If you don't know this already and I might have mentioned it I am not sure, the Chinese love their karaoke. They love it a lot. So they have these Karaoke bars all over China called KTV. Now I know what you are thinking its the typical bar setup. There are a bunch of people in a room, there is a bar on one side a stage on the other and everybody puts a song and then gets up to sing on their turn, not in China. Like I said the Chinese like their karaoke, so the KTV is actually more like a karaoke palace than a bar. It is filled with 100 different rooms. Each room has its own projection screen or TV, its own sound system, and of course its own digital touch screen karaoke song selector. I put a couple of pics on my profile so you can look at those, but basically one side of the room is a couch and the other side was the screen. Unlike American you just sit on the couch and sing from there, which was weird to me. I like the fear of complete embarrassment that can come from standing on a stage in front of people you don't know. The KTV we went to actually had a large selection of American songs as well as some Chinese songs. Before I go any further I know some of you are looking at the title of this post and are wondering, the answer is yes I sang Careless Whisper, the greatest karaoke song of all time, and I sang it by myself cause nobody else knew it.
So it was decided that I needed to experience KTV and we wanted to invite along the Chinese English teachers and Lily our waiban. As you can see from the pictures only the 3 female teachers accepted our invitation. Seeing as how there are only two more English teachers, Stone who is not in the province and River who had a family thing, it is not like there was a whole of choices. So Luke, Katherine, Finn and I met Lily, Vanessa, Lillian, and Ceia (I think that is how you spell it I am not sure it is pronounced SEE-AH) all met for dinner across the street from our school. Before dinner they taught me how to play Mahjong, I learned by watching Finn and Luke get dominated by the ladies. Then we enjoyed a great meal at what we refer to as a dish place. Where you order a bunch of dishes and they each can feed 2 to 4 people each, then they bring them all in and put them on a huge lazy Susan in the center of the table. You spend the rest of the meal waiting for someone to finish grabbing some food out of a dish and putting it on their plate so you can rotate the dish you really want back to you. The best part of this meal is I have eaten with Lily maybe 3 or 4 times now and every time we finish she always tries to tell me that she has eaten more than me. After she makes this pronouncement in English she then tells all the Chinese people with us the same thing in Chinese, which always leads to like 5 minutes of laughter. I am pretty sure she is saying more than I know and i probably don't want to know. Lily is like a 120 pound Chinese girl and I am like *cough* 185 *cough* pound AMERICAN MAN. So of course I disagree vehemently with Lily and proceed to talk smack before dinner. So dinner arrives and my main goal was no matter I wouldn't put my chop sticks down until she did. OMG she eats a ton of food, I don't know where she puts it, I checked her purse later in the night to make sure she hadn't been putting food in it. What is sad is the last 3 people eating were Lily, Ceia, and me, them Chines girls can eat. Of course after Lily put her chopsticks down I had to give he hard time and ask her if she was done already cause I was still eating. So after dinner we hailed two cabs and proceeded to KTV Superstar the biggest and newest KTV in Shiyan.
That place was enormous, I wish I had taken a picture from outside but I didn't. It was five stories of awesome, it had a three story grand staircase that went from the first floor to the basement floor. Incidentally they put us in the basement floor, which at first I was perturbed about, but then I was told the basement has all the bigger better rooms. Which was completely true cause our room had a huge projection screen and all the rooms we walked by to get to it just had little 40 inch flat screens. Plus our room was right across from the restroom, which is also supposed to be a perk cause we don't have to lose as much time going to bathroom, since you pay by the hour. I know you guys are saying why didn't he have a movie well the answer is it was very dark in there. I know from my pictures it looks well lite, but that is just cause my flash produces like a million lumens (Casey will correct that). So all I got was pictures, but in the pictures you will see all the people who went with us. So if you ever wondered what Katherine or Finn or Luke looked like now you know. It will shatter all the mental pictures you had of them in your head, kinda of like when you see your favorite radio dj for the first time. We sang all kinds of songs I can't even list them all but there is one very funny thing I want to mention. For the majority of the American songs they don't actually have the original music video. So the music video for "Final Countdown" a song about space, is a guy and a girl in Carhart snow suits making snow angels then getting into an epic snowball fight. The music video for Boys II men was a bunch of trashy 80's Chinese girls in cut off jean shorts dancing in a non-descript field somewhere. That one made me laugh cause the one girl looked like she was having a seizure. The guy they got to pretend to be Michael Jackson was just bad, he was white like 250 and couldn't dance. We had to keep explaining that these were not the original music videos that they were made up, I don't think the girls believed us cause all the Chinese songs had the right videos. As a shout out to Du Lao Shi, I did sing "Wo he Ni" in Chinese and English. That song is horrible in English cause the translated words don't fit with the music. We finished the night out with "Bohemian Rhapsody", which made everybody laugh when I tried to do the high part for the middle of the song, Freddy Mercury I am not. All in all it was a very enjoyable evening, that everybody was stone sober for, which means nobody will forget my singing and dancing performance to "Careless Whisper". Since Jim and Dan J. weren't there I had to do all the work.
