Karaoke

Monsoon season has officially begun out here. It doesn’t rain all day every day, but there is usually a pretty good rainstorm every day. It hasn’t changed getting to play basketball yet, but I have a feeling that over the next couple weeks it might. So our big activity this week was going out and singing karaoke at a local place. It is a pretty high tech set up. You go into this big building with neon lights and walk down these long hallways to a room that your party has all to itself. There is a big screen TV, a touch screen computer with all the songs, and the whole rock band lighting set up. We were planning on going swimming, which is what I wanted to do, but the weather didn’t cooperate. So karaoke it was. It is kind of a weird thing that twenty-year old guys with tattoos and who like to play sports also love to go and sing karaoke. And man, do they LOVE to sing karaoke. So four of us went and spent the afternoon at the karaoke place. Most of the time we were there I just sat around and listened to them sing these random songs that I’ve never heard before and couldn’t understand. After three and a half hours I was starting to go crazy. At least one of the guys, who had never done karaoke before, was also dying to get out of there. I did end up having to sing a few songs. The had a lot of English songs, and I found a few by Coldplay and some other decent bands that I stuck in there; however there was this option to basically take a song and stick it in front of all of the other songs, so… none of those songs ever came up. The only English songs that ever did come up were ones by the Backstreet Boys or Avril Lavigne. I’ve heard them before but they would not have been my first choice of things to sing. After about the third hour of songs I had one of those intense thirty-seconds of culture shock. There was just this sudden feeling of ‘where am I and what is going on?’ It passed pretty quickly but for those thirty seconds I was freaking out.

After our karaoke party we walked back and the guys wanted to eat. It sounded good to me; however after seeing the food it didn’t look so good. We stopped at a small hotdog stand and picked up some hotdogs. I don’t know how hotdogs can be more sketchy than they are in America, but they are. It didn’t come with a bun; just a toothpick and they put some kind of spicy seasoning on it. I’m glad that they added the seasoning because it covered up the weird taste. Actually the taste wasn’t near as bad as the texture. It is hard to describe but it was crunch outside and kind of squishy on the inside. I managed to put mine down though. After the hotdogs we walked a little farther and one of the guys paid a street vendor for some ‘fish’ on a stick. The only think worse than fish on a stick from a street vendor (actually I’ve found out there are a lot of things worse) is when the fish has a tentacle on the end of the stick. I’m about 90% sure it was squid, but there is that 10% that still has no real idea what it was. Don’t get me wrong, most of the food out here is great, especially the stuff that I order for myself. I just think most of the locals have different tastes. So that pretty much was my Sunday. We got back and went and played some basketball and I called it a night. Other than the weekends basically I study all week long. I’m on my sixth week of intensive language study and I only have two left. I don’t really know what the game plan is after that. I think I will get another tutor, possibly one of the basketball guys, and we are going to start working on conversational kinds of things. I’m looking forward to getting to start something a little different.