What is this "KTV" you speak of???

Essential KTV Equipment

Karaoke television (or more commonly just KTV) is a favorite Chinese pastime. Many of our students and co-workers indulge once or twice a month and we go occasionally when we're invited. Though you all are familiar with karaoke from bars across America, KTV definitely has its very own Chinese spin.

Rather than getting up in front of a bunch of strangers and singing in a bar, you rent a room for a set amount of time. The room is private for you or your party, and it comes equipped with two or more tv screens, several microphones, booth seating, a disco ball, and a computer loaded with China's favorite hits (aka Michael Jackson and Avril Lavigne.)

Brandice, Me & Dani (Spring 2013)

You can order food and drinks to your room, including tea, beer, whiskey, popcorn, fruit, and chicken feet! Needless to say, our group orders drinks more often than food. You can ask for sets of dice to be brought to the room, which make for one of China's favorite drinking games.

Don't want to sing? There's always dice to be played or beer to be drunk.

Once you select a song to sing, it queues up on the computer, like a normal karaoke machine. There's actually a fair selection of English songs, but it's always a coin-toss whether they'll have the particular song you're looking for. When your song plays, the rest is fairly similar to regular karaoke, except for a couple extra perks. There's no need to leave your seat to sing. The microphones are wireless, so if you want to perform from the comfort of your booth, you can! Also, with no DJ, you have a little more freedom concerning how you sing. You can pause or skip songs, you can choose whether or not to play the voice track of the song's artist, and for the brave-of-heart, you can choose to remove the lyrics from the tv screen.

Alex showing up the students.

All in all, we enjoy KTV a bit more than your run-of-the-mill karaoke night in an American bar, because it's basically our own private party. It's pretty affordable, especially if you share the cost with some friends, and it can be a lot of fun. Everyone has a better time when they aren't singing in front of a bar full of strangers.

This doesn't happen often...

Since Shantou is a city with few entertainment attractions, you can probably imagine that KTV is pretty popular. It isn't our favorite activity here, but our students love it. Typically, when we go, it's because we've been invited by students, friends, or fellow teachers. Most recently, the school had a KTV shindig to give the students a relaxing atmosphere to get to know the staff a little better. But now that the summer rush is over and students are leaving, we are getting new invitations from students who want to see us a last time. That's actually what we're planning on doing tomorrow night.

Take care for now & we'll post again next week!

Elise & Alex

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So... This Finally Happened!!!

Hello Hello & Welcome to our first blog post!

In case you haven't noticed, we've been  pretty terrible at actually keeping in touch lately. Summer is our school's busy season so we've been pretty swamped with students since we've been back from the wedding but things are finally settling down some & we finally have time to concentrate on other things that we've been meaning to do... like this blog. Yay!

Lots of fun stuff has been happening in the past few weeks. Two weekends ago our boss decided to host a student/ teacher get together at KTV (karaoke television) on Friday afternoon. So he informed us we had to show up & schmooze with the students. All the teachers were a little unsure of how that would go because some of the students this summer are pretty immature and not very respectful to begin with, & that's before you add in beer and bad Chinese love ballads, but hey, it sure beats classes, right?

Alex sang a few songs & the students seemed pretty amused with his singing and song choice (since his songs weren't super sad/ depressing love ballads). I hid behind my camera most of the time but I did play a few rounds of Uno with some of the students.

This is nearly all the students at the school! Again, I'm hiding. Johny, our boss (front & slightly to the right, in the white shirt) did take pics later, but he couldn't figure out how to use my camera properly because you actually have to look into the viewfinder to use it, so those photos are a bit wonky

The students were all surprisingly good the next week, maybe we should do more morale building events. I mean, who doesn't like seeing smashed 16 year olds...

Last weekend we went to Xiamen, FJ, China to celebrate my birthday. It was an awesome trip, even though the weather was ridiculously hot. We spent Saturday at GulangYu, an island where a lot of Western embassies used to be located, so its architecture is very unlike the rest of China. There's also a whole lot of pianos on the island (thanks to the foreign influences) and we ended up seeing a piano museum and an organ museum, which were thrilling, I promise. In their defense, however, they were air conditioned. In addition to those we got to see a calligraphy museum, a seaside park and Sunlight Rock, which is the crescendo of the island (only a little pun intended). It was a really good day!

Our friend Maggie (from New York & also an English teacher in Shantou) came up and spent Saturday with us too. She showed us the Taiwan style snack street, that we didn't know existed despite visiting Xiamen last year. It has a full block or two of street food vendors packed into a narrow alley, which is crammed with people. Some parts smell great, others, not so much... That's what we spent our Sunday doing. We tried half a lobster smothered in garlic, a squid, an omelette (complete with mayonnaise & sprinkles on top) and for desert ice cream wrapped in mochi (Japanese rice dough) with cilantro & peanuts. Street food here is shockingly good, and unlike restaurant food, has never given us food poisoning.

This is the Xiamen skyline as seen from GulangYu.

Traditional fishing boats, I loved their eyes & all the colors!

Alex, Me & Maggie

Tiawan style "snack" street! Tons & tons of really tasty street food! :) Yum!

I reckon that's all for tonight, but we're going to try real hard to post once a week, feel free to e-mail either of us if we forget!

Cheers,
Elise & Alex