July 4th and Karaoke

Being July 4th, some HBA students decided to get some American food,
and so the general consensus was to go to a TGI Friday's located in a
hotel. I must confess, though, that I rather like Chinese food and
I'm not missing anything other than salad, fruit, and PB&J (and I can
get fruit here, it just takes time and water). As my friend Dai Si
Wen wrote on his blog, it seems that the cleanest and/or more
expensive restaurants don't necessarily have the best or safest food –
I contrast the TGI Friday's meal which, though it tasted good (grilled
chicken), wasn't anything special (and messed with my digestive track
a bit, I think), with the hotpot meal eaten with my Chinese Baba,
which probably cost half as much (and this is just for me – I think I
had the cheapest order at TGI Friday's) and was the best meal I've had
in this time zone (and among the safest), though the décor approached
zero (dimly lit, plain and some walls had dirt/stains, small and
just-barely-not-cramped).
For the more interesting part of the night, the group went to
Wudaokou to do KTV Karaoke. This is not the same Karaoke found in
America, where you're in a bar, there's a sign-up list, and one person
sings at a time in front of everybody – here your group gets its own
private room, with two microphones and a large remote and book of
codes you use to add songs to the queue. You can also order food in
your room (we ordered some sort of red bean, fruit, condensed milk,
and shaved ice confection). The most bizarre bit, however, is the
strange videos that play on the lyrics TV in the background. These
sometimes matched the song (animated dancers or scenes of a man and
woman meeting and falling in love/other standard music video tropes),
but often were out of place and thoroughly weird (fat Oceanians
dancing/one climbing a tree and cutting down a coconut, and a frontal
view of young boy playing on a beach, completely naked). Overall it
was fun.