Kareoke--Chinese Style (kind of like everything else I do in China)

Wow, it's been a long time. This last week of schoolwork was pretty tough--I actually felt like I was back at Vandy. A large part of the reason it was so tough was because I went to see a doctor to get my leg X-rayed for bone damage (if you didn't know I've been fighting a calf strain for some 2+ weeks now). Turns out there is no bone problem, and I have thus started swimming religiously. Taking a taxi to and from the swimming center, swimming, and showering all together might be about 3 hours. Hence my delinquency.

But I want to fill you in on a pretty bizarre and surprisingly good time we had singing karaoke last weekend. A bunch of us decided to go out to the main strip, and then after walking around for long enough, a couple people suggested we go sing karaoke. I was pretty reluctant to go at first, as it was already 10:30...far past my bedtime. But obviously I went--it was a place called KTV--which stands for "Karaoke Television" and is a reference to MTV. You might be able to tell from the pictures that the facilities are pretty plush.

When you first walk into the building, you notice that everything's a good bit cleaner and newer than the facilities of any other building you've been into lately. There are many rooms, and you can rent one out for about $6 an hour (if you think that's cheap, try dividing it between 6 people--it's like splitting hairs). From what I hear it's a popular place to make business deals--yea, not over round of golf, but an hour or two of karaoke. From what I've read online there is supposedly something called a "Special KTV" where men can choose a hostess for the night--basically an escort service--but these are mostly in Taiwan. So while my friends were taking care of registration and such, I kind of just checked the place out.

Like I said, the facilities were comparable to anything you'd see in the States, and they even had these cool looking water dishes all around with marbles in the bottom (see pic). In some childish reflex, what did I do? Oh yea, I stuck my finger in the water. As soon as I did it I realized what that pretty dish's purpose was: it was a spit dish. While spitting has greatly been reduced by changing attitudes toward it here in China, it's still living strong. In the locker room at the swimming pool I go to there's spit buckets next to every group of lockers, and at every end of the lanes of the swimming pool.

So anyway, that was stupid, but it was on to the karaoke. Starting out we sang some Chinese songs, which were ridiculously fast for our Chinese language abilities. Then our machine had some problems coordinating the words with the music, so after getting that figured out, we sung Britney Spears' "Drive Me Crazy", Backstreet Boys' (personal favorite for karaoke) "Tell Me Why", Van Halen's "Jump", Aerosmith's "Dream On", that song from Grease (don't remember, the girls picked that one), a plethora of Disney songs: "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?", "Under the Sea", "A Whole New World" and more. That's me in the 3rd picture getting way too into "A Whole New World" (thanks Cody and Jeff).

Probably the funniest point came when we were singing "Beauty and the Beast."

When the karaoke machine doesn't have a music video for the song (most didn't) it would play this stock footage to stand in as the background movie. This background movie, which looked liked it was shot by one person about 30 years ago, just got weirder and weirder. At one point, the movie was just this Chinese farmer in the middle of nowhere hoeing away. At another point it was at a public swimming pool in the United States, focusing on one person for about a minute and then another person for a minute.

Needless to say, the background movie didn't

lend to the vibe of the music, but this was especially true during "Beauty and the Beast." Of course, this is a pretty romantic song--it is about love at least. However, when the song came on, the background movie instantly switched to some mid-1900s black and white war movie. If you look at the picture you can see the solider with the rifle slung over his back. There's nothing better than singing "Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme..." while watching a solider brutally assault the opposition.

We left at 1:00am, a whopping $2 poorer, and happy we all decided to do it. There was also a feeling of awkwardness, because we're not allowed to SPEAK English, but we had just SUNG a lot of English. Maybe we were bending the rules a bit, but how often do you get to stick your hand in a spit dish?