(Big Day Out, Part 1)
I’ve been busy marking 70 essays for the past few days, so I haven’t done an update in nearly a week. But, I’m happy to say that I’m finished marking and the students have done incredibly well! I’d like to take credit for that… While I could go on and on about school, I’m going to talk about something more interesting today: KTV (Karaoke Television). KTV is a huge phenomenon in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. At bigger establishments, you enter through the lobby of a karaoke ‘hotel,’ so to speak. I say hotel because once you’ve received your room number, you literally ride the elevator to floor where your private karaoke room is located. Depending on the size of your party, your room will comfortably seat anywhere between 4 and 50 people and is equip with at least 1 plasma TV, 2 microphones, a computer screen on which to make music selections and sometimes even your own bathroom. All rooms have room service, some will have buffets located on the floor and sometimes you can even control the lighting effects in the room (strobe, flashing, etc…)
The idea is that you line up song selections and as each comes on you pass the microphones to whoever wants to sing. As the music video plays on the screen, the words to the song appear at the bottom. KTV was one of my favourite things to do in Taiwan and now I’ve experienced it in China too. It can be a great time, but it also has the potential to be a very painful night out. In every crowd you usually end up with one or two people who think they can carry a tune and hog the mic all night while everyone else politely listens (with Kleenex stuffed in their ears).
Last Saturday, one of my classes took me out to KTV. I couldn’t believe the turn-out, 30 out of 35 of them showed up! We got to our room at about 1pm (they got the afternoon time slot because it’s much cheaper). Luckily, the English song selection was alright but every time one came on, the microphone was shoved my way. Two hours and a hoarse voice later the excitement started wearing down and I became tired of sitting and listening to tone-deaf students sing random Chinese pop-love-ballads. I looked around and saw many students using their mobile phones; I found myself wishing that I had brought mine to send a “get me outta here” text to my friend. I turned to the girl in charge and nonchalantly asked, “when do we have the room until?” She answered, “until 6pm.” - oh save me.
After another torturous 3 hours (filled with more Backstreet Boys than I care to say), our time in the room had come to an end. I would have made an exit earlier, but being the guest of honor, that would have been very rude of me to do in China. Some girls were even sleeping in corners of the couches by then, I so wished that I was. Excited to go home and sit down with a cup of cha (tea) and start my marking, I soon learned that that was not going to be the end of my night.
To Be Continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment