Karaoke!

Jinlin singing last night

Our mutual interest with Jinlin in singing and karaoke come apparent rather early in our relationship when we started to complement our video-chats and photo exchange by sending each other MP3-files of us singing to karaoke-backgrounds or on top of the original artists. You can listen to some of her songs to me from here, here and here and examples of my obviously less pretty singing in here and here :-) These songs have been nice gifts, one way of adding a dimension to the relationship, bridging the distance and keeping the feel of the other one during the long moments without live connection.

During our July trip to Yunnan we were occasionally searching for Karaoke places to sing "live" together but in the end our travel schedule limited our singing to some technically limited session in various hotel rooms. So when planning for activities here in Shanghai, karaoke was one of the top items.

Getting the act together

Long corridors and many rooms in "Shanghai Song City"

Last night we went to one of the larger karaoke-places in Jiading, 上海歌城 (Shànghǎi gē chéng), "Shanghai Song City". These places have very little to do with the typical Finnish "bar karaoke" where all customers in the bar share same venue and submit song-wishes to the DJ with pieces of paper. More true to the way karaoke is done in its home-country Japan, Shanghai Song City is like a hotel with many corridors and dozens of private rooms with good sound insulation. A group of people rents a room for one or more hours and they have a private karaoke-system to use. No more endless waiting in the bar for your turn to come. And whereas in Finnish karaoke bars high alcohol consumption is almost a prerequisite to get the folks on the stage (indeed the karaoke itself is free and the bars get their money from booze), here you pay for the real thing and no beverages are available. Well, there are also other places in China where you pay for pretty girls to come sing karaoke and drink with you but that is a different story...

Yeah, She's more sexy but I give 110% !

In the end we sang over 30 songs and had really good time. I must say the quality of the technical setup in the room was good and selection of English songs was surprisingly wide as well. Jinlin sang mostly Chinese songs, including versions of the songs above she had sent me earlier as files. I sang, among others, Michael Jacksons "Stranger in Moscow", Beatles "All you need is love" and "Yesterday", Seals "Killer", R. Kellys "Gotham City" and Coldplays "Speed of Sound" and "Lovers in Japan". And we also sang together Kelly Sweets "We Are One" (which we had practiced together in the summer). And as a very entertaining surprise bonus number we did together the all-known "Gangnam Style" by Psy :-) This entertainment value seems lasting with still today both occasionally shouting "Oppa Gangnam Style!" or "Sexy Lady!" to each other :-)

More pictures of the karaoke night here.

KaLaOK!

It is quite peculiar, how the word "Karaoke" has been adopted to Chinese language. As I have written before, many foreign words are adopted to Chinese via transliteration i.e. using Chinese characters whose pronunciation resembles (although does not quite match) that of the foreign word. For example Finland in Chinese is "Fēnlán" from the characters 芬 (Fēn) 兰 (Lán). Some other words, typically technical or rare foreign words, are simply written with western alphabet in middle of the Chinese characters. The treatment of word "Karaoke" takes a rare combination of these approaches. It is written as:

卡拉OK    

Or, with replacing Hanyi characters with Pinyin tones:

Kǎ Lā OK

So part of the word is transliterated with Hanyi characters and part with a western "OK"! I don't know of any other case like this.