Trippin': Atlanta - Aurora Coffee

468 Moreland Avenue
Atlanta, GA 30307

I love random cool and non-chain related coffee houses. I'm a huge coffee addict and will drink it even though I don't need any caffeine. It just taste so darn GUT! One day, I'll make it a point to try out ever Houston coffee house. That would be a really cool foto project idea. You know how Kramer thot of the idea of having a coffee table book on coffee tables? Well, I'll create a coffee table book about coffee. We stopped by Aurora Coffee after lunch in Little Five Points to drink up. Cute place. Slow on the drinks. But hey, it was ok cos most of us just needed to use their restroom anyways.

Trippin': Atlanta - Atlantic Station

Atlantic Station is a place in Atlanta that's fun for tourists as well as locals. Most notable would be the H&M that my sisters and I made a bee-line for. I spent a good hundred bucks here. Yikes! The area is pretty nice and was perfectly calm for us since we went on a weekday. The rest of the stores there are the basic ones found in every mall in every city. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to really go exploring. I had our group booked for the Dialog In The Dark thing, which was located right in Atlantic Station. We were able to shop for about an hour before we had to leave to get ready to head to the airport. I hate when vacay's end! There were a bunch of restaurants that I had never heard of and would love to come back to try some of them out. One reason that basically made me think this was the perfect one stop shop? There's also a Target and Ikea here!

Restaurant: Kata Robata

3600 Kirby, Suite H
Houston, TX 77098

I have come a long way when it comes to eating sushi. I used to make this claim that I'm allergic to seafood. I'm not sure if that's even true anymore. There were a handful of instances where I broke out into hives after consuming shrimp and ended up with the conclusion that all inhabitants of the ocean makes me itchy! The reality is, I just don't simply like the taste of a lot of types of seafood. Fish? Blech. Crab? Blech. Squid? Blech. And sometimes, it's just easier for me to tell people that I'm allergic and let it be. I'm sure if I eat enough shrimp, I'll blow up. I'm not sure where I'm going with this and I can't find a good transition so I'll just jump right into it. Big poppa and I met up with some people and guess who got to choose the place. That's right! Moi? As usual. I always end up being the person to choose the restaurant even though I'm the pickiest eater out of everyone I know. I had read about Kata Robata on chowhound blog and she went in depth about how wonderful the omakase was. So I chose this place so that big poppa could try their omakase. For some reason, the omakase we had featured nothing but sashimi and sushi rolls and not more creative entree-like dishes. I thought maybe they had ordered a cheap omakase but then again, our waitress didn't mention anything about having different price omakase's. Our waitress was pretty bad. Like really bad. But she was so nice it was hard to get mad. Our whole table pretty much ordered a slew of rolls. I don't remember what they were called but I tried almost all of them and can say that they all pretty much tasted the same. It was still pretty good though. Kata Robata is owned by the same people behind Azuma and Soma. Kata Robata actually means something along the lines of grilling at your table but it wasn't available yet. I'm not very good at writing about food so I'll just go straight to pictures. I've had just about enough of my no nonsense rambling.

Desserts! Mochi ice-cream and banana tempurea (Okay. I'm not a fan of mochi), black sesame creme brulee (YUMS! I love creme brulee and I sometimes really like black sesame), green tea ice-cream (Okay) and green tea tiramisu (Kinda weird. Mos def prefer regular tiramisu).

We're ballers! But not really. That's the total for eight people. So pretty normal for a fancy schmancy sushi place.

Musik Mundi: Vienna Teng

About five or six years ago, I get a call from EmMa asking if I wanted to go check out this concert. It was going to be this Chinese artist, Vienna Teng, who played the piano and sang her own songs. Neither of us knew who she was and I opted out of it cos I was too cheap to pay the $15 cover fee. About an hour later, I get a call from Transam asking if I wanted to go see this Vienna Teng person. With two different people asking me to go to the same concert, I was intrigued. So I changed my mind and decided to head on out to the Mucky Duck. The venue is awesome! It's a small pub that serves food and is mostly lit up by the candles on each table. It gets super packed. I imagine that's how it feels dining in NYC. So we ordered our food and eagerly waited for Vienna Teng to do her thang. When it was her turn to perform, she gave us a small intro about herself and a short anecdote to follow her first song. My first thought was man, she's got quite a low voice. When she played out the first few notes on her keyboard, I immediately loved what I was hearing. The most surprising part was when she actually started singing. Holy crap! She was frackin' GOOD! I remember me and Transam looking at each other with similar impressed expressions. That night, I became a big fan of Vienna Teng. Since then, I have paid actual USD's to go see her on two other occasions. The songs below are from her first CD, which is my favorite out of the four that she has out. Her second one is also quite good but her last few haven't hit a special note with me. I hope she comes back to Houston soon cos I would love for big poppa to see her live. She used to look quite androgenous but she's gotten better at feminizing herself.

*photo courtesy of amazon.com*


Vienna Teng
Album: Waking Hour (2002)
Song: The Tower
Song: Gravity
Song: Lullaby For A Stormy Night