KTV

In all the guidebooks for China they mention KTV. It’s China’s version of Karaoke. Set in private rooms with drinks and often food, I could see the greater appeal. Perhaps if I wasn’t made to wait in a long line for a chance to sing drunkenly in front of strangers, I’d be more of a Karaoke person myself.

I decided to test this theory (and cross another event off of my Beijing Bucket List) by joining some friends for KTV. One pitfall for my evening was that I planned it on the Friday after a 9 day week of school, when I was so exhausted I could easily have gone to bed at 7 pm.

Claire and Dianna happen to be another lesbian couple that live in our building. The changes of this are astoundingly small. Even more rare is the fact that they are awesome. When they invited Kelly and I to pregame at their place at 9, I was happy to go. When we were still there at 1 am and they ordered a delivery of 16 beers, I was ready to go home and forget KTV.

They managed to rally everyone out of the door by 1:30, and we headed over. The KTV place was a 5 minute walk from our apartment, and they let you BYOB. We were led through corridor after corridor of closed off rooms, the Chinese music still blaring into the hall. Our room was pretty big, with one wall lined with couches, two tables in the middle, and two flat screen TVs. There are two microphones, and a machine in the corner for picking songs and adding laugh tracks, hoots, and hollers. That may have been my favorite part of the night, adding extra applause and whistling while people sang.

The other gem of the evening was that when China doesn’t have the real video for a song, they have one made, which always has Chinese people singing to each other in a random harbor, walking along the docks.

Finding songs that worked for everyone was also an interesting game. It was the most international group of expats I’ve spent time with all year. Claire is from Ireland, as were a few others. Dianna is from Bulgaria. Some people were from London or other provinces in China. One blond girl that I had begged as rude because she would only speak Chinese around me turned out to be Russian, and super friendly with the little broken English she pulled out by the end of the night. Whoops! Everyone but Kelly and I spoke Chinese, and not everyone spoke English. This made the prolonged pregame a bit of a challenge, but once we were in KTV land, it was all good. I enjoyed listening to the songs in Chinese, and no one seemed to mind the parade of English songs.

A lot of the time we just all sang together from the couches, although some people stood when a song they had chosen came on. The selection of English songs that made it to China are hilarious enough alone. I forgot how sweet the Cranberries are.

Kelly and I left around 3, but the girls held it down until 7 am! That’s a serious night of KTV!