We landed in Atlanta at 8am, and by 9am I was out of the airport and on the metro train to the city center. I had printed a little Google Map of downtown Atlanta at home on which I'd marked the things I wanted to see, and it served me well. Atlanta is the HQ of the Coca Cola Company and of CNN and those are the only things it's famous for, so those were my two destinations.

I first headed to World of Coca Cola, a sort of corporate museum. I mainly went there as a sort of joke, but apparently Atlanta really considers it a highlight because the speaker on the train mentioned it. I first asked a random guy to take a picture of me in my bright yellow Inka Kola T-shirt in front of the building with its huge Coke logo. By a freak coincidence, this guy was a Peruvian staying in Atlanta so he happily cooperated. The museum itself consisted mostly of pictures showing Coca Cola's marketing throughout the years. Beside that there was a bottling machine at the entrance, and at the end a series of drink machines where you could try the dozens of sodas Coca Cola sells around the world - that was fun.

I had just enough time left to check the nearby Georgia State Capitol (the parliament building of the state of Georgia of which Atlanta is the capital) before I had to head to the CNN building to do a tour of the studios at 11:50 - I'd made a reservation for this two months earlier. The CNN building is very impressive (a huge atrium) and the tour was just fantastic. I've watched CNN for countless hours so it was great that we could peak into the studios while they were broadcasting. Especially the CNN domestic studio was impressive; the anchor sits at a desk on a podium with three robotic cameras in front of her and behind her about a hundred desks where the whole news team is working, and we could see all this from a gallery right under the ceiling. Unfortunately I couldn't take a picture because I'd just been told this was forbidden and there was a lot of security.

I had lunch in the atrium, watching a huge sceen (showing CNN of course) with a few hundred other people. Afterwards I spent two more hours just walking towards the skyscrapers that looked nice and making lots of pictures, before heading back to the metro. There I stumbled upon Underground Atlanta, the oldest part of Atlanta that has been roofed over and is now an underground mall, strange but cool.

I arrived back at 15:30, only a good two hours before my flight to Brussels, which might seem tight with all the new security measures, but I could do a self-service check-in without any waiting, and going through security took all of 5 minutes, so I actually had a lot of time to spare. I spent it counting how many times I've flown a plane now, among other things.

The flight to Brussels was my 46th. I met my parents and sister on the airport at 9am Belgian time on Friday, 44 hours after I woke up in Lima, but by dozing on the planes I felt just fine.