Sunday, April 28, 2013
We had a lovely stroll through the market area(once again pleased our hotel is so convenient to the historic area). Of course if you have watched as much of the Food Channel as I have you have to make a stop at "The Lady and Sons" . This is the restaurant owned by the ubiquitous Paula Deen. Paula always used to make me laugh as she would go through about four pounds of butter in every episode. She now has full blown diabetes and has changed her tune a bit.
It is a very popular buffet restaurant... lots of tourists lined up to get in. We did pop into the giftstore next door.. and I got a cook book. Her son Bobby had undertaken to try and bring the southern recipes down a bit in calories and fat. Good luck with that! Still I did notice that the key may be portions size according to Bobby. What a surprise! The patrons of the buffet in the restaurant were not worried about portion size I can tell you.
We discovered that in Ellis Square they had set up a portable screen to show a movie. This square had been a mutliplex story parking lot till a few years ago. Savannah City ripped it down, built 1000 spaces underneath and put the square complete with fountain on the top. And it is now one of the 22 squares in the two and a half square mile historic area. Yes, there do turn the fountain off when they show movies. The movie was called Gospel, according to a nice group of kids I asked.
The historic area as we know it now, is quite new. The old houses were here, all right, but many of the streest and squares were very run down till the quite recently. What a job they have done to restore the houses and parks. One of the main drivers of all of this is SOCD .. Savannah College of Art and Design. This institution started in 1979 with 80 students. It is now housed in some beautiful new buildings(one designed by Moise Safdi) and others is wonderful restored old factories and warehouses.. Really is the engine to all this restoration. And 13000 students now attend from every state and many countries.
We enjoyed our tour so much yesterday, we went on another tour today,this time by trolley. We saw some familiar places and some that were new to us. Many of the squares were being used by groups on this lovely Saturday afternoon. You can book a square and we saw a wedding in full flight in one of them I am sure the good folks of Savannah are used to the tour trolleys and horse and buggies complete with commentary going by. They probably tune the whole thing out by now.
We had such a nice time yesterday at "The Cafe" in the market we went back for lunch. Of course it could be the peach sangria that was pulling me back!
# posted by katie @ 4:53 AM 
