Field Research Seems a Lot Like Going for a Stroll

So this past weekend we had to do our "field research" on the town we chose for our project. I chose Decatur for this task, as I had read a blog about the town, and many of my friends who actually live in Georgia say it is a pretty cool place to go.
So on Labor Day I walk on over to east campus, cross the bridge and walk down the street to the MARTA station, fully expecting to become hopelessly lost the second I entered the underground train system. My brother is partly to blame for this paranoia as I heard the horror story from my mom about how he went to get his phone fixed and ended up going in the wrong direction. Regardless, the paranoia was vastly unnecessary, because as it turns out… MARTA is very manageable even for a first timer like me.
Ironically, this whole time I was worried that I was going to become lost in MARTA, when it turns out the first time I actually found myself lost was when I was in Decatur! They do have a town map directly outside of MARTA, but I honestly had no idea what direction I was pointing, so it was more or less useless to me. So, I picked a direction, and walked. I can’t exactly say how far I walked, because I was captivated by the residential area of Decatur into which I had aimlessly wandered. Trees lined the street, and provided shade for any aimless wanderer such as myself (which is good because it was hot). The houses seemed to be, well… hard to describe really. The best word I can use to describe the arrangement of houses is “jumbled.” It was as if someone took a random collection of houses from a random collection of neighborhoods, and just assembled them completely randomly.
Soon after that, I found that I had been on the same street for a while, so I decided to see what “left” and “right” had to offer. I picked a road that had a sidewalk, and turned left, but not before I wrote down the street name I had followed from MARTA. I got to see the sights of residential Decatur, the high school, the middle school, two guys getting pulled over for speeding, you know, the regular.
All in all, I found the town of Decatur to be a very quaint and pleasing area to walk around. Birds were chirping, the sun was shining and the roads were close to abandoned. One thing I do regret about my trip is that I went on Labor Day, so none of the stores were open to be investigated.

-Taylor Niehaus