shojin desserts

my mom wanted to take me to a new japanese vegetarian restaurant in little tokyo so we went there yesterday as a birthday makeup lunch. it's called shojin and once i saw them name i was excited because i know that's short for shojin ryori, which is japanese buddhist temple food. essentially it's a vegan organic restaurant run by japanese with western influences, obviously. i would expect pretty much the same food (and portions) served if this restaurant was in japan instead of los angeles. i was really excited over the bento "boxes". it's served with miso vegetable soup, a salad, side veggies, and two entree items of your choice. they had a list of about 10-12 entree items and almost every one of them called to me. once the food was served, it looked so good and in my excitement i forgot to take pictures of it. there was no dessert on the menu but if you asked for it, they have a separate dessert menu. they had 3 items and since there were 3 of us, we ordered all 3 and decided to share. the food portions were small and as we were waiting for dessert to be served, i realized the small portions were deceiving. they were slowly expanding in my stomach and i was getting full. once we finished dessert, i was stuffed. in the restroom they had mouthwash with little plastic cups. i had to try the mouthwash. the only thing not cool about the place was perhaps the plastic cups because they probably don't get recycled. i can't wait to go back to this place.

buck-tick karaoke song list

next to it is a karaoke place and my mom insisted we go over. i said i will but only to look at the song list. i was curious to see which buck-tick songs they had. once i saw the long list of buck-tick songs, i agreed to get a room for 1 hour. we ended up staying for 2 and probably could have stayed for a lot longer. it's pretty cheap during daytime hours, even on the weekend. they must make all their money at night. they have an excellent selection of songs in japanese, english, spanish, and other languages but we only sang those 3. for a buck-tick fan, there were almost 100 songs for you to sing, no fooling. roughly 95 buck-tick songs (2 may be considered duplicates), 1 best medley, and 3 atsushi solo songs. the buck-tick songs were as current as 2005. plus i noticed they had at least one band's cover version of a buck-tick song so if you prefer their version you could do that. then of course they had tons more of other artists. they had so many songs by artists we like that i became sad over the songs and artists they didn't have. the next time i go to japan, i have to prepare for my trip by spending at least one month at this karaoke so that if i go out to do karaoke with anyone, i won't suck.

songs we picked included:
buck-tick: best medley (snippet of the singles up to 1995), "rokugatsu no okinawa" (my mom surprisingly liked that song and wants a copy)
the blue hearts: "linda linda" (i didn't think i'd be able to read the lyrics but it was simple and super fun to sing)
barbee boys: "me wo tojite oide yo", "chibi", "norma jean" (my mom picked the first one but i picked the rest)
luna sea: "true blue", "mother"
l'arc~en~ciel: "wind of gold"
café tacuba: "ingrata" (fast but surprisingly i was able to keep up for the most part)
maldita vecindad: "pachuco" (too fast for me and i couldn't hold it together so i had to quit)
héroes del silencio: "entre dos tierras"
fobia: "veneno vil" (i didn't even try)
jane's addiction: "been caught stealing" (my mom didn't see the title but by reading the lyrics she declared, "this is a thief song!")
dave navarro: "hungry"
siouxsie and the banshees: cover version of "dear prudence"
the smiths: "there is a light and it never goes out"
system of a down: "chop suey!", "hypnotize" (i'm afraid our loud screaming was too much for my mom, plus the lyrics were not to her taste so she asked if we can do more happy songs. i tried to find nice soft japanese songs but as i sang them, i realized they were also about death, etc.)
she wants revenge: "tear you apart"
the white stripes: "seven nation army"
the raconteurs: "broken boy soldier"
okinawan folk song: "asadoya yunta" (i was thrown off by the mainland japanese lyrics! i'm used to this in okinawan dialect only)
plus a bunch of others we had to delete because our time was up