south and the Interstate 75/85 connector to the East. They way that it is planned makes a lot of sense, with some traditional 'city blocks' in the heart of the district and some more wide open areas with pedestrian-friendly tree-lined streets and a small lake in the more residential areas.
It has some serious problems though, and I think someone in my city planning class put it well when they called it 'intown sprawl.' The location of this place is very important--it has no real link to the public transportation system of the city besides a rather unreliable 'shuttle' that runs from the outskirts of the development to the arts center MARTA station. This fact, which many folks may consider meaningless, makes the residential part of Atlantic Station nearly off-limits to lower-income people who cannot afford cars, which may have led to an unnecessary gentrification and social separation commonly found in wealthier suburban areas.
The design of the buildings is spectacularly unoriginal and could be found anywhere else in the country, and the huge underground parking deck with subsidized parking further adds to the notion of 'intown sprawl' because visitors are actually being encouraged to bring their cars to the development, despite the fact that the website labels it as 'pedestrian-oriented' and 'transit focused'. The whole development added a huge amount of traffic to that section of town, and now the home park neighborhood is having to make some street changes to prevent the traffic jams from extending into it. Meanwhile, there are still large surface parking lots in downtown and midtown Atlanta, where residential or green space could be added to increase the density and beauty of the city.
So what do I think about all of this? I think I agree with my history teacher, who said that it needs more time to change and become more personal and real, much like the old neighborhoods in Atlanta like Inman park or Virginia Highlands. Although it is a place for people to live with fancy apartment complexes and classy retail stores, I would never consider it a real neighborhood; I think of it more like a shopping mall with apartments nearby--a little piece of suburbia in the middle of a big city, complete with massive big-box stores (Ikea) that are usually found outside of the city and make walking difficult because of the sheer amount of space that they take up. It has no local flavor--you could pick up the whole complex and put it in just about any city in America, and it would look fine, and the locals would recognize 90% of the chain retail stores.
I have some issues with this, and it is definitely not a place that I would ever live, mostly because it's just too fake. Maybe I'm just a traditionalist and prefer and old-style neighborhood with small businesses, a market, and a post office, much like some of the neighborhoods in Atlanta and Pittsburgh. However, I will admit that Atlantic Station is definitely an improvement on what was there before, which was essentially an environmental hazard and eyesore for the city of Atlanta.
When we first got to GTL, one of the professors here gave us a powerpoint presentation about all the different things to see and do around town, and one of the attractions that she talked about was a bike trail that supposedly goes along the Moselle river from here to the next town called Thionville, which is about 30km north of here. I say supposedly because when we asked for more information, she said she didn't really know where the trail started or how to get there.
Friday I decided that my goal was to take a little solo bike adventure to find the trail and do some exploring of rural France. Since my rental bike got stolen a few weeks ago, my friend Josh was nice enough to let me borrow his bike for the weekend. After biking to the city center near the river, I went around in circles a few times before finally giving in and just asking at the tourist office. When I told her that I wanted to bike the trail, she was like "Oh...that's going to be difficult. The trail isn't completed yet." But she told me where it starts and said I might have to bike along some roads to find the completed parts of the trail.
Some of the original city walls of Metz, built in the 1300s
I got stuck at some dead ends in the middle of the woods, almost rode into the port of Metz, and rode past a meat packing plant that had me on the verge of stopping the bike to puke all over the side of the road, but I finally found the trail! By this point I was already a few miles away from Metz. Being that far from a similarly sized American city would probably mean I was about to start hitting some cookie cutter strip malls, subdivisions, and soccer moms yapping away on cell phones in their SUVs, but suburban sprawl is not a huge problem in France, so I was effectively immersed in farmland and gorgeous countryside.
And by gorgeous I mean that I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. I felt like I was in the middle of a movie that took place in the stereotypical French countryside: one-lane roads lined with flowering trees and fields of vegetables, a family of cows staring at me like I was crazy, and an endlessly charming village called La Maxe. It was so interesting coming into the village from the surrounding countryside--one minute i'm biking past farmland and the next minute I'm on 'rue Principale' of La Maxe, which was lined with humble houses, the occasional cafe, and of course the town square just ouside of a gorgeous church. I veered off the main trail to check out this village so I really had no idea where I was or how to get back, but I loved every minute of it.
One of the roads leading into the village of La Maxe.
The village from a distance. You can see the cows staring at me in the distance.
The church in La Maxe
I eventually found my way back to the river and biked along it for a while, then started getting tired and headed back to Metz, almost throwing up again when I passed that meat packing plant. As soon as I got into downtown Metz, I found a bench in the sunlight with a nice view of the town and slept for at least an hour. Turns out I had biked about 30 miles total. What a great way to spend a Friday afternoon!
I was born and raised in the hills of Southwestern Pennsylvania and spend most of my time in a little town called Atlanta, Georgia. This blog is centered around my main interests of environmental issues and urban design with some occasional banter about anything from food to music to sports--basically anything that I decide is worth sharing with the entire world.
Sid's ready to devour some risotto.
Delish.
